SWEET MAURITIUS
Discover the joys of sugar slashed deserts
What do you do if stuck on a desert island? Starve. What do you do if stuck on a dessert island? Glut. Pick your dessert island right and you may yet look starved. Mauritius’s most hedonistic retreats have employed French pâtissiers who proffer sugar-slashed pâtisseries, viennoiseries and chocolat one may engorge without vexing about the widening waistline.
O&O LE SAINT GÉRAN
When Chef-Pâtissier Sylvain Chesnot forsook Monte-Carlo’s famous 2-Michelinstarred Jöel Robuchon restaurant to concoct chocolate as dark as sin and as smooth as Shakespearean poetry, Caroline de Monaco and Beatrice de Britain pursued him here. A thorough Frenchman, he deigns to dabble in anything but Valrhona, as do all French pâtissiers in Mauritius. Enjoy French savoirfaire and premium French ingredients, at Mauritian prices. Sylvain’s chocolate macarons, intensely dark, maddeningly fragrant, and delicately fragile, are giving sleepless nights to Paris’s legendary Laduré, hitherto the unchallenged Monarch of Macaron.
I too spent sleepless nights, longing for breakfast. Besides delicate cookies and pains au chocolat that flake a la Parisian Pierre Hermé’s, Sylvain’s team dedicated to compotes and confitures array extraordinary flavours like papaya-vanilla, pineapple-anis, passion-pepper, litchi, apricot, fig, kumquot…
At O&O’s cutting-edge restaurant, Prime, Mauritian Chef Vikas Coonjan unveils that marvel of a make-your-own Prime-misu: provided the material, you’re invited to customise your own tiramisu. Also discover erupt-at-touch dark chocolate crumble, grilled pineapple with coconut-vanilla sorbet and succulent Highland strawberries cloaked in mascarpone ice-cream on a flimsy meringue base. This decadent onslaught overwhelms the most resolute line of resistance... but, sugar-slashed, it won’t stretch the waistline.
ST REGIS
Just launched, glamorously. Concept: feel you’re at a friend’s manoir. Hence, instead of hotel-esque brochures, rooms contain glossy mags. (although my friends’ homes wouldn’t).
Besides, my friends can’t boast a Chef Jerome Castellani extracted from Alain Ducasse’s fabled 3-Michelin-starred Le Louis XV in Monte-Carlo, who dispatches frivolous bedtime mignardises. If Jerome offers airy passion-fruit chibouste at the atmospheric Pan-Asian Floating Market; then over Inspiration, a dining option that makes your culinary caprice chef ’s command, he conceives indigenous citrus-litchi jelly with pineapple sorbet. Follow truffles enclosing molten salted caramel, and coffee, the finest amaretti this side of Milan.
Both the French and the British colonised Mauritius. British colonialism revives in the Conservatory’s charming afternoon teas. Except for homemade strawberry jam that spreads like a scarlet silk scarf across scones, Jerome’s three-tiered-platter offerings are mercifully French. Pistachio financiers flaunt the finesse only the French manage and the teas too are an exclusive French brand.
While I’m deriding the British and celebrating the French, the flamboyant French aristocrat of a GM Bernard de Villede waltzes in, utters witticisms, and trots out with his wife, who happens to be British. No, I’m not expected to eat my words for maligning the Brits, so I help myself to yet another pretty profiterole like a satin pouch concealing swirls of sumptuous chocolate cream.
As the sun sets, the poised orange with a dusky cloud strewn across, evokes Chef Jerome’s orange macaron exuding a chocolate centre. While the desserts in Mauritius might not widen the waistline, they do stretch the imagination.
LE ROYAL PALM
Young Chef-Pâtissier Valentin, who trained at Paris’s glitziest addresses (including Le Plaza Athené and Le Crillon), is a sweetheart, but his desserts are tormentingly enticing and diabolically exquisite. Try tromp l’oeil au chocolat, unless attacking the svelte petits pots or the creme caramels or chocolate moussed into velvet tart (it was not a tart, it was quite simply chocolate whipped into a moussy velvet) with orange sorbet…
LE PRINCE MAURICE
Deputy GM Ashok declares, “Luxury is where necessity stops.” Necessity it is to gorge on those terrific tropical sorbets offered complimentary every afternoon. Gourmet L’Archipel’s coconut cream dessert lures society’s creme de la creme (Prince Albert, Amitabh Bachchan). Michael Douglas called Le Prince Maurice a “jewel.” And Catherine Zeta-Jones treasured (to continue the ‘jewel’ metaphor?) those lissom chocolate ganaches.
THE RESIDENCE
Rooms stock slender chocolate-laced orange sticks, fruit pâté and friable French biscuits (get homemade pineapple-cinnamon jam to go with it). Mauritian pâtissiers’ Balade au Chocolat (a chocolate medley) ravishes (I used that word to emphasise the eminently romantic ambience and the sensuality of the desserts) at the romantic Dining Room.
SO SOFITEL
In a stunner floating restaurant, Kenzo’s first hotel venture, splash into unctuous chocolate fondant. Don’t drown before reaching troublingly svelte
truffles.
MARADIVA
At their Indian restaurant Cillantro, Chef Vikram gets adventurous, concocting raspberry sorbet-adorned yoghurt panecotta, with coconut cigars. After which I abort my gourmand excursions, despite the great Mauritian hospitality, lest they end in waistline expansion.