St Maarten/St Martin
19 February 2005 Newsletter

 

 

 

The winner of the California Restaurant contest is Jennie Smith. Escargot Restaurant is sponsoring the contest that runs from 18 February to 4 March 2005, giving $100 toward a dinner for two. Just click their name to go to their website, find the contest code and the link to our new signup form, fill it out, click send, and you are entered. Obviously everybody that is getting this email is already signed up for the newsletter, but you are not automatically signed up for the contest. You really do have to go to their website and click the email link to show you visited their site. Just tell me you are already on our mailing list, and I'll leave you signed up for the newsletter and just add your name to the contest list.

 

 

too busy, sorry

 

 

 

Dining: I got an email from WendyK on TTOL saying her new favorite restaurant in the Durreche style is La Pichounette, in Concordia, next to Pain du Soleil, amongst a row of restaurants. Very "Paris", as we are told by our French neighbor, Laurence. The chef/owner was formerly at Sol e Luna, and the menu is similar to Bistro Nu, with some very "French" dishes such as langue de boeuf, riz de veau, and tripes. It's a limited blackboard menu that's been different every time we've gone. Nice veggies and great roasted potatoes. Last night Tony & Laurence had cioppino, which contained mussels, scallops, salmon, octopus, and shrimp surrounding a scoop of rice. Bernhard had foie de veau with shallots, and I had a delicious magret de canard. With 2 bottles of wine, a bottle of water and 2 desserts of Spanish strawberries with ice cream, chantilly cream, and fresh raspberries, and 1 espresso, the bill came to 100 euros. They don't take credit cards. Only about 10 tables.

 

We had Valentine's Day brunch at the Horny Toad Guesthouse. I should make it clear that all these lunches and dinners at the Toad are private affairs for guests at the Toad and Betty's invited friends. If you stay there for a week you will probably experience one of these parties as Betty is always ready to have a good time at the beach. Mary's Boon, just down the street, does dinners on the beach for anyone by reservation only.

 

For Valentine's Dinner we went to Lal's Indian Cuisine for authentic Indian food. Not very romantic? It's got a lagoon view! Actually, we thought we'd avoid crowds, but it was pretty full and Lal warned us that it would take an hour to get food! Lal's is full of locals, so we spent the hour talking to Cathy from the Endless Summer beach attire shop and Judy, previously at Sapphire here and in the US, but now the new owner of Island Reps. Eventually, we had an onion kulcha, flat bread with onions, a chicken tikki, tender chicken in a red sauce, and lamb vindaloo - all good. Lal has some of the best rock and roll music and best beer on the island: Leffe and Stella Artois from Belgium. Our four beers food and rice came to $30. He even has a small parking lot where the Stop and Shop used to be. We use him or Café Juliana as our airport waiting lounge. Lal has a coupon for a free bucket of Heineken on his site.

 

We talked to Leroy (King Beau Beau) and Anne-Marie (his wife) at their new restaurant, Beau Beau's, at the Oyster Bay Beach Resort. The resort looks good and the restaurant has some fabulous views from the deck. They are just finishing up their new website and put up a coupon for a free drink with a meal.

 

 

We had our real Valentine's Dinner at home with an Angus Beef stew. The beef came from Grand Marche in Pburg. The wine was a fabulous 1999 Gevrey-Chambertin Les Cazetiers from Bruno Clair that we got at Vinissimo.

 

On Wednesday we went to Thai Garden for some very tasty sushi, sashimi, and Thai cuisine. There were four of us and we started with combination sushi/sashimi platter. There is a new sushi chef this year and the platter seemed better than ever. The fish was very fresh and the chef's rainbow roll with fish, seaweed, cucumber, and avocado was an explosion of flavors and textures. For our main courses we had very tender calamari and ginger, flavorful beef with mushrooms, and two shrimp dishes: green curry and musaman with lots of vegetables. We added two bottles of Sylvaner, a white grape similar to gewurztraminer, from Alsace. It stood up to the exotic flavors in our dinners. Prime sushi is not cheap, but our dinner for four came in at about $200. Vincent agreed to sponsor another SXM-Info contest and has been added to the list.

 

On Thursday we went to Montmartre Restaurant at Atlantis Casino. There were four of us and we started with the usual 1997 Beaune Champ Pimonts, which is a very good Burgundy with a bit of age. We split up two aps: foie gras terrine with toast points and the tuna and scallops on a brioche. Our friends got to try the Monbazillac sweet wine with the foie gras and were pleasantly surprised as the two luscious tastes complemented each other perfectly. Our dinners were the capon leg stuffed with foie gras, hare in a very good red wine sauce, rack of lamb, and duck confit. Most dinners came with a squash puree, a potato gratin, broccoli, roasted garlic, and carrots. The hare came with fettuccini, ratatouille, and a roasted tomato. I have raved about the capon leg so much that all our guests get it. Consequently, I look for other things on the menu. The rack of lamb was well worth finding. The hare, like the capon leg, had a bit of foie gras in the center. A capon is most of a rooster raised a bit longer, giving it a bit more flavor. The hare has darker, more flavorful meat than rabbit. Montmartre tends to have these more flavorful dishes on the menu and then adds foie gras for even more flavor. Our friends had creme brulee with raspberries and a pineapple surprise for desserts and they seemed quite happy. Coffees and Armagnac finished off a wonderful evening.

