81 Vine St (Belltown), 770-0155. Lunch Mon-Fri 11 am-2 pm; dinner Tues-Sat 5-10 pm; bar menu available until 1 am Fri-Sat.

The urge to mix descriptions of food and music should be fought, I think. It creates the kind of situation where restaurants start describing their cuisine as "a calypso culinary medley, pulsating and exciting." "Pulsating" is not a word that should be applied to food, no matter how lively the music playing in the bar.

The restaurant in this case is Casuelita's Caribbean Cafe, which has just opened in the space formerly occupied by another Caribbean restaurant called Western Vine. It looks very much the same (tiled tables, terra cotta walls, bright paintings of tropical subjects), and on the night I dined there, it was as empty as Western Vine ever was, but the new owners are counting on the cocktail crowd--and they've got some glitzy cocktails to lure them in.

You can make a nice fat meal out of tapas: We had the sweet-sauced Shantytown Ribs ($8.50) and the eponymous casuelitas ($6.50), which are tamale-like cakes filled with black beans, avocado, and tomato. (I did not get around to a bunch of other dishes that sounded good: the Bahamian conch fritters, the plantain tostones, the Peruvian ceviche.) The flavors were not what I expected: very sweet, mild, heavy as all get-out. I kept wondering, shouldn't Caribbean food be spicy? Or am I stuck in some kind of hot-climate stereotype? The same thing happened when I went to Brazil a few months ago; I liked the empadas, the shrimp, the weird Amazonian stews, but I kept wondering where all the heat was.

Well, I am here to tell you that the heat is in the entrées: in, for example, the Montego Bay pepper prawns ($16), which are hot as hell, but also sweet in a sort of Thai style. But the jerk--the jerk is the standout: a jerk pork ($12) with a demi-glace sauce that's so smooth you can't believe how it bites, right at the back of the throat, and lingers there... yum. It's served with buttery mashed yams and surprisingly tart glazed plantains, really a wonderful constellation of flavors that keep this dish of heavy foods remarkably light.

Casuelita's is brand-new, and so it has some brand-new kinks: slightly spacy service, water that tastes like the faucet, and pale winter tomatoes scattered over everything. Pale winter tomatoes do not "pulsate." They don't do much of anything at all.