This Caribbean Island Is Known for Its Plant-based Cuisine, Rich Culture, and Beachside Resorts — Here's How to Plan Your Visit

For your next trip to Jamaica, here are the top places to stay and eat.

As a Trinidadian, I’ve always known Jamaica loosely — like a good yet distant relative — but long admired the island because of the way it’s anchored my husband, who was born and raised there. As parents living in Raleigh, North Carolina, every time we travel to either one of our home countries, we remind our two small “Trin-Ja-Merican” kids that the trip will be layered: one part beach vacation, one part slightly onerous family visit. Yet we always prioritize experiences rooted in lasting joy, rather than moments of ephemeral fun.

Our last jaunt to Jamaica gave us a rare combination of both: late-night dips in the balmy waters along the island’s western coast, where resplendent stars studded the sky like diamonds; impromptu street-side dance parties, where our kids wiggled and twirled to dancehall music emanating from brightly colored storefronts; and afternoon games of pickup soccer with cousins and strangers on patches of public land. Our children, Luke, eight, and six-year-old Noelle, saw Jamaica through their father’s eyes — eyes that beamed with gratitude to see how easily core memories were being folded into the pockets of their own childhoods.

Understanding the Roots of the Food Scene

The cookbook author in me felt supremely validated that the kids ate heaps of ackee and saltfish for breakfast, leafy callaloo and sweet fried festivals for lunch, and all manner of spice-packed jerk for dinner. They didn't even notice the absence of their beloved yogurt pouches.

As a curious eater, I wanted to learn more about the towering presence of Ital, Jamaica’s robust, wholly plant-based cuisine, which is laced with history and religious symbolism. Pronounced eye-tal, this lifestyle-diet occupies space, in varying degrees, in almost every sun-drenched corner of the Caribbean. The core of the Ital diet is to eat foods that boost life-energy, or livity — anything that is pure, untainted, almost virginal. Ital rejects any animal products or by-products, as well as foods grown in soil that contains chemical additives or has been sprayed with pesticides.

I wanted to know more, but as the demands and desires of our time in Jamaica asserted themselves, I lobbed my curiosity aside, chalking it up to a cook’s poeticizing of a cuisine that didn't have too much to do with me. But then Luke forced my hand. Late one afternoon, as the sun dipped beneath the hills, he scoured a mango tree on his grandmother’s property, carefully eyeing which fruit would make the best pre-dinner snack. Maneuvering a stick — one twice the length of his body — he struck a branch to knock a mango loose, taking care not to bruise its smooth, perfect skin. After about 10 minutes of patiently trying — his face steady with determination, his thickly lashed eyes hell-bent on victory — the mango fell directly into his waiting hands. Luke flashed me a look of pure delight, because he had just won the school-age equivalent of Olympic gold. Then, in an almost reflexive move, he used his teeth to peel the skin away and bit deep into its golden flesh. Mango juice dripped down his arm and pooled at his knobby elbows. I noticed that a battery of emotions registered in his body, the most obvious being pride.

I made my way to him — not with congratulatory praise but rather with a soft chide: “You need to wash the mango before you eat it!” Luke looked at me with confusion in his eyes, the bottom half of his face aproned in highlighter-yellow mango nectar, and asked: “Why? I just got it directly from the tree. Isn’t it perfect?” I fell silent, because he was right. And I suspect he claimed this knowing silence as yet another triumph.

Later that night, I promised myself to do the work on understanding the many merits of Ital. I had to correct the teachable moment that had occurred so naturally, I’d almost missed it.

Finding Ital in the Island's Resorts

In doing some digging, I learned that Ital was created by followers of the Rastafarian movement. Born from the Rastafarian religion (popularized by the Jamaican anti-colonial activist Leonard Percival Howell), its tenets were inspired by the philosophies of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, whose original name was Ras Tafari. In the 1930s, despite fierce opposition from Jamaica’s colonial governing body, the Rastafarian religious movement was propagated, anchored by Howell’s cadenced sermons promoting the need for continued positive Black identity.

This grassroots rise was continued by the uplifting reggae of one of the religion’s most prominent believers, Bob Marley. While in recent years the religion has changed in scope and timbre — strengthening in the eyes of some and dissipating in others — what hasn’t waned is the abiding belief that nourishment happens naturally. And in Jamaica, that abiding belief is not hard to find.

