WHEN Carl Suares walked out of a driving rainstorm into Nick & Joe's Pizza & Heros in downtown Brooklyn last week, his eyes passed right over the New York-style slices, the Sicilian pies, the stromboli, the calzones and the meatball heroes.

"I'll have," he said, "a Jamaican patty with cheese."

Jamaican patties? In a pizza joint?

The patties, spicy meat turnovers with flaky orange crusts so popular in Kingston, are now a regular feature in many pizzerias in the city. "We call them 'beef patty parmigiana,' " said Joe Carlone, the Joe in Nick & Joe's, which sells about 100 beef patties made by Tower Isle's, an East New York company, each week. Most customers like them smothered in mozzarella cheese ($2 each). "Some people like them with pepperoni" ($2.25 each), Mr. Carlone said.

The idea of selling its Jamaican beef patties in pizzerias was one of the innovations that turned Tower Isle's from a small family bakery in Crown Heights into one of the largest patty-makers in the world. The company now bakes 100,000 patties a day in its factory on Atlantic Avenue.

"It's not just Italians who eat pizza, Chinese people who eat egg rolls or Greeks who eat gyros," said Steve Levi, Tower Isle's vice president of sales and marketing. "We knew a man, a jobber, who sold tomatoes and cheese to pizza places around the city. He would take our patties to pizzerias and say: 'This stuff is good, man. You want to buy it? You can open it up and put mozzarella inside. Take a box, and if it doesn't sell, I'll take it back.' Invariably, they'd call and ask for another box. It caught on."