Barbados craving to be food heaven
Even the island’s government jumping on breadfruit wagon, pushing the ‘culinary capital’
BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOS— Growing up in Barbados, Damian Leach and his friends would build a big fire on the beach, crack open a couple of knobby green orbs of breadfruit the size of bowling balls, stuff them with corned beef from a can and wrap them in foil.
“We’d just drop them in the fire and get drunk,” laughs the 32-year-old executive chef at Cocktail Kitchen in St. Lawrence Gap, south of Bridgetown. After more than a few glasses of rum, the national drink, they’d dig them out and devour the sweet flesh with its salty meat accompaniment.
Those hazy breadfruit days are a food memory Leach is chasing on the plate at Cocktail Kitchen, a bright, multi-patioed restaurant he opened in June 2016.
After eating breadfruit the traditional way — steamed, fried or pickled — Leach’s smoked breadfruit croquettes are a revelation, with crispy breaded crust giving way to a smooth mash of wood-and-charcoal scented flesh, which in turn reveals a centre of goat cheese from Hatchman’s Premium Cheeses in St. Michael parish, where Leach is also co-owner of a casual café called the Mill.
They are served with a mediumrare tenderloin of Bajan marinated New Zealand lamb, plus a side of local black belly lamb, which he marinates, smokes and braises until the meat is falling apart, and serves with roasted beets and a pumpkin purée.
“Local lamb has a different flavour. It’s a little stronger,” Leach says, adding that it’s also very lean. “It’s something you can’t get a tenderloin off.”
A country’s cuisine carries the history of the land and its inhabitants within its DNA.
Cassava, food of the island’s original inhabitants (Indigenous people who travelled to the Caribbean from Venezuela), is still popular.
Atlantic Canadian salt cod, purchased by plantation owners in the 1600s as cheap protein for slaves, is such a staple it is simply called salt fish. It is found shredded in the island’s beloved deep-fried fish cakes and pickled in bul jol. The offcuts of pork became the famed Saturday lunch known as pudding and souse (a pickled jumble of everything from pig ears, snout and feet served with steamed sweet potato pudding), and you can find cow heel soup and chicken steppers (feet) in small, family restaurants. Grilled fish, flying or otherwise, make excellent sandwiches called cutters.
Leach leans very much on those food traditions, but in his hands, pudding and souse becomes “sous vide pork with pan-fried sweet potato pudding, pickled cucumber and scotch bonnet.”
The Barbados-born chef, like several others on the front lines of modern Barbadian cuisine, brings home training and food experiences learned abroad. The first time he left the island was to attend Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Arts Institute in Ottawa, where he also worked for a year at the Courtyard with Marc Lepine, a young, hotshot chef who has won the Canadian Culinary Championships twice and now helms the muchlauded Atelier restaurant.
“We are taking local food and elevating it,” Leach says after a Thursday dinner service. “There are not many people doing it now.”
The Barbados food scene has been focused on proving tourists could get the same food on the island that they could get at home, says chef Michael Hinds, who runs a catering company and the East Point Grill, a casual weekend barbecue spot on the east side of the island.
Chef Willis Griffiths, who trained at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan, says the modern food movement has been slow to take root on the island because chefs don’t cook outside their comfort zone.
“That’s our culture, we’re laid-back people. Because I experienced the hustle and bustle of New York, I want to keep it exciting.”
Those who are pushing the parchment paper envelope can be found manning tables at the annual Food and Rum Festival, held every November at different venues around Barbados, from polo clubs to the Concorde jet hangar near the airport. There are always some hotshot international chefs there. This year Michelin-starred U.S. restaurateur Jean- Georges Vongerichten and British sensation Tom Aikens cooked up some plate stealers. But locals swarmed the group events where the best and the brightest of Barbados food scene manned booths serving small plates, including Leach, Griffiths and Hinds.
All this talent and innovation has not been lost on the Barbados Tourism Product Authority, which is jumping on the breadfruit wagon with a new, self-guided, culinary trail brochure called Authentic Eats, which will be familiar to Canadians who have travelled a butter tart trail in Ontario, the Nanaimo Bar trail on Vancouver Island or the cider route in Quebec.
“We call ourselves the culinary capital of the Caribbean, but we are aware of the diversity of food choice,” product authority CEO Kerry Hall says, noting the government has declared 2018 the year of culinary expe- riences. “We have world-class restaurants, but we also have street food and everything in between.”
At Braddie’s Bar, one of the few traditional rum shops remaining in St. Lawrence gap near Dover, co-owners and business partners Santia Bradshaw and Jerry Baker are holding tight to Barbados history.
Although everyone has their favourite fish cake, I fell in deep-fried love at Braddie’s. It could be that I was entranced by the rum shop, where tourists and locals while away the time sipping spirits and playing pool. And it most definitely could have been the Creeper, a rum cocktail so named “because that’s how you feel a couple of hours after it creeps up on you,” says Bradshaw.
The bar first came into the family after her father, former Labour party MP Delisle Bradshaw — Braddie is his nickname — bought it when he retired. While he tended bar and talked politics out front, her mom was either in the back turning out world-class chicken wings and pork chops or singing karaoke, which she stills does when the senior Bradshaws drop in for a visit.
Like her father, Santia is a Labour party MP and a member of the official opposition, responsible for shadowing the business portfolio. Tourism is the linchpin of the indebted island’s economy, so much so that, if they have a bad tourism season, “it could be concerning for the island.”
She is the kind of person who, when you ask what’s in the fish cakes, takes you to the back of the shop where Baker is stirring a bowl of orangehued batter.
“This is what the bar was like when my parents ran it,” Bradshaw says. “It was an extension of their home.”
She is passionate about keeping the rum shop alive because she sees the way tourism has changed in the past 10 years and knows visitors are looking for authentic experiences.
“We want to expose people to Barbadian culture, like taking you into the kitchen. It’s the experience you get in places like this that will make you come back.”
So when Baker picks up the bowl of fish cake batter and shows me exactly what goes in it — the chopped garlic, green pepper, marjoram, thyme and a little bit of grated cheddar cheese — I am taking detailed notes, because I have to have them again.
And when it is time to leave the island, after sampling many fish cakes and finding them wanting, Baker heads to the rum shop to cook up 20 for me. I get them all the way to Toronto, where, 24 hours later, I have a little piece of Barbados for lunch. Kim Honey was hosted by Barbados Tourism Marketing, which did not review or approve this story.