Lclat Baxter said he had never won anything in his life. That was before he was awarded a $9,000 Austin Eats grant for culinary entrepreneurship.
The owner of Jamaican restaurant Jam Grill said he was “flabbergasted” when he found out.
“It was great,” Baxter said. “I appreciate being a part of the community and doing things with them now. I’m trying to give back because I received it. It was a great experience and it also helped, because a restaurant is a very high-risk thing and you don’t really get a lot of investment.”
Baxter isn’t new to the restaurant business. He immigrated from Jamaica in 1994 and owned another restaurant in Oak Park from 2008 to 2017, but his motivation has changed throughout the years.
Baxter says he cooks not to make money, but because he loves it and wants to give back to his community.
“It’s just being in an area where I can give back,” Baxter said. “I think that’s the most important thing for me. It’s not about making money, more about having a stable community.”
Jam Grill serves mostly Jamaican food, along with some fusion dishes Baxter designed to appeal to “meet the needs of other people.”
Baxter hopes that his affordable prices provide an alternative to fast food options that he says aren’t healthy. Aside from the food though, he says his restaurant is “mainly about the vibes.”
“I’m bringing the Jamaican vibes,” Baxter said. “The atmosphere when you come in here, you feel like you’re in Jamaica.”
With his restaurant, Baxter says he wants to “bring every different ethnic group together.” He appreciates the diversity of the Austin community and believes the community is more than a stereotype.
“I think with my community, I think things that you hear on TV and so on does happen everywhere,” Baxter said. “But I think media does push it to some bad, negative vibes… but people are very friendly. People are very loving. People are very communal.”
Baxter said he is using the funds from the Austin Eats grant to hire locally, because he wasn’t in a position to do so before, but thinks it’s very important.
He hopes this will allow him to give back to the community and hopes that people in the community can also take inspiration from his story.
“If I can give back in the sense of knowledge, and just seeing a young man like me open the business, will open eyes for other young people that move it around and say, ‘if he does it, and he’s my skin color, I can do it too,’” Baxter said.
Baxter said he is proud of the progress he has seen in Austin since moving to the community but still feels there should be more investments and more support from local governments.
Regardless, he says he always tries to take the “positive things out of everything.”
“I think that’s the only way you can progress and move on. If you speak positivity, you breathe positivity, just look at things on a positive side, even though there’s always the other side there, we don’t focus on that,” Baxter said.