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Fresh local foods & haute cuisine
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Fresh local foods & haute cuisine
Top chefs rely on Bahamian producers
Few places in the world can offer the same concentration of glamorous haute cuisine choices that is available in the top hotels and restaurants of Nassau, Cable Beach and Paradise Island.
Among them are such delights as:
• a special foie gras with sapodilla at Café Martinique in Atlantis’s Marina Village on Paradise Island;
• salmone all’arancio e basilico at Sheraton Nassau Beach Resort’s Amici, a Trattoria restaurant on Cable Beach;
• blackened conch with sweet pigeon peas relish at the Wyndham Nassau Resort’s Black Angus restaurant; and
• delicious claypot chicken flavoured with local thyme and rosemary at Ristorante Luciano’s of Chicago on Bay St.
The most demanding gourmands will find lots to rave about at these and scores of other fine dining places scattered throughout the island.
You’ll find them at the British Colonial Hilton in downtown Nassau, where the main dining room, Aqua, opened in December 2009. Guests enjoy a variety of delicious and freshly made international and Caribbean cuisine for breakfast, lunch and dinner, either à la carte or buffet-style, in sophisticated surroundings.
Two all-inclusive hotels on the Cable Beach strip–Sandal’s Royal Bahamian and SuperClubs Breezes Bahamas–also offer fine dining venues to their guests and to singles and couples (and families with children older than 14 in the case of SuperClubs) who purchase day or evening all-inclusive passes.
These choices include the Garden of Eden indoor-outdoor restaurant and Martino’s Italian pasta bar at SuperClubs Breezes and the elegant Baccarat and The Crystal Room at Sandals. Other fine eateries at these hotels are listed in the Wine & Dine Section.
A sense of place
Perhaps it’s not surprising that so many great restaurants are massed here, given that The Bahamas is one of the most desirable holiday destinations in the world.
What may come as a surprise is the degree to which talented chefs at all the top hotels and restaurants rely on unique local produce to give their dishes a dash of Bahamian style.
Good cooking has a sense of place, says Canadian-born chef Frederic Demers. “When you eat a meal it should tell you something about where it came from.”
Demers runs Café Martinique and Dune, two of the most luxurious restaurants on Paradise Island. His clients pay top dollar to get what they want, from wherever in the world it happens to come. But when Chef Demers wants to add something special to his menu, his thoughts don’t stray to Kobe beef from Japan or durian fruit from Indonesia. Instead he loads his children into the car and drives them to an inhospitable-looking patch of rocky ground in the heart of New Providence.
“They get to play, and I get to see what’s new.”
At first glance Holey Farm is the sort of place that would excite kids much more than foodies. No tractors have ever worked its 30 acres, because none could survive the treacherous, uneven landscape, with its jagged limestone outcrops and the mass of holes, up to 40 ft deep, that give it its name.
Patches of vegetation straggle through the rocks, like weeds, and only a closer look reveals them to be tiny islands of arugula, kale, spinach, garlic chives, cilantro or some other equally delicious leaf.
Managed wilderness
Farming has traditionally been a hazardous occupation in The Bahamas–an archipelago of limestone islands subject to punishing summer heat, whose occasional pockets of rich soil are quickly exhausted by commercial-scale cultivation.
Holey Farm succeeds by operating more like a managed wilderness than a conventional place of agriculture. Plants like the garlic chive are not cropped on first planting, but allowed to seed and become naturalized. So valuable crops end up growing just like weeds, in the natural shade provided by avocado, banana, coconut or papaya trees, the branches of which are themselves often twined with passion fruit vines. Human activity is kept to a minimum. The motto here is to let nature do the work and regulate itself.
For a chef like Demers the result is a kind of wonderland: “I go every three weeks just to look around.” There are berries, he says, that he hasn’t served, because he hasn’t even identified them yet: “But they taste so good.”
At Café Martinique and Dune, restaurants owned by New York-based master chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Demers loves fitting this fine Bahamian produce into the predominantly French-with-Asian-influences menu. “We’ve served foie gras with sapodilla, which works perfectly because of its brown-sugar taste and grainy texture. But it’s out of season, so we do it now with mango. We make a soufflé with soursop and a coconut crème brûlée with passion fruit and guava sauces. I’ll use anything local that I can–it’s better, fresher and cheaper.”
Local produce doesn’t have to equate to local flavours. At Sheraton Nassau Beach Resort’s Amici, A Trattoria, executive chef Devin Johnson swears by Holey Farm’s basil, which he says “infuses a large part of the menu with Italian flavour,” including the fettucine all’ aragosta (with spiny lobster tails and diced tomatoes in a basil cream sauce) and the salmone all’arancio e basilico (seared salmon fillet in a basil orange glaze). Basil also features heavily on the menu at Ristorante Luciano’s of Chicago. There, however, the gourmet herbs come from Goodfellow Farms at the western end of the island, where Canadian tycoon E P Taylor used to grow the hay for his racehorses.
Ian and Karin Goodfellow came to Nassau six years ago, after running another farm for 12 years on nearby Eleuthera. “We concentrate on things that grow all year round and don’t transport well,” says Karin. “Some herbs like cilantro, parsley and dill don’t like the heat, and we only grow the edible flowers, like nasturtiums, from November to April. But basil, mint, lemongrass, spinach, arugula, Asian greens we can grow all year. We don’t want to overlap other farmers–we leave others to provide the staples like tomatoes and peppers.”
Goodfellow’s is a more tightly regimented operation than Holey Farm, with crops stretching off in well-organized rows. Although only five acres are under cultivation, Goodfellow ships out 50-60 lbs of greens a day to restaurants and sells about half that much again through its own store. The greens also provide the basis of lunches that are sold at the farm–and last year Goodfellowserved 42,000 of them.
Everything gets picked at 7am,” says Karin, “and washed in the morning. It’s shipped out to restaurants by 12:30, to be on the plate for dinner.”
The freshness of locally grown sage lends its unmistakable aroma to veal saltimbocca, one of Chef Lorenz Martinez’s favourite dishes at Luciano’s. But Martinez says the clay pot chicken, with its bouquet of thyme and rosemary and its homegrown peppers and tomatoes, is a more quintessentially “Bahamian dish.” Goodfellow’s other clients include some of the most popular and discriminating restaurants on the island, like Mesa Grill at Atlantis, Simmer Down at Marley Resort & Spa on Cable Beach and the Black Angus Grill steakhouse at Wyndham Nassau Resort.
Chef Tiffany Barton at Black Angus unhesitatingly nominates her “most Bahamian” dish as the blackened conch with sweet pigeon peas relish: “The blackening comes from a seasoning of native herbs, which is a little bit secret, lots of pepper and a little paprika.” The conch–a highly prized local sea mollusc–comes from Leslie Rolle, a Bahamian fisherman.
Like all the chefs here, Barton has closely guarded relationships with local fishermen, often built up over years, to ensure that the seafood she serves is just as fresh as the newly picked herbs and vegetables.
Like Barton, chef Devon McPhee at Simmer Down names a seafood dish as the item on his menu that makes good use of local ingredients. The lobster duo is a lobster tail cut down the middle, one half broiled and the other breaded and fried. But for McPhee, too, a great part of the dish’s “Bahamianness” comes from the flavours that accompany the sweet, pungent lobster meat. “There’s a Bahamian ‘rundown’ with spinach, corn, carrots, cabbage and coconut milk,” he says. “And if that’s not enough there’s a mango chutney underneath.”
In other words, these and other dishes are a guided tour of the surprising variety and richness that can be teased from the hard soil of these remarkable islands.
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