Scotch bonnet hummus, lamb with labneh mash and oxtail pizza give this Mediterranean-inspired restaurant a distinctly Kingston point of view. Its online menu now brings pickup and delivery into the picture.
Photograph: Michael Moodie Photography.
Scotch bonnet hummus is a useful place to begin with Mezza Luna. A familiar Jamaican pepper appears in a dish with roots far beyond the island, offering a small but telling introduction to the restaurant’s approach. Further down the menu, slow-braised oxtail finds its way onto pizza. Between those two dishes sits a broad Mediterranean-inspired repertoire, with enough local accents to make the address matter.
Mezza Luna occupies a rooftop in Kingston. Mezza Luna opened in December 2025, from the team behind Mystic Thai, with indoor dining alongside its outdoor space. For Kingston diners, it offers a place to gather over mezze, settle on a substantial main course or let a sharing board do much of the choosing.
The change of culinary direction was deliberate. “We’ve been focusing on Asian cuisine and wanted to take a different route,” owner Karina Mahbubani told The Gleaner when the restaurant opened. Mezza Luna’s menu follows that route through hummus and kibbeh, kebabs and shawarma, while making room for Italian dishes and Jamaican ingredients. It covers considerable ground. The most revealing choices are the ones that connect those influences rather than simply placing them beside each other.
Start in the middle of the table
The opening pages give a group plenty to work with. Classic, beetroot, avocado and scotch bonnet hummus are among the choices; the Hummus Trio lets you choose any three. Hot mezze includes crispy cauliflower with tahini, lamb-and-pine-nut rolls and Beirut-style garlic shrimp. These are dishes around which to build a shared order, choosing a few different preparations before moving on to the larger plates.
For a more structured introduction, the Mezza Chef’s Board gathers lamb kafta, chicken kibbeh and shawarma with hummus, vegetables, pickles, cheeses, dates and pita. Its appeal is in the range: a single order that opens several routes through the menu. Someone arriving chiefly for a rooftop dinner can use it as an introduction to the kitchen’s Mediterranean interests without having to commit the whole table to one kind of meal.
Among the mains, Lamb Ouzi pairs slow-braised lamb chops with labneh mash and grilled vegetables. Cedar-Smoked Sea Bass is listed with a toum marinade and lemon-caper emulsion, while Garden of Baalbek puts charred cauliflower kebabs at the centre of the plate, with pistachio dukkah and vermicelli rice. These descriptions offer a clearer sense of the restaurant’s direction than the word “fusion” can manage on its own: garlic, citrus, yoghurt and spice recurring in different combinations.
The Jamaican accents are especially interesting in the pizza section. Oxtail comes with mozzarella, roasted peppers and onions; Jerk BBQ Chicken is another option. These dishes give familiar ingredients a different format, and give a mixed group several ways into the meal. A table can begin with hummus and end up sharing an oxtail pizza without treating either choice as a departure from the evening’s plan.
Dessert continues the cross-cultural conversation. The Baklava Sundae brings baklava together with pistachio-saffron ice cream, honey syrup and crushed pistachios. Tiramisu is also on the list. There is room here for diners who want to follow the Middle Eastern thread through to the finish and those who already know how they like dinner to end.
Another way to make it a Mezza Luna evening
The rooftop remains the reason to go out. Online ordering adds a practical reason to keep the restaurant in mind on the nights when going out is not the plan. Mezza Luna’s website now offers an ordering menu for both pickup and delivery, with dishes ranging from hummus and hot mezze to entrées, pizzas and desserts.
That creates a different way to approach the same menu: a few dishes for the centre of a table at home, a main course for one, or an oxtail pizza to share. Current selections and ordering details are available on the restaurant’s website.
For an evening out, the rooftop and indoor dining spaces remain part of the choice. For an evening at home, the menu does the travelling. Mezza Luna’s character is there in its dishes: Mediterranean influences, interpreted with Kingston at the table.
Plan a visit or order
Where is Mezza Luna?
In Kingston, Jamaica, with rooftop and indoor dining.
