Bax Food Co

Melbourne, it's time to get acquainted with ackee: the buttery soft, luminous yellow and thrillingly toxic-when-underripe national fruit of Jamaica. Saltfish and ackee is Jamaica's smashed avocado on toast – the combination is fried with onions, peppers and spices and served with pan-fried bread dumplings for breakfast. Here in Yarraville you're getting the fragrant fry-up in empanada form. And it's a condiment-pastry miracle.

The shells are crisp and light; the salty and lightly pungent filling crashes headlong into a sweet and tangy apple and tomato relish that tastes like sour plum. Picture the first time you added sauce to a meat pie and discovered what life could be.

It's all about cheap, simple and solidly executed Jamaican food at this Yarraville diner by Roderick Grant of Boss Man Foods (a roving jerk chicken operation and purveyor of Caribbean goods). This is his first permanent venue, opened in February with his brother Dalton and friend Romain Grenville. 

This is not a high-concept place. "Bax" is "box" with a Caribbean accent, a reference to Jamaica's street food. That means your really excellent goat curry featuring soft meat falling off rib-ettes in a mellow coconut sauce, made fragrant with cardamom and star anise, is served in a take-out container, with big hunks of cake-like saffron roti on the side. 

Is there reggae playing? Sure is. Will you see red, green and yellow accents in the form of stools, doors and panels above a bar stocked with Caribbean rums? You bet. But thankfully Jamaican ownership means there's a refreshing absence of themed tat. The room is more of a contemporary cafe with acid blond walls, big artworks and beardy, beanie-toting locals. This is the real deal. 

You're basically getting a crash course in Jamaica's history of foreign occupation, mouth-first. Here's an Indian curry, there's some Spanish escovitch (fried snapper with vinegary pepper sauce). 

Empanadas aside, Grant – also Bax's chef – plays a pretty traditional hand. A spicy fish soup has the consistency of a sweetcorn chowder and the dusty, earthy flavours of West African cooking. Fine shreds of snapper speckle a thick broth, which washes around chunks of chocho (that green, crunchy squash relative), and chewy, sticky, boiled dumplings – a simple flour and water dough that eats like dense gnocchi. 

Cassava chips are like long potato wedges, the centres slightly sticky, the stringy nature of the root vegetable upping the surface area, delivering extra crunch. They're lightly salted and served with a jerk mayo that lets the fresh thyme and chilli of the marinade punch through. 

That fragrant combination of herbs, allspice and scotch bonnet peppers forms the base note for a menu built around jerked meats. Fat-rich cuts – chicken wings and scapula meat; hunks of pork belly – are basted and oven roasted before being finished over coals. It's not the traditional seven-hour slow-grilling over an open drum, but it gets results. Chicken skin has a cellophane snap, the meat is soft and almost buttery, as if it's been confited.

Order the jerk platter for $28 for a bit of everything, laid on a banana leaf, with blackened corn cobs fuzzed up with a jerk butter and desiccated coconut jacket. There's also a salving side of coconut-creamy Caribbean 'slaw. 

Bax is what you might call a diamond in the rough, if this suburb weren't increasingly the opposite. (To the right: family-filled houses. Opposite is Lady Moustache, a two-storey formica-favouring cafe that looks like Mad Men meets the wild west.) The front of Bax is an enclosed courtyard featuring big tables where you can sit drinking Red Stripe lagers or creamy rum cocktails when Melbourne stops raining sideways. You can also discover that a sweet potato, cinnamon and condensed milk pudding is good. You can do this regularly, since the most costly thing is that whole snapper for $29. You should.

The LOWDOWN
Pro tip Get your jerk and roll. They do takeaway and sell Boss Man's sauce range 
Go-to dish The jerk platter – chicken, pork, corn, $28
Like this? Boss Man is doing a Fitzroy pop-up, Bob's Hot Box, over winter, 100 Kerr Street, Fitzroy

How we score
Of 20 points, 10 are awarded for food, five for service, three for ambience, two for wow factor.  
12 Reasonable 13 Solid and satisfactory 14 Good 15 Very good 16 Seriously good 17 Great 18 Excellent 19 Outstanding 20 The best of the best