Sassy’s Jamaican Kitchen

Eating at Sassy’s truly conjures a Caribbean dining experience. From the sparse décor to the minimal menu to the too-​loud reggae music to the communal esky for your byo booze, Sassy’s screams of eating in another place and for this I am thankful.
They do a tasting platter here whereby you get a small serve of each of the dishes on the menu. There’s a bit of fish (invariably bones in), a serve of goat curry (the bomb), a small portion of jerk chicken (actually cooked in a home made converted drum) and some rice. This is a super option for the uninitiated.
For the seasoned, the jerk chicken and fish is amazing. It has this blackened outer and the flavours are out of this world. They also give you pens to write on the table cloths here and this has provided hours of entertainment.
As a host, Sassy himself is the nicest bloke and really gives a shit about you and your dining pleasure. This is the ultimate casual restaurant for the ultimate casual meal out. I love it.

There are lots of hits and misses at Sassy’s.
The hits: BYO, and lots of it and they really don’t mind that your group is getting ultra-​pissed up and loud because of beers that they don’t get to profit on. They’ve got some goddamned tongue-​burnin’ hot chili sauce, bloody brilliant. Jerk chicken and jerk fish, nice and charred and beautifully spiced and so nice with rice. The spareness of the restaurant suited the vibe.
And oops, the misses: not enough food, far too small servings. Some of the dishes were a bit plain and boring, like the vegie curry. The banquet did not include goat curry, which was on the menu and which I desperately wanted to taste. Quite a long wait for food to come out even though there was only one other table of customers.
Overall, I’d go back. I wouldn’t order the banquet and I’d bring more booze to keep me happy until the food came. There aren’t enough Jamaican restaurants in Melbourne and so I’d come back just to support these guys because I don’t want them to go away.