What kind of food does it serve?
A Mediterranean-inspired menu including hummus, mezze, kebabs, seafood, pasta and pizza, with Jamaican touches such as scotch bonnet hummus and oxtail pizza.
Freedom, faith, music and the work of building an industry. Issue 01 of CanEx’s Jamaica Ganja Guide brings the people behind the story into view.
Jamaica Ganja Guide, Issue 01. Published by CanEx.
By Douglas K. Gordon
In the Jamaica Ganja Guide, Denzil Williams, known as Wadada, describes one of the gains from reform in four words: “The benefit of freedom.”
Williams’s next words explain the weight he gives that answer: “Because freedom is very important.” His account also questions who has received the commercial rewards from a culture that Rastafari helped carry through years of stigma. Reading his answers together reveals both the value he places on freedom and the recognition he still wants to see.
That is a useful place to enter Issue 01 of the guide from CanEx. Jamaica’s ganja story contains people with different histories, beliefs and ambitions. Spend time with them and the familiar image of a leaf begins to give way to more substantial questions. Who carried this knowledge? Who gets heard? What does opportunity look like to someone whose livelihood or faith is part of the story?
The Jamaica Ganja Guide brings those questions into a publication that moves between cultural history, personal accounts, the regulated industry and the places where these conversations take shape. It is intended for people living in Jamaica, those coming home and visitors who want to understand more of the country they encounter.
Start with the people
Williams’s account also moves through relationships, music and his own Rastafari journey, giving reform a personal history that a legal timeline cannot supply.
At Rastafari Indigenous Village, Firstman approaches recognition through the life of a community. In the guide’s interview, he describes a space built around social, cultural and economic rights. Music is part of that life, along with family, responsibility to the earth and the practical work of sustaining a collective enterprise.
A visitor may first become curious through reggae or ganja. The Guide places that curiosity beside Firstman’s account of collective rights and responsibilities. The people living and working at the village have priorities that extend beyond a visit.
Read together, these voices ask the reader to listen before deciding what ganja means to Jamaica. A cultural symbol can travel a long way from the people who give it meaning. Here, those people explain their own priorities.
The business story has people in it too
The language changes in the industry pages, where capital, processing and regulation enter the discussion. The human questions remain.
The Guide’s “After the Green Rush”, drawing on Wayne Isaacs’s recollections, revisits the expectations that accompanied investment in Jamaica’s cannabis industry. In his account, administrative demands and banking difficulties help explain the distance between money announced and money available to put to work.
That distinction has consequences for anyone building a business. An impressive announcement does not, by itself, explain when a company can hire, build or pay its bills. The guide makes room for a more practical conversation about what an industry needs to endure.
Rory Liu takes the discussion towards what happens after cultivation. In “Beyond Flower”, his emphasis is on adaptability, processing, development and manufacturing. He describes the importance of a scale a business can sustain and the ability to change plans when circumstances require it.
The question of who participates runs through these accounts. Building a business requires more than an opportunity on paper: people need conditions in which they can put their work, knowledge and money to use.
Follow the music into the wider culture
The guide’s music pages put Peter Tosh’s Legalize It and Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Kaya into a listening conversation. Dub and dancehall take their place in the selection too.
The selection offers another way into the subject. Music carries argument, faith, pleasure and ordinary life. A listener who arrives through a familiar title can keep listening for the worlds surrounding it.
The wider publication also explores gardens, food, bathing heritage and the ways people make space in a day. Those subjects help keep wellness connected to everyday Jamaican life. Their cultural value does not depend on turning every tradition into a medical promise.
For a reader interested primarily in the industry, these pages broaden the view. For someone drawn by music or community, they provide routes into questions about work, regulation and ownership. The connections are part of the reason to read across the guide.
A directory within a larger story
The directory gives the publication a geographical dimension. Alongside its entries, the editorial pages supply history, different perspectives and the people whose concerns give the industry its wider context.
The value of the publication lies in being able to move between those forms of information. A directory organises names and places. An interview can change the questions a reader brings to them.
