The first thing chef JJ Johnson talks about is the water.
Not the restaurant. Not the logistics of translating his Harlem-born rice bowl shop into a resort restaurant at Atlantis Paradise Island. No, he talks first about the feeling of being in The Bahamas, where the ocean keeps pulling him away.
“The water in Paradise Island is phenomenal,” Johnson says. “When the breeze hits your face, you know you’re in tropical paradise.”
When the breeze hits your face, you know you’re in tropical paradise.”
When he visits The Bahamas now, he tries to get beyond the quick check-in. He spends time with his team at Fieldtrip, the fast-casual restaurant he opened at Atlantis, and then he looks for life outside the resort gates. He likes Cricket Club for oxtail. He likes the small mom-and-pop restaurants down below the bridge. On the next trip, he says, he wants to get on a boat and get into that clear ocean.
It is an appropriate image for Johnson, who has built a career around movement: between Harlem and the Caribbean, between rice traditions across the world, between cookbook pages and television studios, between the chef-driven restaurant world and a fast-casual model built for daily life.
At Atlantis, Fieldtrip gives the resort something new: a poolside restaurant with the pace of a casual lunch spot, the reach of a global rice bowl kitchen, and the particular point of view of a chef who sees rice not as a side dish but as a passport.
The idea began long before the restaurant did. Johnson had been invited to Atlantis about four years earlier to cook for a special dinner. He returned for more events, including the Nassau Paradise Island Wine & Food Festival, and the connection kept deepening. Locals recognized him from Just Eats With Chef JJ, his CLEO TV show, which airs in The Bahamas, and fans started showing up. Then, Atlantis President and Managing Director Audrey Oswell made a statement that stayed with him. He recalls her telling him: “You know, we don’t have anything like this at the resort.” And so, Johnson set out to change that.
By then, Fieldtrip had already established itself as one of the more unusual fast-casual restaurant stories in America. Johnson opened the rice bowl concept in Harlem in 2019 after a career that included work at more than a few famed New York restaurants and a James Beard Foundation Book Award for Between Harlem and Heaven, the cookbook he co-authored with chef and restaurateur Alexander Smalls and writer Veronica Chambers. His later book, The Simple Art of Rice (written with Danica Novgorodoff) continued the argument at the center of Fieldtrip: Rice is not background music. It is culture, memory, agriculture, migration, comfort and dinner.
At Atlantis, the question became how to keep that idea intact while letting it breathe in Bahamian air. “The goal for me is to always give people a consistent product,” Johnson says. That consistency did not mean copy and paste. In the United States, Fieldtrip’s crispy fish bowl leans on haddock or cod, because that’s what fits the supply chain. In The Bahamas, Johnson saw the chance to work with snapper sourced from local fishermen. Sitting adjacent to The Royal Pool, Fieldtrip offers outdoor dining and bowls that work for a guest coming in from the pool deck. “[In] a lot of the essence of the food, you do see some Caribbean notes,” Johnson says.
That makes sense given his own family history. His grandfather was from Barbados, and Johnson’s cooking has long moved through the overlapping foodways of the Caribbean, West Africa, the American South and Asia. At Atlantis, the curry shrimp bowl has become one of the clearest examples. “It really resonates with the locals and with people coming in from somewhere else,” he says. Now, he’s thinking about a monthly local bowl, a way to let The Bahamas shape the menu in a more deliberate rhythm.
One idea in development is a pineapple-glazed rib bowl. Another comes from how Bahamians eat grits with peas. Johnson also encourages his local team on the ground to help build the restaurant’s island vocabulary.
Food, for Johnson, is also a way to get people talking, which explains why Just Eats With Chef JJ has become such a natural extension of his work. Now in its sixth season, the show brings together cooking, music, culture and conversation, with guests this season including rapper Dave East, artist Honey Bxby, Time Chief Marketing Officer Sadé Muhammad and chef Courtnee Futch-Brinson.
We’re cooking, we’re eating and we’re having a good time.”
“A good guest on Just Eats is someone who loves food,” Johnson says. “We’re cooking, we’re eating and we’re having a good time.”
He remembers rapper Slim Thug coming on and telling an Anthony Bourdain story about showing him around Houston barbecue joints. Honey Bxby talked about trying to figure out what to eat while working in the studio. Other guests discussed parenting, promotions, first jobs or the private machinery of a public life.
That same curiosity follows Johnson back to Atlantis, where Fieldtrip feels less like an outpost and more like an evolving conversation. Harlem is still part of the story. So is Paradise Island. So, soon, is JFK airport in New York City, where Fieldtrip is headed next. “Oh man, I’m always trying to figure out how to dominate the world,” Johnson says. “We’re taking it steady and every opportunity one at a time.”
The plan now is bigger than restaurants alone. Johnson sees Fieldtrip moving increasingly into becoming a food company, with restaurants, television and products all working together. For a chef whose central ingredient is one of the world’s great connectors, that seems a natural continuation. “The world is in a whirlwind right now, and nobody knows what’s next,” he says, “and so I’m just out there keeping it positive.”
