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Trinidad "Sweet Hand" Cuisine
By : Chelle Koster Walton
Photos J. Kevin Foltz
"You know, there are upscale restaurants right up the street," an American ex-pat told us as we stood in line at Shiann's roti restaurant in Port of Spain. We assured him we were looking for the genuine Trinidadian lunch experience and were there by choice.
Roti could be considered the national dish of Trinidad, although Chef Raymond Joseph says that because of the island's mishmash of cultures, it's hard to pinpoint less than five dishes. Roti comes from the nation's predominant population of East Indians, but is purely Trinidadian by invention. It is a type of thin, malleable, pita-like flatbread flecked with ground chickpeas. At a roti restaurant, the hungry file through a buffet line of fragrant curried dishes such as beef, chicken, goat, duck and chickpeas with potatoes. Your first choice is whether or not you'd like your meal wrapped or unwrapped, your second is the main filling(s), then hot sauce followed by side dishes.
"Wrapped" gets you a fat burrito-like bundle you can fire up with local Scotch bonnet sauce that comes in hot or blazing. "Unwrapped" means you get the roti on the side, which works best if you've selected bone-in chicken or goat. Sides range from bora (cut-up, foot-long green beans) to sweetened stewed tomatoes or pumpkin. Locals eat all this, even the unwrapped version, without the aid of flatware, often without napkins. There's a trick to the "roti scoop" that isn't as easy as it looks.
The other quintessential Trini dishes, according to Chef Joseph, include a stew of greens called callaloo, pelau (pigeon peas, rice and meat), shark and bake (more on that later) and curry crab and dumpling. Chef Joseph, along with Chef Debra Sardinha-Metivier, Bartender Raymond Edward and two other chefs, comprised the winning team at the 2006 Taste of the Caribbean competition in Miami. Like Trinidad's many fine chefs, their goal is to take what's truly indigenous and graduate it to gourmet.
"We try to elevate it but don't want to lose that 'sweet hand' taste, as we say," says energetic Chef Sardinha-Metivier, the first female executive chef for Hilton in the Caribbean and Americas and today a renowned caterer, TV personality and food consultant. "So when someone tastes it, it's not too refined."
My goal was to start at the roots and graduate with the cuisine, so after roti I was off to Caracas Bay, where the dish "shark and bake" arguably got its start in a beach shack that has grown to a handful of purveyors. At a traditional shark and bake, it's all about condiments. You get a paper basket containing a flatbread johnnycake (the "bake" in the equation) sliced open to accommodate chunks of deep-fried shark meat (or kingfish, mahi or shrimp). You dress it with your choice of lettuce, pickled mango, tomatoes and a number of sauces from Thousand Island or garlic to tamarind, oyster, hot pepper or chadon beni, a local herb that's cilantro-like in taste. Wash it down with Carib beer, and you're ready to hit the beach.
At Femmes du Chalet, shark and bake is served for breakfast. Here, rows of local cooks fix lunch too, mostly for the local business population in Port of Spain. Saltfish and bake is also a popular choice.
Another form of Trini fast food, "doubles" are smaller versions of roti. I sampled one at the Chaguana Market on its busiest day, Saturday, when the little town's street is jammed with people and the marketplace overflowing with a bounty of produce, fish, crab, goat and other meats. We snacked on snow cones bolstered with sweetened condensed milk and slices of salted and spiced green mangos. I love the way the Trinis graze. At a roadside stand oversized jars filled with exotic contents were more luring than a candy shop. Samples of pickled hot mango slices, preserved sweet pimento peppers, Surinam cherries and black mangos cost under a quarter, and the green-on-green mountainside scenery is complimentary.
Fully versed on street food, road food, beach food and folk food, I took the Trini food elevator up. At Cascadia Hotel, I sampled an approximation of the culinary competition's winning non-alcoholic beverage prepared by Raymond Edward. His colleague, Chef Joseph, explained how the competition ran: Iron Chef-style, where each team received a "mystery basket" of ingredients they were required to use. Edward, who believes cocktails are "liquid food," proved his theory by flavoring his Soca (named for the local strain of calypso) with the ubiquitous pimento pepper, a savory but mild local variety. It lent new dimension to the fruity drink rimmed with spices. Another of his winning concoctions, the Abracadabra, blends together vodka, avocados and cream. As for the chefs, one of their award-stealers was curried lamb potpie, putting to use Trinidad's love of curry spices.
That evening at Mélange Restaurant, one of a lineup of fine eateries along Ariapita Avenue in Port of Spain, I sampled the curried crab that, along with doughy dumplings, makes up sister-island Tobago's signature dish. Mélange earns its name by swirling classic French into Trinidad's cultural stew. A typical example on the changing menu at this cozy, home-like restaurant would be pepper-crusted pork tenderloin with cassava and wild rice cakes, or stuffed chicken breast with a coconut crust and port wine sauce. A snifter of Trinidad-brewed Angostura 1824 aged rum caps the experience.
To taste the British in Trinidad's heritage, I repaired one afternoon to Pax Guest House at the Mount St. Benedict monastery, where the good monks make their own bread, honey and yogurt and have traditionally welcomed pilgrims and other visitors to rest and eat. Gracious proprietor Gerald Ramsawak has resurrected an old tradition of afternoon tea and with it serves internationally themed goodies from the recipes of local ambassadors' wives. Brown bread, Pax honey, curried egg sandwich, Dutch chocolate cake, guava jelly and sesame and cheese scones add global allure to the peaceful, hilltop setting where birders and professors gather.
But the grandest food orgy of all was the two-night Taste of Trinidad & Tobago in Port of Spain, where all the best chefs (16 total) gathered to prepare tastes of their specialties, while others performed demonstrations, and local costumed dancers, steel-drum bands, and school groups entertained. I devoured tandoori drumsticks, nutmeg horseradish creamed potatoes, guava glazed grilled kingfish, Creole coconut shrimp, and more, all prepared with multicultural influence and, as Chef Sardinha-Metivier called it, the "sweet hand."
Bold and BRIGHT at Battimamzelle
Chef Khalid Mohammed from Battimamzelle restaurant served Guava Glazed BBQ King Fish at the Taste of Trinidad &Tobago, and it scored on my palate as one of the best gourmet samplers I tasted that night—a local fish served with untraditionally prepared traditional sides: creamed callaloo, coconut oildown and roasted garlic whipped yam.
The highly acclaimed Battimamzelle resides within a 16-room boutique hotel in Port of Spain named Coblentz Inn. Serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, Battimamzelle is most famous for its elegant prix fixe luncheons and dinner in an atrium waterfall garden beneath vaulted glass ceilings.
Chef Mohammed, an artist at the stove, prepares locally inspired masterpieces for his constantly changing dinner menu such as lamb carpaccio appetizer with tabouleh salad, Rabbit Three Ways (stewed legs, roasted loin and seared sausage), pepper jelly glazed chicken, whole roasted red snapper with crispy pepper squid, and warm carrot bundt cake with rum and raisin ice cream.
American and American Eagle serve Trinidad from Miami International Airport and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Book your trip today! Visit www.aa.com, call American/American Eagle reservations at 1-800-433-7300, or call your travel agent for more information.
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