I was surprised to see how many resorts and restaurants embrace Ital’s earth-loving ethic. At the Jamaica Inn — a family-owned luxury hotel in Ocho Rios — the executive chef, Maurice Henry, takes a hands-on approach when it comes to introducing guests to Ital. Every Friday for the past seven years, he has hosted an excursion to a nearby farmers’ market, followed by a cooking demonstration. “I look for all the fruit that grows wild,” Henry says. “From naseberry to Otaheite apple, I talk about all of it and give guests a firsthand view of what it is, how it tastes, and how it’s used.”

From Jamaica’s interior to its shore, you don’t have to look hard to see how nature does thrive and perform in her own wild and diverse ways, how each part performs in relation to, not in isolation from, the other. When it comes to Ital cuisine, it’s as if this system’s approach to wholeness reaches peak efficiency, offering not just a sustainable and hyper-healthful natural feast (not to mention other traditional medicines), but also illuminating how naturally wrought foods can embody a touch of the divine.

After all, Ital’s prevailing truth comes from the Bible verse — one that I repeated to my children — where God says to Adam, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” (Genesis 1:29)

Even with religion at its core, there’s a lot of levity to be enjoyed in Ital eating, as my son clearly demonstrated. As we made our way from Montego Bay to Negril, on the winding Norman Manley Boulevard that snakes along the Caribbean Sea, stopping to snack on toothsome sugar cane sold by roadside vendors, it became clear how the fundamentals of Ital easily cleave to the agrarian curves of the island.

A Visit to Montego Bay and Negril

This fact was effortlessly felt in Negril. The westernmost town of the island, Negril hasn’t shed its low-key “hippie haven” status, despite the attention it receives for its plush, blindingly white sand, cobalt-blue waters, mesmeric sunsets, and consummate Caribbean cool. There are two standout sister resorts, Rockhouse Resort & Spa and Skylark Negril Beach Resort, that seem to get it right, prioritizing not just the style of Negril but also the soul of Jamaica. While at Rockhouse, the cliff-set hotel that’s long been a destination for the enlightened eco-traveler, it’s evident that Paul Salmon, the Australian owner, and his devoted team of locals have figured out how to ask less of the earth, yet receive more from it.

For instance, every bed, table, desk, and chair is made in-house using repurposed lumber. My husband fell indescribably in love with an oversize hand-carved chess table — complete with two chairs — where the details of each of the 32 chessmen were so intricately cast that they looked like a relic from antiquity. He’s been scouring the Internet for something similar, but nothing comes close.

Also on Rockhouse’s grounds is an impressive 4,400-square-foot hydroponic greenhouse, complete with around 1,500 lettuce heads and herbs and 300 other plants, including tomatoes and peppers, that produce daily harvests. Dwayne St. Hill, a local expert in regenerative agriculture and owner of Gro N Green Organic Farm, runs the greenhouse and uses nontoxic neem oil as a pesticide. The greenhouse’s average weekly yield is 250 pounds of produce, which supplies both of Salmon’s properties (the surplus is sold to other resorts). I sampled several tomatoes while on an impromptu walk-through of the greenhouse, and those bright little cherries were so sweet, with a clean rush of juice and a just-right uptick of acid, they could have been candy. St. Hill saw my enthralled expression and, with a smile, noted, “This is what regenerative tourism looks like.” And while hydroponically grown food isn’t technically considered Ital, the process does indeed mirror — in modern, scientific form — its natural-minded ethic.

From that point in the trip on, I made it my mission to ask as many chefs as possible — whose life’s work is to make everyday ingredients memorable — how they incorporate the accessible joys of Ital into a menu that stays engaging and exciting. Kahari Woolcock, executive chef of Miss Lily’s restaurant at Skylark, takes a personal observation and parlays it into part of his business model. “Every Jamaican I know, after they hit 45, they cut out meat,” he says. “They eat fish till age fifty and then go straight vegan, right back to Ital.”

