WATERVILLE — Standing three floors tall, with sweeping windows and a tiny yard lining the front steps, the house looks like many others in Waterville. But a small orange sign, the deep bass of reggae music and a distant smell of smoking meat set 15 School St. apart from its neighbors — and the rest of the city’s restaurants.

Jamie Pomerleau and Clayton Whyte opened Strait Jamaican Cuisine in June. The pair began planning last year to build a restaurant out of the back of Pomerleau’s house, intertwining her Maine-based restaurant experience with Whyte’s decades of cooking at hotels, restaurants and Jamaican street stalls.

The restaurant, named after Whyte’s nickname in Jamaica, became a neighborhood staple from the first month, Pomerleau said.

“Right from the get-go, we had people that were coming two or three times a week, and they still come two or three times a week, even six months later,” Pomerleau said. “We’re definitely making an impact on people. Before they would even try the food, people would be like, ‘Oh, thank God you’re here. We’re so glad— we’re so happy you’re here.'”

Tom Suttie, who lives across the street, at 16 School St., said Strait Jamaican Cuisine has brought a new type of food to town.

“I think it’s a great addition to Waterville,” Suttie said. “I think the biggest thing is, it’s a different kind of a restaurant, so it’s adding diversity. It’s not just another American food place, I should say. We do have several Asian places around, but we’ve added so much over the past five, six, seven years over downtown, so I think it’s great.”

A large part of Jamaican cuisine is based in jerk cooking, a cooking style that involves dry rubbing or marinating meat in a spice mixture before cooking it, usually over a wood-burning oven.

Whyte marinates his meat in a jerk spice for days before cooking it on the smoker outside, preparing popular menu items like jerk chicken, jerk pork, curry chicken, beef patties, rasta pasta and a variety of sides. The portions are generous, clearing a path toward a fridge full of leftovers.

Strait Jamaican Cuisine was not possible without big changes to the house. Around back, the room in which Pomerleau’s daughter grew up was transformed into a tiny commercial kitchen, with a stove, hood and sinks. The back deck became the resting place for Whyte’s meat smoker. A large space behind the house was repurposed for parking, and the gravel driveway lining the side of the yard became the public’s main thoroughfare.

A walk-up window was also added this fall.

The business only serves takeout, with a couple of tables on the porch providing a waiting area. The restaurant delivers and caters, often to Colby College, which provides some of its most loyal customers.

Whyte said after Strait Jamaican Cuisine opened in June, some people wandered over to check out what they had heard about a half-kitchen, half-house restaurant.

“We’d have people come straight and ask: ‘Are you guys legit to operate in business? Are you guys legal to do this?’ And I’d just say, ‘Yes, we are,'” Whyte said.

Pomerleau said she originally looked at storefronts, but seeing high rents and costs, decided it would be easier to start small at her own home.

The house borders Albert S. Hall School at 27 Pleasant St. and is a few doors down from School Street Yoga and an accounting firm, but before construction began, Pomerleau said she checked with each neighbor to make sure they were comfortable with another commercial addition to the mostly residential street.

Suttie said that the smell of smoking meat often wafts across the neighborhood, reminding him to pay his neighbor a visit for takeout every couple of weeks.

“It’s kind of funny when you wake up in the morning, especially, I think Monday or Sunday is one of their big days to start their smoker outside,” Suttie said. “So it’s the first thing you smell in the morning when you go outside and get your paper. It’s like, ‘Uh-oh, it’s cooking day.'”

When the idea for the restaurant was in its early stage, Pomerleau contacted Waterville’s code enforcement officer and health inspector. Because the restaurant is at a residential property, sit-down dining is not permitted, and rules state that the owners cannot hire paid workers. But the pair’s combined expertise makes business run smoothly, Whyte said.

“Her insights with my Jamaican cuisine, it’s like perfectly blended, because some of our dishes, we kind of Americanize it,” Whyte said. “So with her blend and my blend, it’s perfectly good.”

Pomerleau and Whyte live together on the first floor. The pair met working seasonally at The Chart Room, a seafood restaurant at 565 Eden St. in Bar Harbor, where Pomerleau was the bar manager and Whyte the sous chef. They began dating in 2022, and Whyte moved to Waterville full time last winter.

Originally, Whyte had flown to Bar Harbor from Jamaica in 2015 to visit a friend. He never left. Today, both of his daughters live in Connecticut.

While the bulk of his cooking experience came from working as a hotel chef for 25 years, Whyte said he learned to cook from his father.

Every year on Christmas Eve, a large-scale festival called Gran’ Market opens across Jamaica, bringing many food vendors and community members to the streets. On those days, Whyte’s father stayed up all night jerking chicken and cooking soup for festivalgoers, only stopping at about 6 a.m.

Whyte later went on to do the same, jerking on the street over weekends to make extra money for his children. Through all of this, he said he developed the flavor-infusing method — and secret sauce — that he now uses at Strait Jamaican Cuisine.

“I build my jerk rub from scratch,” Whyte said. “I build all my seasonings from scratch, so I use it to marinate my meat, like a day or two, and then I do it on the charcoal. Right now, we have some jerking outside, because that’s the only way you’re going to get an authentic taste of Jamaican chicken or pork, by doing it on the charcoal.”

Pomerleau, who grew up in Winslow, also has deep roots in the food industry. She has had stints at the now-closed Lobster Trap & Steakhouse, Silver Street Tavern, Applebee’s, Weathervane Seafood and catering at the Holiday Inn. Those with whom she has worked over the years have been some of the biggest supporters of her new venture, she said, giving her the confidence to finally open her own restaurant.

“For years, when I was younger, when I first started getting into the business, I was always like, ‘Oh, I want to own my own restaurant,'” Pomerleau said, adding she eventually realized “there’s a lot of struggle” in the restaurant business.

“It’s not the easiest business to get into,” she said. “But where we got set up this way, I think we’ll be able to survive.”

Strait Jamaican Cuisine has an online ordering system and a strong Facebook presence, and the owners said they want to keep spreading the word and growing online, with the hope one day of expanding into the entire first floor of the house.

Suttie said he would like to see the restaurant expand.

“They’re very nice people to deal with — very organized, all set up online, so you can place your order there,” he said. “We’re certainly always spreading the word about it. And who knows? Maybe someday they’ll get big enough that they might want to find a little building where they can have a small restaurant.”

For now, the restaurant is staying put and bringing new scents, customers and flavor to the neighborhood.

While Pomerleau has long called 15 School St. home, Whyte said having the opportunity to cook Jamaican food every day brings a piece of his homeland to his and Pomerleau’s Waterville restaurant.

“A couple people that come here and said, ‘Oh, this is the best food I ever tasted,'” Whyte said. “Like more than one, more than two, more than three people. And that really gives you a good feeling to see people accepting your culture in a different country. That means a lot.”