Begin with Wadada’s account of freedom, follow Firstman into the responsibilities of community, or read Isaacs and Liu on what it takes to build a business. Each opens a different part of the same Jamaican story.
Williams’s phrase is worth carrying into the rest of the edition. Freedom has meaning before it becomes an economic measure. What people can make of it, and whether their contribution receives recognition, remains a conversation worth having.
The Jamaica Ganja Guide website goes live on Monday, 9 November 2026. Visit CanEx Jamaica for the Guide and its wider programme.
Disclosure: I publish the guide through CanEx and have a commercial interest in Cookies Jamaica, its presenting sponsor, and Natural Mystic Wellness. The guide is produced by The Studio by OCEAN Style.
Illustrative photograph: Tamra Creatives Agency / Pexels. The model is not presented as a patient or medication user.
Medical care does not become cheating because somebody else thinks you should have suffered more.
Losing weight is apparently only half the assignment. The other half is providing an account of how much you suffered along the way, preferably one that reassures everybody that you did it properly. Introduce a medicine into the story and suddenly your body has become a debate about character.
That is the logic of the easy-way-out argument. It treats difficulty as proof of virtue and help as something to confess. Weight stigma can dress itself up as concern about discipline; the question of whether a person is receiving appropriate care gets pushed aside.
OCEAN Style’s position is straightforward: nobody should have to perform hardship to deserve medical attention. You can ask serious questions about a treatment without putting the person considering it on trial.
Who decided care had to be earned?
There is something revealing about the demand to do it the hard way. It gives the onlooker a starring role: judge of the effort, keeper of the rules, final authority on whether somebody else’s body has changed acceptably. The patient’s own experience becomes a supporting detail.
Consider the woman who is tired of organising her life around another attempt to lose weight. She may have tried different approaches for years. She may be considering treatment for the first time. The relevant conversation concerns her health, her options and what she can sustain. She should not need to produce a sufficiently miserable history before anyone takes those questions seriously.
The same respect belongs to someone who decides against medication. This is a medical decision with consequences, costs and uncertainties. Turning it into a test of whether you are modern enough to embrace a drug, or disciplined enough to refuse one, is equally tiresome.
A smaller body is not evidence of better character. A prescription is not evidence of worse character. We can retire that entire system of moral accounting.
Take the medicine seriously
The discussion about GLP-1s deserves more intelligence than a miracle story or a sneer about shortcuts. These are prescription treatments. They warrant scrutiny, competent care and an honest account of what remains uncertain.
In December 2025, the World Health Organization issued conditional recommendations for using these therapies in adults with obesity as part of long-term, comprehensive care. WHO recognised their effectiveness in treating obesity and improving metabolic and other outcomes. Its recommendation remained conditional because of limitations in longer-term evidence, questions about maintenance and stopping, cost, health-system readiness and unequal access. There is room in an adult conversation for benefit and uncertainty.
Those questions belong in the consultation. They cannot be settled by a friend’s experience, an impressive photograph or a stranger’s opinion of your willpower.
Ask more of the provider
The people offering treatment should be able to withstand considerably more scrutiny than the people seeking it. Who assesses you? Who remains responsible for your care? What support is included? What happens when something becomes uncomfortable, expensive or difficult to maintain?
An attractive first-month price can be an introduction to a bill. It is not a complete account of continuing care. Ask about assessment, medication, follow-up and any tests, including what the quoted price covers. NIDDK includes cost among the factors to discuss with a health professional; its US regulatory and insurance information does not establish Jamaican approval or coverage.
WHO also warns about falsified and substandard products and the need for qualified prescribing and regulated distribution. A persuasive sales pitch cannot do the work of a proper assessment. The quality of the care deserves your attention before the elegance of the marketing does.
Medical help also leaves plenty of ordinary life to organise. WHO places these therapies within wider care involving food, activity and professional support. There is no universal timetable a magazine can give an individual reader for starting, tapering or stopping a prescription.
