Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week: Caribbean Cuisine And Southern Soul Collide at Jake’s

Good morning and welcome to the second feature highlighting a participant in Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week, where we caught up with Christina Renteria, the owner of Jake's Soul Food Cafe.

Each day this week, the Thread and Visit Tuscaloosa will profile one of the businesses that will participate in the annual event, presented this year by Cadence Bank.

Hungry to learn more? Over 60 participating eateries will offer unique items or special discounts on their most popular orders next week when Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week returns June 22nd through 28th. Learn more and get connected at the Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week website now.

From Trinidad to Tuscaloosa

The owners of a still brand-new Caribbean and soul food restaurant in Tuscaloosa are here to stay and are committed to serving domestically grown food that tastes like memories of home.

Although the business's name and core concept are more than a decade old, CEO Christina Renteria only opened Jake's Soul Food Cafe on Tuscaloosa's McFarland Boulevard in December.

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In an interview with the Thread, Renteria explained that entrepreneur Dawn Simmons and her husband, Sean, launched the business venture 14 years ago and named the restaurant after his father, Jake, who was from Trinidad.

"The seasonings, ingredients, and culture all came from that side of the family, and when Dawn and Sean came to Alabama from New York, there really was no food here that had that Caribbean taste to it," Renteria said. "And because they set up here in the South, naturally, it featured that soul food taste too."

After locations in Pelham and McCalla failed to thrive, the Simmonses opened on John Hawkins Parkway in Hoover, where Jake's Soul Food Cafe finally found its core customer base. Ten years later, it's one of the longest-running black-owned businesses in that area.

Follow the Faith

Renteria said that when she met the Simmonses, she was running her own successful marketing and business development company and wanted to work with Jake's to modernize their messaging.

Last year, they asked her to become a partner and she put the brand to the test by opening a second location here in Tuscaloosa. She and her partner, Elias Hendricks, packed up their belongings and moved to town to open the restaurant in December.

"It was a case of following the faith. We really picked up our lives and moved here, we didn't live here in December," Renteria said, laughing. "But we don't want to be like any other restaurant where someone comes in, they open shop and you never know who the owner was, you never know the CEO. You just know they want you to come buy their food. We didn't want that to be the experience here."

Renteria said she often speaks about the restaurant in child-rearing terms, which everyone can understand, and at five months old, Jake's is still just a toddler. Still, she's committed to seeing it grow.

"At five months, you're still learning trust, so that's where we are now, but I feel like in the community, people are learning we're not going anywhere," Renteria said. "The owner and CEO is going to be around and if she needs to, she's going to speak up and say something. She's going to be active. We're not just opening up a location and leaving like a lot of businesses tend to do in smaller cities."

The Focus is Family

At Jake's, Renteria and Hendricks said the whole model revolves around family. The food should taste like it was made by someone who loves you, and the environment should feel welcoming to anyone walking in.

"You can go anywhere and eat. There are tons of options. It's not like we're the only soul food restaurant or even the only Caribbean food restaurant someone can choose to patronize. So as an owner, you have to come in and make sure you're not just impacting the food, but also impacting the people personally," she said. "At Jake's, my number one priority is the people, and by that I mean the people as our customers and the people as our team. In the hospitality business, if you don't have that as your focus, you don't have a good business model."

The food, too, calls back to meals shared in the family kitchen. Renteria said she believes these down-to-earth entrees and sides made fresh every morning with US-farmed ingredients are increasingly rare, even at home.

"Our goal, when you eat our food, is that you feel like your family could have made this up for you," she said. "New generations, millennials and Gen Zers, they don't know how to cook a lot of the items that their mamas and grandmas and great grandmas used to make. So, here you get that quality and that taste, but it's also at a great price point, too."

Caribbean Cuisine Married to Southern Soul

Renteria said Jake's isn't quite like anything else in town, as the menu features a broad mix of Caribbean classics complemented by soul food sides and entrees straight from any southern cookbook.

"We are a Caribbean Soul Food restaurant, and I say that because there are more islands in the Caribbean than just Jamaica. When you come here, you're going to get a taste of the complete Caribbean culture," Renteria said. "And because we're here in the South, we're bridging the gaps by adding some family favorite soul food dishes with a little twist on them and plenty of seasoning. That's the pork chops, chicken wings, real mac n cheese, our rice and more."

From the greens to house-cooked cornbread, there's a taste of home waiting at Jake's, but also island offerings like jerk chicken, curry and plantains.

She said the new restaurant's unique offerings and high quality have set it up for success in a time when so much food is flash-frozen and reheated fast at some franchise.

"Now may be the best time for restaurants like ours to soar and prosper in our nation, because people want to get back to freshness, back to quality," she said. "There's a deep appreciation for what we're doing, which really motivates us to do it right."

The Swiss Cheese Model

Being on the ground here in Tuscaloosa has been a learning experience for Renteria and an opportunity for the Jake's brand to grow. The hungry entrepreneur sees this second location as the first of many more cafes to come and a prime place to find any holes in the business model through the Swiss Cheese Model.

"When you start having more than one location, you start seeing all the holes that need to be fixed, but you won't see those holes until you actually open that second location," Renteria said. "But I believe if we can do two, we can do one hundred."

Customers in Tuscaloosa are not afraid to point out those holes either. When Jake's first opened here, Renteria and Hendricks realized they would have to both adjust prices and improve messaging about the value of their product.

For instance, their wings - customers questioned how a four-piece wing combo could be considered a full meal - but a full-size to-go box can barely close with just three Jake's wings inside.

"We do not sell little, baby-bite party wings. We sell whole wings," Renteria said. "If you chopped it up to the same amount of food you'd get out of a typical wing, four of ours would probably make 10 wings, but there's some food psychology at play."

Another issue was the price point - customers in Tuscaloosa made it clear that a lunch or dinner plate needs to feel like a value.

"Tuscaloosa made us realize we have two customer segments. There's the more cafe-style high-end version, which will be great in your Hoovers and Huntsvilles, where there are larger demographics and they're used to that price point," she said. "Then we have a second customer segment who still deserves high-quality, locally made, well-seasoned food. We won't change those three parts of our model at all, but we can look to ensure that customers can still enjoy those foods at a price that makes sense for us as a profit margin, but also makes sense to our second customer segment in smaller cities."

Jake's Tuscaloosa is more like an express location than a full-service restaurant. Plates come pre-packaged in to-go boxes, which you can enjoy on-site, take back to work, or eat at home.

"Those were unexpected holes, but when we heard from the community, we immediately went back and now we have lower prices using a different model that's tailor-made for Tuscaloosa," Renteria said. "I want to thank everybody who said something because it got the point across, and it allowed us to see what we needed to fix to bring fresh food to other communities as we continue to grow. When we open up our third location and fourth location, we're taking that knowledge with us."

Jake's is open from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and on Sunday from 11 to 6. It is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Renteria also said it offers full-service, customizable catering featuring many options not on Jake's regular menu.

This profile is the second in this year's series partnering with Visit Tuscaloosa to highlight locally owned businesses each summer. Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week 2025 is presented by Cadence Bank.

Check back tomorrow for more, and for ongoing coverage of restaurant and retail development in west Alabama, stay connected to the Tuscaloosa Thread!