One of the first things Dwight Jackson remembers cooking is fried chicken. He was 9 years old and charged, by his grandmother, with frying the chicken served after church on Sundays. “I feel like I was inducted into this thing,” he says of the world of cooking.
Now, as the owner of Pepperpot – which grew from Jackson selling home-cooked dinners out of his house to a takeout spot on 41st and Capitol to a dine-in Jamaican restaurant that opened in Bronzeville in 2022 – chicken has become his trademark.
Specifically, jerk chicken. More specifically, jerk chicken eggrolls – plump, crispy Caribbean-spiced packets of nuanced heat and piquancy that made their debut on a day his customers were “cussing” because the food wasn’t coming out fast enough, he says. Jackson decided to punt, testing out the now-signature fried appetizers on that restive, hungry room. Their reaction was swift and positive. “They just stopped talking,” he says, and the rest is history.