Your body does not require a press statement
If you want to talk about treatment, talk about it. You may have something useful to share. You may also prefer to discuss the details with the clinician looking after you and leave everybody else out of it.
A compliment does not entitle the person giving it to your prescription history. Nor should anyone feel they have to pretend the change came from drinking more water to make the conversation comfortable. Privacy is a choice; shame should not be the price of keeping it.
If someone close to you is considering treatment, ask what support would actually help. They may want somebody to listen, to accompany them to an appointment or simply to stop commenting on their body. Leave room for an answer that does not involve your verdict on the medicine.
And extend that courtesy to the person whose body stays exactly as it is. Kindness that arrives only after weight loss comes with an ugly set of terms.
Put the scrutiny where it belongs
There is plenty to question about medical weight management: the evidence, the promises, the cost and the care. Be demanding about those things. They affect someone’s health and their ability to make a decision they understand.
But a person seeking help is not a public referendum on effort. They can be candid with a clinician without making their body public property. Getting help does not put their dignity up for review.
Just over a year after the hurricane, Jamaicans are restoring the means to earn, learn and live at home. Their experiences reveal what makes recovery possible, and why so many are still waiting.
Mystic Thai chefs began work at four in the morning, preparing meals to help get food out around Jamaica after Melissa. Photographed on 31 October 2025. OCEAN Style.
Courtland Blake makes cabinets, doors and bed frames. In All Hands & Hearts’ October 21 account, his work supports his family, two employees and his daughter’s college education. Melissa destroyed the workshop on which those different futures depended. A grant paid for a new roof, electrical repairs and equipment. By the time of that report, the business was operating again.
“If it weren’t for this grant, I wouldn’t have the roof. I wouldn’t have come this far,” Blake told the organisation.
There is a whole household economy inside that repair. Restoring a workshop allows its owner to take orders and pay people whose own bills have continued through the disruption. The assistance becomes useful through the work it makes possible. A year after Melissa, that connection between a repaired building and a life that can function again runs through Jamaica’s recovery, along with the frustration of people who have yet to reach it.
Melissa made landfall near New Hope, Westmoreland, on October 28, 2025. The National Hurricane Center’s final report places it at approximately 12:25 p.m. Jamaica time, a Category 5 hurricane. Its account describes catastrophic destruction across western Jamaica, including severe damage to concrete buildings as well as the loss of wooden structures and roofs. The report, dated February 25, 2026, records 45 known deaths in Jamaica. Behind that dated reckoning are families for whom an anniversary also marks a year of someone’s absence.
Broken walls and debris beside the sea, 4 December 2025. One view of the destruction Melissa left behind. OCEAN Style.
In the first weeks, people needed to eat while almost everything that sustained their ordinary lives was interrupted. World Central Kitchen worked through Jamaican cooks, volunteers and restaurant partners, establishing field kitchens in Montego Bay and Negril. By November 24, 2025, it reported more than two million meals served. Its January 20, 2026 wrap-up put the completed Jamaica response at 6.7 million meals over nearly three months. Reaching families cut off by damaged roads had required motorcycles, four-wheel-drive vehicles and aircraft. As households regained the means to cook, the response also included more than 36,000 meal kits.
One of those local partners was Nathalee, owner of Kajay’s Seafood Restaurant in New Hope, Westmoreland. In WCK’s account, damage initially prevented her from cooking, so she organised the distribution of meals supplied by the Montego Bay kitchen and other partners. The restaurant later resumed cooking while keeping its team employed. Familiar people and places helped turn a large relief operation into food a neighbour could actually receive.
Jamaica’s cultural networks carried help across borders too. Food For The Poor’s November 6 report described Cedella Marley joining students in South Florida to pack more than 1,600 hygiene kits. The Bob and Rita Marley Foundations also mobilised food, clean water and emergency supplies through their One Love in Action response, with partners including Food For The Poor and Global Empowerment Mission.
