Inn Dining on St. Martin

As I mentioned earlier, St. Martin is a surprising culinary adventureland, what with all the Frenchiness abounding on this tropical island. And so the series continues:

We made the fortunate choice of spending our nights in one of the guest suites at Sol é Luna, a mountain hideaway primarily known as one of the best restaurants on the island. Actually, ‘known’ may be a strong word; our taxi driver spent an extra half hour wandering on mountain roads before finally finding it... 

The restaurant, run by chef/owner (...bellhop/receptionist/concierge/wifi repairman) Christian Moreau, opens onto the dusty Rue du Mont Vernon. Views of the surrounding hillsides and Étang Chevrise (which sounds nicer in French than Goat Pond) greet the diners seated on the wraparound patio. The suites are perched behind the restaurant at the top of a winding staircase climbing the hill, and each one has wide vistas that stretch eastward past Orient Beach. As an added bonus of this arrangement, unmistakably Provençal aromas wafted from the kitchen through our open windows (wooden shutters, no glass) every evening. 

View from the top

Needless to say, upon our arrival, we proved helpless to resist this odoriferous siren song, so following a dip in the pool and a change of attire, we moseyed in the direction of the dining room downstairs. After a full day on an airplane, a long connection in Miami, an airport schlep and a pothole-ridden hot minivan taxi ride across the island, we would have been masochists to decline our waiter’s calm offer of a champagne cocktail. They arrived in enormous cartoon-proportioned martini glasses, festooned with fresh mint - huge, unwieldy, and a little silly-looking, but refreshing like an icy glitter shower. The heat melted away and we were officially on our honeymoon.

The restaurant entrance

The meal was expectedly spectacular– perfectly executed, delicate and balanced. But I won’t go into a line item menu review here; I’ll just expound on one dish - the one that finally unseated The Egg. 

What I’m referring to, of course, is the mythical Arpège egg, aka chaudfroid d'oeuf au sirop d'erable. It's original creator was the famed French chef Alain Passard, who put a coddled egg in its shell with sherry vinegar, whipped cream, and maple syrup, creating a psychotropically tasty amuse-bouche at L'Arpège in Paris.  It’s the kind of thing that sends food bloggers into frothful fits. After tasting it at Manresa in Los Gatos a couple of years ago, I was duly impressed, and bowed to its prowess.

But back to Sol é Luna, where a new king dethroned The Egg. In keeping with the reverence with which The Egg is remembered at our house, it seems only appropriate to bestow similar capitalization to Sol é Luna’s contribution as The Scallop: It’s basic – a thin carpaccio of fresh cold scallop, served over a cold cream sauce infused with a barely-perceptible citrus hint from lemon leaves, drizzled with olive oil and augmented only with cracked black pepper. I like to avoid ‘best ever’ hyperbole, but this was phenomenal. Conversation-stoppingly, jaw-on-the-tiles, mind-alteringly good. Our waiter explained, in reply to our inquisitive babbling, that the dish depends on top-quality fresh scallops, never frozen ones, lest they carelessly leak their delicious moisture away upon thawing. Of course, to enjoy such a thing in the Caribbean meant complicity in jet transportation and a sinful carbon footprint, but in the throes of gustatory bliss, I couldn’t care.

A word of warning though – this was one of the most expensive meals I’ve ever had while wearing sandals. In fact, even sans footwear qualifier, it was steep. Those champagne cocktails were 17 Euros each, and the scallop…ahh, well. Perhaps it's time for more quiet reverence for The Scallop. Prenez garde!

Not bad for the house white

Next up, the island’s budget-friendly gems – bush rum, lolos, street food and peculiar beer...

A Literal Piece of France in the Caribbean

Lazy restaurant critics and travel writers are fond of a tired old chestnut, still regularly used in mediocre in-flight magazines, whereby they’ll have you believe that a meal at the newest Italian restaurant in Chicago is ‘like a vacation to Italy’ or that a favorite Irish pub in Atlanta is ‘like stepping into Dublin’. This threadbare cliché, endemic of a peculiarly American desire for heritage (and the willingness to borrow it from other countries when we can’t find our own) isn’t just bad writing. It’s invariably dead wrong.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t countless cozy Italian trattoria, homelike Irish pubs, and serene sushi restaurants in nearly every major metropolitan area that would outshine many of their counterparts in Italy, Ireland and Japan. Popularity represents demand, and restaurateurs naturally respond with their best efforts. Hundreds of years of trade and immigration have slowly eroded the barriers that once sequestered food traditions into geographically-constrained boxes, and opened the world to some great ideas, e.g., the introduction of coffee to Europe in the 17^th century, the arrival of pizza in the American Midwest in the 1950s, and the global debut of Taiwanese bubble tea in the 1990s.

