He Thought Brisket Was Too American to Cook. Now His Caribbean Version Has a Permanent Stall in Union Square.

The dish that put Jase Franklyn on a permanent stall in Manhattan is a brisket he spent years refusing to make. It smokes low and slow for twelve hours, then arrives slathered in passionfruit sauce, a sweet and smoky glaze that no Central Texas pitmaster would recognize and no one who tries it forgets. Franklyn calls his food Caribbean barbecue, built on lessons from his mother's grill in Tobago. For a long time, brisket had no place in it.

Brisket, he decided early on, was "so American". His menu leaned into the flavors he grew up with: rice and peas, jerk and barbecue chicken, and pig tails grilled and caramelized in barbecue sauce. The big American cut of beef, the one that anchors every Texas joint, felt like someone else's tradition. Then the pandemic gave him time to reconsider, and the reconsidering turned into a year-long obsession that ended with a stall at one of New York City's busiest food halls.

The grill in Tobago

Franklyn's barbecue education started at his mother's side, at a tender age, in the twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. "My initiation into the world of barbecuing was actually through my mother," he told the interview series Food Karma. "She was the cook in our family." They grilled pork, chicken and fish for celebrations and holidays, and for the extended family that gathered every Christmas and New Year.

He carried that habit to the United States, where he moved to study, coming away with a bachelor's degree in Computer Information Systems. Cooking stayed a side pursuit, the thing he did on weekends and for the Fourth of July, at birthday parties and backyard cookouts. "At these events, I was frequently complimented by all who indulged in my barbecue dishes," he said. The compliments piled up until they turned into a question he could not ignore, which was whether other people would pay for this.

The coach who sells barbecue on the side

They would. In 2017, Franklyn officially founded Jase's BBQ, first selling out of his backyard in Brooklyn, then from the Rockaways after he moved there in 2019. What makes the arc unusual is that barbecue has never been his day job. By day, Franklyn is a track and field coach at a Brooklyn high school, a sports fanatic who follows track, soccer and Formula 1, and who once owned an electronics repair shop that fixed phones, tablets and computers before he traded circuit boards for smoke.

That outsider path shaped how he thinks about the work. Selling barbecue taught him that not every palate wants the same thing, and that chasing every palate is a trap. "Create your signature, embrace your style and persevere regardless," he said when asked what he had learned. It is the kind of line a coach would give an athlete, and it is exactly the philosophy that led him back to the one cut he had sworn off.

The brisket he did not want to make

When the pandemic shut down the events that filled his weekends, Franklyn finally took brisket seriously. "Brisket, it could be simple, but it could be technical," he said. "If you don't know anything, it's going to be technical." He treated it like a research project, moving from slow-cooking the meat in an oven to running it on a charcoal and wood smoker, learning the cut over a full year of trial and error.

He did not do it alone. Franklyn asked friends for guidance, including a genuine master of the form: Ruben Santana of Bark Barbecue, the Bronx-born pitmaster whose Dominican-inflected brisket had already made Bark one of the most talked-about barbecue names in New York. Where Santana threads Dominican flavor through Texas technique, Franklyn did the same with his own heritage, folding a "hush-hush" blend of Caribbean spices into the meat. The result was a brisket that reads as Texan in method and Caribbean in flavor, finished with that passionfruit glaze.

The video that was supposed to be about pig tails

Franklyn started selling the brisket at pop-ups around the city, including Red Hook's Strong Rope Brewery and the Smorgasburg market. The break came by accident. The food creator Rob Martinez showed up to shoot a segment about Franklyn's barbecue pig tails, the dish that had already earned him a following, but a brisket happened to be resting on the grill when the cameras rolled.

"His interview wasn't supposed to be about brisket," Franklyn recalled. "That interview was actually supposed to be about the barbecue pig tails. But the brisket happened to be on the grill at the time." Martinez tried it on camera and called it the best barbecue in New York City. The clip did what a year of careful cooking could not do on its own, which was hand a coach with a side hustle a citywide audience overnight.

From a Brooklyn backyard to Union Square

The recognition was building before the video, too. Franklyn took Best Rib Dinner at the 2021 Rib King competition with jerk-spiced smoked ribs, Dominican rice and beans, sweet plantains and cornbread, and he had already won a "Hidden Gem" nod at the 2020 Pig Island festival for his jerk pork and signature pig tails. Each award widened the circle of people who knew the name before they knew the man behind it was grading track times by morning.

As of June 2026, that name has a permanent home. Franklyn's Caribbean barbecue now smokes at Time Out Market Union Square, the Manhattan food hall where his old brisket mentor Bark Barbecue also cooks, a small full-circle detail for a man who once asked Santana for tips. The jerk brisket came with him, alongside pulled pork, spare ribs, sweet cornbread and mac and cheese. At lunch he runs a deal that would be hard to find anywhere near Union Square: a brisket sandwich, a pulled pork sandwich or a two-rib plate, plus a side, for fourteen dollars.

He is not standing still. Franklyn plans to rotate in his award-winning pig tails and a new invention, brisket spring rolls, the kind of cross-cultural mashup that only makes sense coming from a cook who grew up between traditions. You can follow what is smoking on the Jase's BBQ Instagram, where the account bills itself, with a Trinidad-to-America flag in the bio, as the best premium barbecue in the city.

A wider map of American barbecue

Franklyn's rise sits alongside a small, growing group of New York pitmasters redrawing what regional barbecue can taste like, Santana's Dominican brisket among them. The old assumption that great brisket belongs to Texas, and only to Texas, gets a little harder to defend each time a cook from somewhere else masters the cut and then makes it their own. Franklyn spent a year proving he could make brisket the American way, and then he seasoned it like home.

There is a lesson in the fact that the dish he resisted longest is the one carrying his business into its most visible chapter. He did not abandon his roots to make it; he brought brisket into them. A boy who learned to grill at his mother's elbow in Tobago now serves twelve-hour brisket under passionfruit glaze to a Manhattan lunch crowd, coaches a high-school track team between cooks, and treats every plate the way she taught him, which is like it matters who eats it. You can find the full story of how he got there in Time Out New York.

Sources

Time Out New York, "This Caribbean barbecue restaurant now has a permanent home in Union Square" by Morgan Carter (Aug. 10, 2026). Pig Island / Food Karma, "From Tobago to Brooklyn with Jase Franklyn of Jase's BBQ". Jase's BBQ official site and Instagram. Bark Barbecue at Time Out Market. Images: courtesy Morgan Carter for Time Out New York and Jase's BBQ.