TOWER ISLES When you go to a pizza joint, ...
Likely, patties leave this impression because they all look the same. Hot or cold, old or new, these sturdy snacks wear the best poker faces in fast food. Tower Isle's, a leading mass producer of Jamaican patties located in Bedford Stuyvesant, is responsible for this look. The factory cranks out more than 100,000 patties daily, both frozen for supermarket sales and baked for ready consumption. More likely than not, Tower Isle's made the one that you scarfed down when you were drunk a few Saturdays ago.
"Undoubtedly," says Joy Levi, a woman of regal bearing who runs the operation, "we feel that God has given each nationality something special to share. The Italians have pizza, the English have pasties, we have our patties." In the late 60s, Ms. Levi started the business as a small bakery with her late husband, Earl, shortly after they emigrated from Jamaica. Although it began as a full-service bakery, the sale of the patties overtook all other items, which prompted the couple to devote the business entirely to that product. In addition to the successful growth of the bakery into a full-fledged factory, which saw sales rise from 500,000 patties annually at its start to millions today, patties also managed to cross over from being a Jamaican specialty item to a food with mass-market appeal.
Which is not so unusual. At one time, patties were the only fast food in Jamaica, so it's natural that in the fast-food-craving U.S., they would catch on. Grover Nichols, a brawny Jamaican fellow who has been Tower Isle's plant manager for more than two decades, says that patties are the Jamaican interpretation of Cornish pasties, the English meat pies, and originated when the country was still under British rule. But he says the mass production of them didn't take place at this scale until the Levis started Tower Isle's.
"People are inquiring about the product from all over," he says, and then describes recent requests from Hawaii, Alaska and Japan.
Six days a week, the factory produces beef, vegetarian and chicken patties in cocktail and regular sizes that they ship, every day, all over the country. The operation is a menagerie of functions: In one cell, spices are milled: In another, mini-dumpsters full of onions and scallions are peeled and cut: Massive silos transfer flour to the dough-making station, and Jacuzzi-sized mixers process 2500 pounds of filling per batch. Sheets of yellow dough that, when folded and stacked look like fluffy golden bath towels, are rolled out, and a machine that Earl Levi invented shapes and spits out freshly minted patties that glide across the conveyor belt like air hockey pucks, stamped with the Tower Isle name. Finally, they're packed into boxes and shipped out.