As a result of all this sharing, people today have access to a wider variety of culinary options than at any other point in human history. Tacos no longer need subtitling as ‘crispy Mexican sandwiches’, as they did in the 1950s. Sushi can be bought in Kansas City supermarkets, and the Big Mac is available in so many countries that it’s been the basis of an exchange theory index in The Economist for nearly 25 years.

But despite all of this cosmopolitan ubiquity and high quality, our glut of choice is often at the expense of authenticity. Foods’ associated cultural traditions have a tendency to get lost in translation, and very often, the transcribed version of an indigenous dining experience ends up like a deformed cargo cult simulacrum of the original. This is the reason that Starbucks is nothing like an Italian coffeehouse, La Madeleine is completely distinct from a Parisian neighborhood bakery, and why the experience of eating a Krispy Kreme doughnut in Harrod’s is not the same as waiting in a crowded line on a Saturday morning in Winston-Salem. 

This was all on my mind as our plane began its descent en route to St. Martin, in the western Caribbean. The tourist board had distributed sightseeing guide magazines to us at the airport in Miami, and as I flipped through it, I kept seeing that same old phrase. A “piece of France under the Caribbean sun”, proclaimed one article. “A piece of France in paradise”, boasted another. I yawned, unimpressed by the dull prose, and leaned over to peek through the gauzy clouds for a glimpse of the island. After the high energy of our wedding weekend, the prospect of lazy days speaking French on a beach seemed idyllic, hackneyed tourist blurbs or not.

After several days of exploration, driving and strolling through the towns on the island, visits to restaurants, cafés, bakeries, supermarkets, and roadside stands, I must sheepishly admit that, in the context of this little island, I misjudged the writers that wielded this phrase. I mistakenly took their use of ‘piece of France’ to be a fatigued metaphor, attempting to describe the delightful convergence of Caribbean climate with centuries of French colonial influence. In reality, it was nothing of the sort – it’s a simple statement of fact.

St. Martin is, speaking in the most legally specific and technical terms, actually part of France. It’s not a former French colony, like Vietnam née Indochina, or imbued with the cultural mark of French settlement like Québec or Louisiana. It is an overseas collectivity of the Republic of France, and every iota of infrastructure is as French as a beret full of cassoulet. 

The roadsigns, traffic patterns, and license plates, the restaurants, tiny dogs, bottles of Volvic and Gallic attitudes are precisely as they are in France. The postmen drive the same little yellow Renault panel vans emblazoned with the blue La Poste logo, prices are all posted in Euros, and France Telecom makes the phones ring with the same long tone as they do in Belle France.

At only 37 square miles (smaller than the city of San Francisco), the island of St. Martin has been shared by two countries since 1648. The scruffy Dutch side caters mostly to Americans who spend a few hours drinking Coors Light in the port city of Philipsburg before moving on to the next island, never setting foot on the little piece of France. 

It’s no surprise that Marigot, the main town on the French side, is considered by many to be the culinary capital of the Caribbean, following the pattern set by New Orleans, Montreal, and Saigon of seasoning their reign of colonial oppression with exceptional culinary standards. It’s evident throughout the island.

I’ll be sharing more specific tales of Caribbean comestibles in later posts, but in the meantime, I’ll leave you to peruse the following snapshots from a literal piece of France in the warm Caribbean sea:

 Cheerful open-air boulangerie in Marigot

Tropical patisserie

A sensible pre-beach breakfast

Another leisurely daybreaker

 Rhums agricoles in the supermarket, mostly from Martinique

 

The butter aisle

The ham aisle

Prepacked lardons

Spiny lobsters, left, and other fish, right, at the Marigot fish market

Coconut crème caramel