Once you find your way to Lincoln Avenue on the west side of the city, locating the new incarnation of Garfield Phillips' Natural Vibes restaurant is not much of a challenge. On a street lined with houses in shades of brown, grey, and red brick, Natural Vibes Jamaican Jerk Hut, painted a vibrant green with bright yellow trim, stands out. Assuming you are color blind, the other way to find the restaurant is to follow the steady stream of customers who come and go from this no-frills carry-out at all hours of the day and night.

The new Natural Vibes seems to be an attempt to strip away everything that is extraneous from a restaurant so that all that remains is the food itself. Where reviews of Garfield's original restaurant talked about presentation, the food here is largely served heaped into take-out containers that come in two sizes, small ($10) and large ($12). There are no tables, only a narrow counter bolted to one wall and a few stools.

The menu is written on a white-board to the right of the service counter (although when I was there the menu bore only a passing resemblance to what was actually on offer). And the food hides underneath stainless steel lids on a steam table that is only partially visible from the customer's side of the counter. Service, too, is very much on the casual side: it took my companion and me several minutes to get the attention of one of the two cooks working in the open kitchen. Even then they took their time getting to us and promptly vanished after handing our groaning plates full of rice, beans, meat, and cabbage across the counter (be sure to ask for extra napkins while you have the chance, because you are certain to need them).

Jamaican food is similar to Dominican food, concentrating on rich stews ladled over generous heaps of rice and beans. Meat, used as a condiment and accent, adds texture and flavor to sauces that are more deeply flavored and peppery than their Dominican counterparts, largely because of the addition of both curry powder and fiery Scotch bonnet peppers to the Jamaican cook's repertoire.

Fortunately, almost everything that's available at Natural Vibes is served from the steam table, and our server was happy to walk us through the options including curry goat, braised oxtails, brown stew with chicken and potatoes, curried chicken feet, a liver dish whose name I did not catch, and tripe stew. In addition you can find the more familiar patties - distaff kin of the empanada, which are baked rather than fried so that the pastry shell is more like pie crust than puff pastry - and, if you ask, jerk chicken.

If you have ever had jerk chicken before, you are likely to remember the heat. Scotch bonnet peppers, which weigh in near habaneros and bird peppers on the Scoville heat scale, often dominate jerk rubs, pushing the complex flavors that go into the mix into the background. At Natural Vibes, the heat is there, but it acts as a supporting player rather than the star. The bite of green onions, and the aromatic tug of Jamaican allspice, thyme, cinnamon, and coriander take center stage. The rub is smeared over chicken parts that are then grilled, emerging from the fire with a fragrant crust over meat that nearly falls from the bone.

As in other Caribbean cuisines, the chicken used in Natural Vibes' jerk is cut into odd pieces, presumably to allow more surface area for the rub to coat and penetrate the meat. There is no neat way to eat jerk chicken. The plastic fork that comes with your food is entirely inadequate to the task of tearing it apart. So throw caution to the wind, pick the meat up, and gnaw away. This is the very definition of finger lickin' good.

Those same, irregular cuts of chicken, roasted low and slow along with peppers, onions, and thick slices of potato become "brown stew," the Jamaican analogue of a Dominican chicken stew. As in the Dominican version, the chocolate-brown color of the sauce comes from caramelized sugar, which also permeates the meat and gives the pieces that poke up out of the gravy a delectable glazed appearance. The sauce has a nice spice profile and a subtle heat that builds at the back of your throat, tingling and tickling there as you eat more and more of the meat.

As good as both the chicken dishes are, the curried goat is better. Goat can tend to be both a little tough and a little gamey, but the meat used in Natural Vibes' curry is tender and very mildly flavored, more like lamb than like mutton. Slow cooked in a yellow curry with onions, irregular chunks of meat and bone release their flavor into a sauce that makes you grateful for rice to soak it up.

As my companion and I were mopping up the last of our curry goat, a huge man came barreling through the door of the shop, bellowing "Man, can you hook me up with some grub!" What he wanted, we discovered, was a plate of braised oxtails. And after getting a whiff of the intoxicating gravy in which they are served, I wanted some, too.

Oxtail, the bony joints that make up the tail of a cow, would not seem to be the source for some of the tenderest meat imaginable, but cooking those joints low and slow transforms them into tiny versions of the very best braised shortribs ever. The deep brown and unapologetically fatty gravy in which the oxtails cook makes an ideal dip for the morsels that slide free from the bones. Reheated the next day, the flavor gets even better - and again you'll be glad that you have excess rice to catch the bits and drips as they fall.

Natural Vibes Jamaican Jerk Hut

146 Lincoln Ave.

436-5260

Monday-Saturday, 8 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sunday, 8 a.m.-6 p.m.