Allan Appel Photo
Oxtail to go, with rice, beans, vegetables, and plantains
City’s Cathy Graves with Stone at opening.
Oxtail, curry goat already drawing loyal customers to Andrea Stone’s lifelong dream business. A spicy secret was revealed at the formal ribbon-cutting.
Those culinary bulletins were part of the aromatic talk Thursday as city officials gathered to cut the ribbon on Kool Breeze, the newest locally owned restaurant to join New Haven’s tasty food scene.
The full name is Kool Breeze: Jamerican Cuisine Restaurant, located at 1400 Whalley Ave.
Stone, center, cuts the ribbon with the mayor and Deputy Economic Development Directors Cathy Graves and Steve Fontana, and friends
On Whalley Avenue near Ramsdell, the sun-lit, spacious restaurant with palm-treed island paintings is the labor of love of Andrea Stone, who has been cooking and catering out of her house nearby for ten years — all the while holding down a medical assistant’s job at Yale New Haven Hospital.
Stone said opening the establishment has been a lifelong dream. She hopes one day to open a Kool Breeze Two.
Friend Avery White has been coming in every week since the restaurant’s soft opening a month ago. White said Stone cooks not only with love but with flavors and secret rubs that are the taste of home — that is, Jamaica.
City’s Cathy Graves with Stone at opening.
The oxtail, the jerk and curried chicken, and the brown stew chicken have that taste of home, Stone said, in part because she imports the spices she uses from Jamaica. She revealed a key ingredient of her secret rub: the pimento.
“It looks like a black pepper ‚but it’s different,” said Avery White. “It’s minty,” mixed with garlic, scallions, curry, and other spices.
“The meat is wet and the rub gets ‘massaged’ into the food,” added Stone. “That’s what makes it different.”
And successful.
The secret pimento and spice rub
In the month the soft opening, the restaurant has drown both natives of Jamaica and the Caribbean islands and people from all over, like those curried-goat seekers who happened to pop in the other day from Guilford.
Other customers are Westville locals, along with doctors, lawyers, including the crowd from Woodbridge, Stone said.
It was important to Stone to have a restaurant with a kool vibe, so the eating is an experience if you linger and take in the generously spaced tables, the relaxing yellow paint and island art on the walls.
Cathy Graves, who runs the city small business academy, and fellow city development deputy Steve Fontana placed their orders for future staff meetings during Thursday’s event. They have a tradition of ordering from new local restaurants. They concurred with Stone that hers is the first full, sit-down Jamaican restaurant in New Haven.
Loyal customer and friend Avery White.
Kool Breeze has seven employees. The restaurant is open Monday to Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.; and Sunday 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Mayor Toni Harp praised small businesses like Stone’s as the backbone of the city’s economy. Then she got personal: “And thanks for going into business in my neighborhood.”