Through the Sean Paul Foundation, Sean Paul combined a pledge to match up to US$50,000 in donations with work on the ground. Food For The Poor reported on November 1 that he and his family had helped volunteers pack 1,000 food kits. Shaggy, recounting his own relief mission in a November 2025 Associated Press interview, described bringing supplies from Miami and transferring them into smaller vehicles to reach damaged communities. Water, tarpaulins, sanitary supplies and batteries were among the things he carried.
The Buju Banton Foundation records working with Miami-Dade County to collect and deliver relief supplies for Jamaicans affected by Melissa. These efforts depended on people who could sort, transport and distribute what was donated. Shaggy also spoke about ordinary Jamaicans filling their cars and heading out to help. Volunteers sorting boxes and finding a route into a damaged community were part of the same effort.
A meal and a clasped hand during the relief effort, 5 November 2025. OCEAN Style.
That work continued as emergency assistance gave way to repairs. UNDP’s August account describes Petersfield residents turning storm debris into bins and school seating, while salvaged lumber and zinc went towards home repairs in Petersfield and Sawyers. Welder Garth Martin made a bin from recovered material. Paid clean-up also gave residents a way to equip themselves for further work: Gregory Anthony of Sawyers said his earnings enabled him to buy painting and carpentry tools. Materials recovered from the storm and wages earned clearing them could both contribute to the next job.
A T&TEC crew from Trinidad and Tobago helps restore electricity in Montego Bay, 14 November 2025. OCEAN Style.
Yet enterprise needs more than a willingness to work. Marine Beale ran a small café opposite a school in Savanna-la-Mar. Melissa destroyed both her business and her house. In an IFRC anniversary account published on October 27, she was living in transitional accommodation. She used her first Red Cross cash transfer to buy food. The business that could restore her income remained her next concern.
“Once my business is up, I know I can survive,” she told the organisation.
Beale’s experience makes the order of recovery painfully clear. A person may need assistance to get through today before she can use assistance to earn tomorrow. The Jamaica Red Cross and IFRC reported cash and voucher support to 7,161 households by the anniversary update. Their account also described thousands of families still displaced. A transfer can relieve immediate pressure without resolving the loss that created it.
Access to help can itself require help. At an October application drive in St Elizabeth, tax officials processed registrations for people who needed a TRN to apply for the Government’s business restoration grants. Justices of the peace assisted with verification, and volunteers helped applicants navigate the online process. An October 17 Observer report republished by the Ministry of Industry, Investment and Commerce put applications at 1,485 as of that update. The J$500 million programme had opened on October 6.
Those were applications, with eligibility checks still part of the process. The ministry’s portal explains that approved support is paid to suppliers for eligible repairs, tools or equipment. For an applicant, the practical questions continue beyond submitting a form: whether support is approved, what it will replace, and when that replacement will allow work to resume. The people staffing a registration desk can be as consequential to that process as the announcement that funds exist.
The national figures describe the scale of the interruption. In March, the Planning Institute of Jamaica presented an assessment of approximately US$12.232 billion in damage, losses and additional costs. The World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank’s earlier US$8.8 billion estimate covered physical damage. Lost income and the extra expense of coping with disruption belong to the broader reckoning. For a family whose home and business were both destroyed, the distinction has an immediate meaning: rebuilding the structure leaves the months without earnings still to be absorbed.
Jamaica needs the income that returning visitors bring, but the return is uneven within tourism too. In a September 17 interview with Jamaica Information Service, Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett said most tourism jobs had returned and formal accommodation capacity stood at 70 per cent. He projected further improvement for the winter season. That September measure described available capacity across formal accommodation; it did not establish how many damaged rooms had been repaired by the anniversary.
The financial obstacles were still drawing scrutiny. An October 1 Associated Press report described hotel operators’ complaints about delayed insurance settlements and deductions. Insurers stressed the complexity of individual commercial claims and the demands on loss adjusters. In an October 3 statement reported by The Gleaner, the Insurance Association of Jamaica acknowledged the pressure outstanding claims placed on households and businesses and said its members were reviewing unresolved cases.
