Beef Patty Mozzarella Cheese Coco Bread
NEW YORKERS & CO.
NEW YORKERS & CO.;Gimme a Slice and a Jamaican Beef Patty
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December 17, 1995
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WHEN Carl Suares walked out of a driving rainstorm into Nick & Joe's Pizza & Heros in downtown Brooklyn last week, his eyes passed right over the New York-style slices, the Sicilian pies, the stromboli, the calzones and the meatball heroes.
"I'll have," he said, "a Jamaican patty with cheese."
Jamaican patties? In a pizza joint?
The patties, spicy meat turnovers with flaky orange crusts so popular in Kingston, are now a regular feature in many pizzerias in the city. "We call them 'beef patty parmigiana,' " said Joe Carlone, the Joe in Nick & Joe's, which sells about 100 beef patties made by Tower Isle's, an East New York company, each week. Most customers like them smothered in mozzarella cheese ($2 each). "Some people like them with pepperoni" ($2.25 each), Mr. Carlone said.
The idea of selling its Jamaican beef patties in pizzerias was one of the innovations that turned Tower Isle's from a small family bakery in Crown Heights into one of the largest patty-makers in the world. The company now bakes 100,000 patties a day in its factory on Atlantic Avenue.
"It's not just Italians who eat pizza, Chinese people who eat egg rolls or Greeks who eat gyros," said Steve Levi, Tower Isle's vice president of sales and marketing. "We knew a man, a jobber, who sold tomatoes and cheese to pizza places around the city. He would take our patties to pizzerias and say: 'This stuff is good, man. You want to buy it? You can open it up and put mozzarella inside. Take a box, and if it doesn't sell, I'll take it back.' Invariably, they'd call and ask for another box. It caught on."
The patties are also sold in bodegas.
The company was founded almost by serendipity just before Easter in 1968. Mr. Levi's parents, Beryl and Earl Levi -- a clothing designer and an engineer by trade who had immigrated to New York from Battersea, Jamaica -- could not find a bakery that sold Easter buns, the long, fruitcake-like pastries served with cheese throughout the island on Good Friday.
"There was one place in Harlem, the only place that made it, but they took orders weeks in advance and you had to stand in line," Mrs. Levi recalled. "So we started making Easter buns for a few friends. And they needed some patties too, so we decided to make those. That was the embryo stage."
The Levis opened a small bake shop on Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights and sold patties, coco bread and traditional Jamaican bread with hard dough. They called it Tower Isle's after a popular hotel in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. But the bakery soon ran afoul of United States Department of Agriculture inspectors, who ordered its meat-producing operations moved into a bigger factory built to Federal specifications.
"It was a blessing in disguise," said Mrs. Levi, 63, who is now Tower Isle's president. She and her husband, who died this year, took out a loan from the Small Business Administration and moved to a 5,000-square-foot U.S.D.A.-approved plant on Atlantic Avenue in 1975. "I kept thinking, how can we sell that many patties?" she said. "Neither my parents or their parents or their parents had ever borrowed over a million dollars to start a business."
On Franklin Avenue, they had turned out patties one at a time, using a hand-cranked machine. But Earl Levi turned his engineering skills to design a fully automated machine that could churn out hundreds of patties an hour at the Atlantic Avenue plant.
They had to find new customers and new ways to push those patties. The customers came in the waves of Caribbean immigrants who arrived in New York in the 1970's and 80's. The Census Bureau estimates that there were 67,655 foreign-born blacks in New York City in 1960. By 1980 there were more than 300,000 New Yorkers from the non-Hispanic Caribbean. And 78,622 more arrived in Brooklyn alone from 1983 to 1989, according to the City Planning Department.
Still, Tower Isle's wanted to appeal to a broader market. "We had to Americanize the product," said Steve Levi, 40. "We cut down on the excessive spices and placed more beef into the product so it could compete with hamburgers. A typical Jamaican patty has an ounce of beef. We use two and a half ounces."
Some patty purists sniff at the Americanized version, but Mr. Suares, a 19-year-old Brooklyn College student, is not among them. "In Jamaican stores they put in more pepper," he said after placing his order at Nick & Joe's. "I like the crust, the meat inside and the seasonings."
In 1985, Tower Isle's expanded again, to its current 41,000-square-foot factory farther east on Atlantic Avenue, in what used to be a Chevrolet dealership. It has more than 60 employees, many from Jamaica, who begin at the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour and receive raises with seniority.
Now the patties are sold in supermarket freezer cases in 24 states and in schools and prisons. A recent setback was the decision by the Board of Education to switch its contract -- for 150,000 patties a week, at one point -- to a less expensive company.
Five years ago, the Levis introduced vegetable patties to appeal to the cholesterol-conscious, and last year they added chicken patties. Beef patties, Mr. Levi said, still outsell the others seven to one.
Mr. Levi sees his company's future in the micro and the macro. Recently he started making individually wrapped patties and selling them to 24-hour convenience stores, where customers microwave and eat them on the run. At the macro end, Tower Isle's is selling boxes of nine patties to warehouse stores like the Price Club and Sam's.
It's enough to make Grover Nichols marvel. "We ate these every day in Jamaica," Mr. Nichols, Tower Isle's plant manager for the last 18 years, said the other day as he watched forklifts load cases of patties onto a truck. "I never thought I would see them made in this volume."
EVOLUTION From Kingston To Court Street
Major moments in the production and marketing of Tower Isle's Jamaican beef patties, and the number of patties sold annually:
1968 Storefront bakery opens on Franklin Avenue. 500,000
1975 Earl Levi invents patty-making machine. 6 million
1979 Patties sold in pizzerias and supermarket freezer cases. 10 million
1985 Tower Isle's moves to 41,000-square-foot plant on Atlantic Avenue. 15 million
1995 Patties marketed to warehouse chains and convenience stores. 25 million
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/17/nyregion/new-yorkers-co-gimme-a-slice-and-a-jamaican-beef-patty.html
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