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| Remains of lunch at the Sugar Reef Restaurant and Bar, Crescent Bay, Bequia |
It is 25
degrees outside my office right now, and a storm that is going to dump 10” of
wet snow on the farm is headed this way tonight. That’s okay, though, because
we are driving to DC later today so I can catch a train in the middle of the
blizzard and enjoy it in Brooklyn, which is known for being a tropical paradise
this time of year.
So yeah,
we’re back from Bequia.
But I am
determined to continue my now renamed “Unofficial and Bad Guide to Bequia” with
more of the “Where to Eat” section. In all honesty, I couldn’t write this the
last couple weeks we were there because it had gotten to the point where if one
more person served me, pretty much no matter what I ordered, a plate of dry
baked kingfish and rice, I was going to leap across the table and stab probably
her (most waitresses are women) with my little bundle of silverware tightly
wrapped in the world’s thinnest paper napkin (where do they find those?). Now that I am back and have had a couple of
“beef” dinners that were not in fact “goat” or “kingfish,” I have regained my
composure and can press on.
I have to
start with an apology. I do not, as the picture at the top of this article
demonstrates, have very many photos of Bequian fare. Problem is, I am often hungry
when I go on my fact-finding missions and forget to take a picture of the food before scarfing
it. Also, photographing one’s plate in restaurants is looked down upon by Nick
(and Tom Sietsema of the Washington Post, according to several pieces of his I
have read but now can’t find. I did try but (a) the searching was starting to
feel like research, to which I am morally opposed, and (b) the exercise was
disintegrating into me making a list of DC restaurants which I will never go to
because I am too old or too poor). When
I did remember to take a few shots before digging in, Nick would react with
exaggerated sighs and eye rolling as well as playing to the crowd (even if
there wasn’t one) with silent appeals: “What are you going to do? She was sane
when I married her.” His drama would
increase if I were going for an art shot, crouching down to get just the right
angle on my dry piece of kingfish.
Lunch and
dinner menus are usually similar in Bequia, with one exception. Roti, a meat
(fish, chicken, or “beef”) dry stew in a naan-like bread (from the “Indian”
part of the “West Indian” tradition) is served at lunch while the stew minus
the bread and poured over rice is the dinner version, usually called something
like “fish, chicken, or ‘beef’ (though they leave the ironic quotation marks
out) over rice.” Most restaurants also offer “fish, chicken, or beef
lunches/dinners” which are the same thing, perhaps a little drier, next to rice. Occasionally you will get
the big three offered as a curry, which is back to the stew with curry powder,
over rice. Unless it is a curry soup,
and then the standard mixture is watered down and no rice.
Bequians are good at soups, and I
very much enjoyed their calaloo soup, which is made with what they say is
“spinach” and what we know as “anything that looks like it could be spinach
when it is ground up.” In a separate
post soon to come on the Green Fence Farm blog, I will discuss recipes for
Calaloo soup and my search for spinach that could grow in year-round 85 degree
heat (spoiler alert: I found it and asked the farmer what it was. He said
spinach. I then asked how he grew it. He said from seeds. I asked what kind of
seeds. He said spinach seeds). The
seafood chowders and curries are excellent and fresh, and there is a speciality
called “goat water soup,” which I (thank God!) never found on offer.
The fish
one finds on menus (almost always identified just as “fish”) is usually kingfish, mahi-mahi, or barracuda,
which Nick warns you not to eat because, besides tasting bad, it will give you
some nerve disease and boils (actually, he didn’t say “boils.” I added that. I
assume it is true since a startling number of plants and food in Bequia can
give you boils. I honestly thought boils went the way of leprosy and leeches,
but good on Bequia for keeping the old ways alive. Look for a future post on
touring in which we visit the ocean pool built for bathing lepers. Not
kidding). Grouper is never offered, and
if you ask for it, they will explain it prefers the Bahamas, and they take that
kind of personally. Red fish, which is
always good, is sometimes an option.
You can get lobster, served broiled
or grilled, for dinner almost anywhere. The Caribbean lobster has no claws
(they do have legs, just not ones big enough to crack open and eat) but make up
for that with enormous tails, which is all of them that anyone consumes. The
meat is sweeter than Maine lobsters and a lot easier to get at since you don’t
have to waste time pretending you are eating all that suspect, lung stuff in
the body. The price of a hunk of lobster is about what it is in the U.S. and
exactly the same across the various restaurants because they don’t have
antitrust laws on the islands.
I saw several versions of shrimp,
but no one farms or catches or herds shrimp in that part of the word, so I avoided
it figuring it was either out of Florida or out of cans. Tuna, mostly on
nicoise salad, ran the gambit from fresh and just seared to cat food, so take
your chances or wander around pretending to find the restroom and see if anyone
else ordered it. You can, of course, ask if it is fresh, but the answer will
always be “yes,” because the islanders hate to disappoint or be negative (it is
your vacation, after all).
Conch is local and usually fresh,
or as fresh as a tarted-up slug can be. The consistency of conch is like squid,
but a little tougher and the taste is under-seasoned rubber band. Despite this,
or perhaps because of it, Bequians abandon their favored grill-it-
stew-it-or-bake-it-and-dump-it-over-rice cooking method and do some interesting
things with conch including conch fritters (spicy cornbread with little enough
conch that you don’t have to worry about its taste or texture) and something
call “conch ting” which is conch cooked as tender as it will ever get in loads
of garlic and butter and poured over rice. This is touted as a powerful
aphrodisiac at at least one restaurant we visited. Then again, a huge variety
of local foods and drinks are sold as such, which might explain the large number
of children on the island.
Next post: The Bequian Wait Staff
Tradition: Lightening-Fast Inefficiency
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