 

On Friday night we went to Hibiscus for a very interesting dinner. Thierry Delaunay fuses cuisines from around the world, and having picked up some of the dishes and concepts from his now-closed Charme Restaurant in Maho, he presents them on amazing serving dishes. Previously, he used fantastic china from Faience, France, his home town. These colorful plates are still there but now he has added the whimsy that existed at Charme to the repertoire. We had a bottle of 1999 Fixin from Fougeray de Beauclair (49 euros), a light burgundy that we felt would be quite good with a tuna ap, a pork dish, and a parmentier of lobster. First, of course, Thierry delivered an amuse bouche: a small bowl of chilled sweet potato and saffron soup. We had ordered a "marbre" of tuna tartare with an avocado cream topping (hint of wasabi?) with wakame seaweed in a cucumber shell, sun-dried tomato bits, and a sesame crusted bit of puff pastry. "Marbre" means marble and we had no idea what this really meant. It turns out that the whimsy from Le Charme exerted itself as the tuna was delivered on a "plate" of stone. Truth in advertising requires me to say it was polished granite, not marble, but chefs only have to know about food. The sushi platter, served only on weekends when fresh fish is arriving from France, is served on an even larger chunk of granite. Our dinners were a pork tenderloin with oyster mushrooms and a creamy emulsion of goat cheese, a crottin de Chavignol. The dish was quite tasty with the tenderest of pork, layered with  minced veg and mushrooms all flavored with a goat cheese sauce.  Steven Jenkins in his Cheese Primer translates crottin as horseball and he is correct. It is the shape of the goat cheese from Chavignol that is being referenced. Martha had the parmentier of lobster in sandalwood essence. Parmentier means garnished or made with potatoes, named after Frenchman Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (see tedious potato dissertation below). In this case, the potatoes were mashed sweet potatoes containing lobster bits and sandalwood essence. It was all held in a rough circle by snow peas. Both dishes arrived on strange plates. The website has photos, so that will save me 2000 words. Both dishes also were quite flavorful and were not overpowered by the Fixin. We ended with coffees, a ten year old rum, and a platter of cookies (no charge). Our bill for dinner was 70 euros, plus 49 euros for the expensive wine. There were quite good wines in the 30 to 40 euro range. Thierry uses a realistic exchange for the euro, but the prices are quite good. It is a very cute restaurant (not on the water) and for those interested in new taste combinations, this is one of the best places on the island.

 

Tedious Potato Dissertation: The potato did not exist in Europe until the Spanish brought it back from Peru around 1550. It traveled around the Spanish Caribbean and the Mediterranean, but not to England (and Ireland!). One story is that Raleigh, reprovisioning in the Caribbean, got some, brought them to Virginia, and by 1590 they had made it to England but were thought to have originated in Virginia. As potatoes are not mentioned in the Bible, many protestants wouldn't plant them or eat them. The Irish Catholics sprinkled them with holy water and planted them on Good Friday. Stories circulated saying that they were an aphrodisiac (Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor) or poisonous. They are part of the solanum or nightshade family, containing tomatoes and deadly nightshade. Certainly one should not eat any of these leaves and the admonition to avoid green spots on potatoes is based on the high arsenic contest in those spots. Count Rumford (of fireplace fame) was hired to determine how to feed prisoners cheaply in Bavaria and had to disguise the fact that he was putting potatoes into their gruel. Parmentier - remember parmentier? - This is a story about Parmentier -  was a French Army officer imprisoned in Hamburg during the Seven Years War, where he was fed potatoes. After his release, he convinced King Louis XVI and the court to try them. He then planted huge fields of potatoes near Paris surrounded by ditches and patrolled by guards. The fields were lightly guarded at night (on purpose) and the local peasants, thinking the produce must be quite valuable, snuck in, stole the seed, and planted it in their own gardens. The potato became more and more popular such that any dish in France that uses potatoes frequently has the word parmentier associated with it.

 

Tedious Wine Dissertation: We received an email asking how to learn about wine. Martha and I agree that the best way to become knowledgeable about wine is by drinking a lot. Not too much, as you may forget something, but a lot. Seriously, the best way is to find a wine store with a knowledgeable person and let them guide you. When I was 22 I walked into a store in Cambridge, MA (it was Savenor's, where Julia Child shopped, very close to my apartment) and told Joe that I knew very little about wine but wanted a mixed case in the $3 price range. A lot of wine has passed somewhere since then, so let's update the price point. I think that you could find drinkable wine at $10, decent stuff at $15, and quite good wine below $25.