The mother-daughter team behind Little Tokyo’s popular Jamaican restaurant, A Beautiful Life, opened a new destination for Jamaican-Chinese cooking in Hollywood on April 22. At ABL Hollywood, Aja Dawson and her mother, Barbara, explore their family’s heritage in dishes such as jerk fried egg rolls and chen pi ji–style chicken wings in an intimate 35-seat space that used to be a boba shop.
For the Dawsons, ABL has always been a highly personal venture. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Aja sold patties and Jamaican dishes as a grassroots pop-up before opening A Beautiful Life in 2013; she also ran a Jamaican food truck. The new project diverges from the often traditional Jamaican dishes that can be found in Los Angeles’s Caribbean restaurants by
exploring the intersection of Jamaican and Chinese diasporic cultures, which has a long history: records show that, as early as 1854, English plantation owners in Jamaica brought over Chinese and Southeast Asian migrants to work as indentured laborers.
The growth in populations of Chinese and South Asian immigrants in Jamaica brought new flavors and dishes to the island’s shores, which the Dawsons lean into at ABL Hollywood, Los Angeles’s first full-scale Jamaican-Chinese restaurant. “When growing up, my mom made jerk chicken bao,” says Aja. “ABL is all about paying homage to my family, mom, grandparents, diaspora, and the intersectionality of what makes up our genetic code.”
On the menu, diners can find crowd-pleasers like oxtail macaroni and cheese, traditional beef and vegetarian patties, coco bread, and an oxtail platter with caramelized plantains and rice and peas. Oysters get doused with jerk seasoning before being fried crispy, while jerk fried egg rolls arrive filled with a choice of earthy jerk chicken, vegetables, or fall-apart oxtail. Larger dishes include deep-fried whole escovitch snapper laced with fiery Scotch bonnet pepper, citrus ginger branzino, curry fried rice, and chen pi ji wings reminiscent of orange chicken.
ABL’s dishes ultimately trace Aja’s own path through the United States. Jerk chicken doused in mambo sauce, a popular condiment in Washington D.C., pays tribute to her alma mater, Howard University. A daytime brunch features most dishes from the dinner menu along with apple-rum French toast and honey jerk chicken wings over red velvet waffles to pair with drinks such as mimosas and a lychee passionfruit martini.
ABL Hollywood takes over the former Bearology Boba space on the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood Boulevard. Aja designed the 35-seat dining room, which has been covered in deep hues of red and maroon; custom textured banquettes are tucked along the walls. A bright neon-red sign that reads “abl” in lowercase script emits an ethereal glow at the entrance.
For Aja, the new restaurant has been a long time in the making. “ABL is my most honest expression of food and is a full-circle moment,” she says. “It’s always been our ultimate vision to move to Hollywood. We saw an opportunity come up on Cahuenga, our dream street. We decided to go for it and expand west, joining the fabric of that location.”
ABL is open at 1649 N. Cahuenga Boulevard, Hollywood, CA, 90028 from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, until midnight Friday and Saturday, with weekend brunch starting at 11 a.m. Reservations are available on Resy.
