The Jamaican patty is, I propose, a culinary avatar of New York on par with the hot dog, the pizza slice, and the bagel, those other portable totems of immigrant ingenuity and the city’s knack for making the quick address of hunger into something like a civic religion. Today, in at least four of the five boroughs, you’re always within two blocks of a patty ready to be bitten into, whether it’s microwaved behind the counter at a bodega or a slice joint, or pulled from the steam cabinet at a dedicated patty shop: a flaky, golden half-moon filled with curried meat or fish or vegetables or whatever else can be coaxed into its turmeric-stained folds. As the knish descends from the metropolitan pantheon—ave atque vale to that Eastern European stalwart, its crust filled with onion-scented potato and the ghost of another century’s promises—the patty, a thrilling, dynamic distillation of South Asian, African, and Caribbean influences, should take its rightful place as the city’s most iconic pastry.

Patties, kept warm, at Chef Kwame’s.

At Kingston Tropical, in the Bronx’s Wakefield neighborhood, open since the nineteen-seventies, the patties burst with meat and veggies, a hearty snack for around five bucks. Little Miss Muffin ’N’ Her Stuffin, on the edge of Prospect Heights, makes barbecue-chicken patties that cannot be beat. Natural Blend, a plant-based Brooklyn mini-chain, turns out lentil-filled patties that are out of this world. The pastry’s stature in the city was further boosted this year with the arrival of Juici Patties, a beloved Jamaican chain that opened outposts in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. Unlike the patties at the ubiquitous chain Golden Krust, which are reliably just O.K., Juici’s patties are quick-service perfection: the fillings generous and vibrantly spiced, the texture a perfect uniform savory mush. The $4.25 spicy beef has a broad, meaty flavor spiked with the curry-floral fieriness of Scotch-bonnet chiles. It’s even better with the addition of a slice of American cheese, which melts around the beef and adds a facet of creamy sweetness. At any half-decent patty shop, you can get your pastry inserted into a big, fluffy piece of coco bread, a squishy Caribbean roll made with coconut milk. I love the carb-on-carb opulence of this sandwich, not least because the bread neatly contains all the pastry shards that otherwise tend to explode out with every bite, making an enormous mess of your lap or shirtfront.

The biggest story of the Jamaican patty lately has been its inroads into the higher end, following the same trajectory as pizza and bagels before it. Perhaps the first New York chef to place the patty on a pedestal was Kwame Onwuachi, in 2022, when he opened Tatiana, his glittering Lincoln Center restaurant, with a menu that included miniature, semicircular pastries filled with spicy curried goat. Onwuachi is a poetic interpreter of New York’s Black culinary vernacular, and his upscale patties shared a menu with versions of other dishes generally considered unworthy of haute-culinaire attention—corner-store snack cakes, a truffled chopped cheese. But earlier this year he democratized his vision with Chef Kwame’s Patty Palace, an apparent chain in the making, which began with a stall at Citi Field and recently expanded to Union Square’s Time Out Market food hall. The patties at the Palace are full-sized and set into big, steamy wedges of gently sweet coco bread. Similar to the patties served at Tatiana, they come with a pair of sauces—here, it’s a slathering of jerk-spiced barbecue sauce and a tart green hot sauce, along with a bright tangle of ginger-cabbage slaw. Whether you’ve chosen a flaky pastry stuffed with piquant, cumin-scented curried chicken, or a doughy baked shell wrapped around bland and mushy jerk-spiced mushrooms, the forceful toppings tend to overpower whatever’s going on inside the patties themselves. Still, the sandwiches are awfully good.

Onwuachi’s take on patties includes a squiggle of barbecue sauce.

The leader of the fancy-patty movement, for me, though, is Bar Kabawa, the swanky, sexy East Village Daiquiri joint that’s attached to Kabawa, the chef Paul Carmichael’s marvellous Caribbean tasting-menu spot. Carmichael’s patties are cheffy and ambitious, for sure, with a dazzling array of creative fillings including curried crab with squash; pepper-pot-spiced duck with foie gras; and an unctuous blend of short rib, conch, and bone marrow. Some of the patties come with laminated Haitian-style casements that are burnished in a deep fryer. Others, with breadier wrappers, are baked. The prices are high—on a recent visit, a patty filled with kale and oats (richer and livelier than it sounds) was ten dollars, and one containing a briny, spicy mixture of lobster and herring cost more than twenty. (Coco bread, if you’re feeling sandwich-y, was an extra four dollars.) Somehow, despite their decadence, these pastries never feel one bit haughty or pretentious: Carmichael understands that a patty isn’t for fussing over. It’s for tearing into. It’s for devouring.

Jamaican and other Caribbean immigrants brought the patty to New York beginning in the sixties, and it is still a staple of the city’s West Indian enclaves. It’s Caribbean food, Black food, American food—and, like so much of what makes New York’s cuisine vital, it comes from communities whose contributions to the city often go unrecognized until they become impossible to ignore. In that sense, there’s a bit of poignant irony in the patty’s current elevation: it takes a moment of trendiness, of pageantry and gussying up, for the patty to claim its crown. My own first Jamaican patty came from a corner store on 111th Street. It was shoved into my hands one hungover morning by a friend who had been living in the city a year or so longer than I had, and who had a lot to teach me. That patty, almost certainly mass-produced by Tower Isles, the city’s ubiquitous patty distributor, remains my benchmark: warm as a kitten, neon-yellowy, with a gooey filling that tasted mostly of salt and hot pepper. The great and grand patties of the new generation aren’t better than that, though neither are they worse: they’re just fancier, louder, higher-wattage. The Jamaican patty has made it into the ballpark, thanks to Onwuachi; perhaps next it’ll be printed on T-shirts, or used as Big Apple shorthand in the movies, or added to the ranks of MOMA’s N.Y.C.-themed collection of Christmas ornaments, alongside the Anthora coffee cup and the yellow cab and the cranky pigeon. But the patty is what matters, the joy of it, the heat and the flake and the bite. ♦

Carb-on-carb glory.