Island Flavour: Gen-X Jamaican Patty Bakery

If you weren’t raised by, or around, the Caribbean-Canadian community, your only reference point for the famed Jamaican beef patty probably comes from those frozen nine-packs at the supermarket. If you’re really unlucky, it might even be those cardboard imitations 7-Eleven tries to pass off as the real deal.

And that’s a damn shame because a true Jamaican patty is a thing of beauty. It’s a marriage of bold island-inspired flavours and spice lovingly enveloped in a rich, flakey, turmeric-seasoned pastry that has won hearts and minds far removed from its diasporic origins. In places like Toronto, you’ll find just as many carts serving up patties as you will serving up brats. The street food is so popular there, it’s earned its own holiday and even inspired a documentary about a multinational dust-up over the foodstuff.

Out west, the Jamaican patty doesn’t enjoy quite the same level of celebrity, but it should because you don’t need to travel to the strip malls of Scarborough to find authenticity and nowhere is that more evident than in Edmonton’s new Gen-X Jamaican Patty Bakery in Inglewood.

As a long-time lover of the humble patty, I knew I had to be the one to try this spot. It’s located in a strip mall at the corner of 118th Avenue and 124th Street and offers counter service as well as catering.

The menu is diverse with beef, cheesy beef, curry chicken, veggie, oxtail, curried goat, and ackee and saltfish patties on offer. That’s a far cry from the beef and spicy beef options you’ll see at Circle K.

Additionally, Gen-X has a rotating menu with jerk chicken available on Wednesdays, brown stew chicken on Thursdays, fry chicken on Fridays and calypso chicken on Saturdays.

I had the oxtail and the jerk chicken on my first visit and both came out hot and with a weightiness that the flash-frozen knockoffs just can’t replicate. The filling was rich and fresh with enough spice to have me sniffling without being so hot as to take away from the patties distinctive flavour profiles. The pastry is light and flakey and yet still manages to hold its integrity — something I personally put to the test when I dropped my second patty on the way home and it didn’t splatter.