Akee <i> Aqui</i>

As you power down Crenshaw, past the auto dealerships, past the Japanese restaurant in the bowling alley, past the Baldwin Hills mall, Leimert Park is just around the biggest curve, an intimate sort of neighborhood business strip more familiar to most from old photographs than from actual experience.

Leimert Park is the intellectual center of African-American life in Los Angeles: the jazz clubs, the coffeehouses, the bookstores, the galleries of African-American art, the cultural center being built in a fine old movie palace, the African-American restaurants that draw people from all over town. Neatly suited Muslims stand on the corners, offering newsletters and bean pies for sale. Reggae blasts from the record shops. Hip-hop blasts from the cars.

And in the center of it all, under its painted billboard and a couple of doors up from the news-report-famous Crenshaw Cafe, is the Jamaican restaurant Coley’s Kitchen, which may be the best Caribbean restaurant in the city of L.A. It’s groovy in here, pulsing with the beat of dancehall reggae, great hats all over the place, African-American art on the walls, young guys handsome enough to make the women stare. Sometimes you’ll see an entire family, stately in richly ornamented African robes; sometimes tablesful of African-American college fraternity brothers; sometimes groups of women who look as if they’ve stepped straight from the pages of Elle.

Curried goat is hotly spiced, luscious, with the tender sweetness of really good lamb. Slices of “Kingstonian beefsteak” are braised like a pot roast, still a little chewy, blanketed in a dark-brown gravy. Jerk chicken is closer to a good braised bird than to the crisp, spice-rubbed chicken at Janet’s but is redolent of pepper and allspice. Braised oxtails are spectacular, subtly gelatinous, deeply flavored, sauce reduced to a turn. Almost all the sauces and gravies seem spiced with more ingredients than appear in the average Schilling display.

This is what you get on a plate with your entree at Coley’s Kitchen: a subtly sweet mound of rice cooked with red beans; a small heap of steamed cabbage; a fried slice of plantain, an egg-size capsule of festival bread that will remind you of a buttermilk doughnut. Before this massive plate of food arrives, there might be a cup of thick, curried chicken soup, or spicy cow’s-foot soup . . . or on Mondays, incredible, intricately spiced red-bean soup, which is pretty much what you have always secretly wished pea soup could taste like. You might want one of the hot, flaky Jamaican turnovers called “patties,” filled with savory pastes of ground chicken or stewed greens. You will want a tall glass of the restaurant’s spicy, home-brewed ginger beer.

“Akee, rice, salt fish are nice,” Harry Belafonte used to sing, and in fact akee and salt fish are quite nice here, fried together with a fragrant tangle of peppers and onions. The Caribbean vegetable akee looks and tastes not unlike pillowy scrambled eggs when cooked and is so rich that a food section editor got excited about its potential in low-cal cooking when I brought some back to the office. (It didn’t pan out. Akee turns out to be higher in fat than practically anything this side of bacon.) The steamy richness of akee mellows the cod’s pungent muskiness; the caramelized onions lend the strong fish an irresistible sweetness, like the dried cuttlefish you can snack on in Japanese movie theaters. A dash or two of the house’s hot sauce, sort of a pink-hued pepper vinegar with the blistering smack of scotch-bonnet chile heat, puts a Carville-quality spin on this weird yet delicious plate of food.

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Coley’s Kitchen

4335 Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 290-4010. Open daily 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Takeout. No alcohol. American Express, Discovery, MasterCard, Visa and most automatic-teller cards accepted. Lot parking in rear. Dinner for two, food only, $13-$18.