For farmers, the capacity to begin again may depend on something as basic as planting material. In The Gleaner’s October 28 reporting from southern Trelawny, yam farmer Althea Pryce described a shortage of planting material. “I am having a difficulty getting yam heads to replant but I am not giving up,” she told the newspaper. Audley Gager was searching for them too. Lisa Gordon, a teacher from Thompson Town, recalled how yam farming had paid for her own family’s schooling and home. These are livelihoods with obligations extending far beyond a field. Replanting restores a source of income on which children, vendors and other households depend, but the desire to plant cannot supply what is missing.
Recovery also has to contend with the weather that follows the hurricane. Agro-Invest’s September 3 report described an equipment and irrigation handover the previous day to Essex Valley farmers in St Elizabeth, who were recovering from Melissa while facing dry conditions. Water tanks and drip irrigation addressed the next growing season’s needs. Restoring production requires keeping a farm viable through conditions that will not wait for the repairs to finish.
At home, assistance also has to cover the work of installation. In its October account, All Hands & Hearts describes how it tarped Donald Brown’s roof in Elim, then supplied a roofing kit and covered the cost of installation.
Other housing work was at an earlier stage. A ministry update published on October 26 described inspections four days earlier at St Elizabeth sites where work included clearing land, excavating foundations and preparing septic tanks. The parish component provided for about 125 semi-permanent units. Reinforcement, inspections and concrete work remained ahead at the sites described. The work was real, and it was still construction rather than evidence of families moving in.
Pews beneath exposed roof framing in a church damaged by Melissa, 12 November 2025. OCEAN Style.
Even the Government’s own anniversary-period statements acknowledged the impatience. In an anniversary-period release, the Office of the Prime Minister recognised continuing hardship among people without secure homes and recorded the prime minister’s dissatisfaction with aspects of recovery, particularly the restoration of homes and roofs. Faster delivery has to produce somewhere people can live. It also has to take account of how they will make a living there.
In Parottee, the two questions are inseparable. The Observer’s October 28 report found residents rebuilding in the low-lying coastal community despite an official relocation plan to Luana. Boat-tour operator Ridge Harvey described fishing, tourism and family graves as reasons people wanted to stay. “We live off the sea, the pond, and tourism,” he said. Windell Daley told the newspaper he had received no financial help; he and his wife were willing to move to other land in Parottee, while his daughters wanted to remain where they had grown up. Even within a family, people were making different choices about where they could begin again.
Relocation asks people to weigh safety against the places where they know how to earn and where their family histories remain. A safer address has to work as a home within a life. Attachment to Parottee cannot settle the risk, but any lasting response has to understand it.
The strain also travels into classrooms. Ilene Cohall Bailey, a master teacher at Manning’s School in Savanna-la-Mar, was dealing with anger, loss and uncertainty while helping her pupils, according to UNICEF. Its September account, carrying a May 19 dateline, described her participation in Return to Happiness training earlier in the year. The sessions gave teachers space to recognise their own distress while learning how to support children.
“Through the laughter and the sharing, I realized I was not alone,” she said.
That relief belongs beside the accounts of physical rebuilding. The adults expected to restore routine have also lived through the storm. Their ability to care for children can depend on finding care and understanding themselves.
Practical learning has meanwhile required its own improvisation. The Gleaner reported in September that damaged books and tools at Muschett High in Trelawny had pushed industrial arts teaching towards theory and revision. At Herbert Morrison Technical High in St James, grade-12 student Tevel Richards faced missing tools needed for his mechanical technology school-based assessment. His parents supplied some, and he shared them with classmates so they could work on their assessments too.
At an October 22 education briefing reported by the Observer, junior education minister Rhoda Moy Crawford described shortages of skilled labour, material difficulties and contractor challenges. Officials also outlined stronger building standards. Children need those buildings to be safer, and they need suitable spaces and equipment while the work continues. Every term spent adapting places demands on teachers and families that a construction update cannot fully describe.
The tools passed from one pair of hands to another, putting his parents’ help to work beyond their own household.