Woolcock’s perception plays out in his menu. When I sampled the Bushman Ital stew, for instance, with coconut, stewed peas, yam, and beets, I was spellbound by the combination of assertive spices and gentle texture. The dish is a tenderly prepared, luscious ode to the island’s interior that boasts deep ribbons of flavor. You can actually taste the rich history from which the dish was forged.

“More of our guests are demanding vegetarian and vegan options,” Salmon said. “We move with the times and look at ways to fulfill that demand. It’s just part of our desire to be a responsible hotel.”

At this point in our travels it was clear that Luke and, to a lesser extent, Noelle, understood that Ital wasn’t just about being a vegetarian — or a vegan, for that matter. They got that there was a deeper meaning and history beneath the surface. Interestingly enough, the kids started to make connections, toggling back and forth in their own kid parlance. It was an exercise that we all inadvertently adopted — kids have a way of teaching parents — that made us look for Ital even in places we least expected.

The sprawling, 400-acre Half Moon resort in Montego Bay, with its two-mile stretch of beach, has long been a destination for travelers who enjoy the feel of a large luxury hotel. Sugar Mill, the flagship restaurant, has a craft menu that “tells the story about Jamaican food from the countryside to the seaside,” according to chef de cuisine Christopher Golding. By incorporating native ingredients like gungo peas, chocho, hibiscus, and breadfruit into the offerings, Golding is able to combine multiple worlds into a cohesive menu that imparts a deep sense of place. It was refreshing to see a big resort like Half Moon stay committed to the homespun ideals of the island.

There was another teachable moment, a redemptive plotline of sorts, that I witnessed at Half Moon that I was all too eager to share with my son. At the resort, there were many groundkeepers who tended to their daily business, such as manicuring the flora and fauna into laser-sharp silhouettes. One groundkeeper in particular, when trimming some unruly branches off a coconut tree, made it a point to set aside some water-filled coconuts. A small group of swimsuited vacationers quickly formed around him. With a soft, generous grin and swift, precise swipes of his cutlass, he sliced open the coconuts and offered one, without charge, to each vacationer. In an instinctive swoop, the pool- and beachgoers hoisted the coconuts and pressed their faces deep into the hard shells to extract as much of the electrolyte-rich water as possible.

I quietly watched from the sidelines. There was no talk of straws, cups, or other accessories. In fact, there was little chatter, as if everyone in that randomly assembled group agreed not to trespass on the precious silence. The faces of these vacationers were wet and aglow with glee. It’s very likely this was not anyone’s first taste of straight-from-the-nut coconut water, but within this cultural context, charged with purity and bereft of pretense — like my son’s mango — this group, whether they knew it or not, were the unlikely recipients of that indefinable Jamaican natural mystic Bob Marley sang about. And just like Luke, they bore witness to Ital in its most virtuous, sacrosanct state. I had learned my lesson, and this time my silence sang of joy.

Where to Stay and Eat

Half Moon

This resort, which has 210 rooms and 19 villas, offers a full range of luxury experiences: a championship golf course, a well-appointed spa, and an equestrian center. Its Sugar Mill restaurant offers dishes highlighting native ingredients.

Jamaica Inn

The palatial oceanfront suites and cottages have a breezy aesthetic and access to a long arc of secluded beach in Ocho Rios. The Terrace Restaurant serves up Ital cuisine.

Rockhouse Resort & Spa

Built in the 1970s, Rockhouse was one of the first hotels in Negril’s West End. The 40-room hotel has terrific views, a world-class spa, and cave swimming. Check out the vegan and vegetarian options at the restaurant.

Skylark Negril Beach Resort

Located on pristine Seven Mile Beach, this property has 43 rooms, each thoughtfully outfitted in retro-tropical style. Head to Miss Lily’s for the signature Bushman Ital stew.

A Few Other Options

Rasta Ade Refreshments: This health-food restaurant on the famous Seven Mile Beach whips up vegan food and fresh juices.

Zimbali Culinary Retreat: Thirty minutes from Negril, Mark and Alecia Swainbank created this mountain oasis to combine Ital culture and cuisine — and bring guests closer to nature.

Rastafari Indigenous Village: Founded in 2007 beside the beautiful Montego Valley River, a short drive from downtown Montego Bay, the village offers an introduction to the traditional Rastafari way of life.

A version of this story first appeared in the December/January 2024 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline "Food for the Soul."