St Maarten/St Martin 24 January 2010 Newsletter Other newsletters Contests | Restaurants | Bargains and Happenings ISLAND NEWS

Weather: Sunday last crept in on sodden pachyderm feet. It rained off and on, sometimes quite hard, all day long. Looking skyward was much like staring at the vast gray underbelly of an elephant. Monday started out a bit gray, but cleared up, and I have reports of a rather nice day at Orient. In fact, it seemed so warm that several people took off their entire bathing costumes. This cruiseship came by on Tuesday morning about 8AM when the temperature was a pleasant 75F and although there were plenty of clouds in the sky, they were not dripping. It turned out to be a beautiful day with lots of sun and temperatures in the low 80's, culminating with this sunset and a green flash. Wednesday was nice all day but we got a bit of a sprinkle as we walked the streets of Grand Case at dinner time.

Thursday was cloudy, featuring some bright sun at times and downpours at other times. The humidity made it seem warmer that the 77F reported on the thermometer. Friday, Saturday, and now Sunday morning were the reasons this is a tropical paradise. The box shows the current local conditions and here's the forecast from Weather Underground and here's one from the Weather Channel. Sunset today is at 5:59 and the moon is waxing gibbous. The full moons in 2010 are 30 Jan, 28 Feb, 29 Mar, 28 Apr, 27 May, 26 Jun, 25 Jul, 24 Aug, 23 Sep, 22 Oct, 21 Nov, and 21 Dec.

SXM-Beaches: We took a trip to Pburg and can report that the beach is as lovely as ever. No major hurricanes have arrived since they distributed sand from the dredging program for the cruiseship piers. In addition to the sand, this lovely boardwalk was built all the way from Greenhouse Restaurant at the extreme eastern edge of town to the Sea Palace Hotel. The boardwalk is lined with restaurants, many offering typical grilled or fried beach fare, but there are some fine restaurants here also. The first one, Greenhouse, is larger and more substantial than many of the shacks along the beach. They also have one of the largest menus on the island and feature Angus beef. A bit further is the Pasanggrahan Restaurant, an oasis just steps off the boardwalk.

About halfway to the Captain Hodge Wharf where the water taxis dock, Taloula Mango's has an interesting menu. Close to the dock, Harborview has a following among those who like local food, although we head further inland and get our Créole food fix at Shieka's Bistro. A bit further along on Front Street is L'Escargot Restaurant featuring fine French food with plenty of salads for lunch. Still further with entrances on Front Street and on the boardwalk is Antoine Restaurant. Dine in the dining room or on the beach. There is a large French menu available at lunch and dinner and lighter fare on a lunch menu. A few more steps brings you to Fusion Restaurant with a young and talented chef preparing innovative cuisine. Again a lighter lunch menu is available, but we stopped in this week and couldn't resist his interesting preparations, although even his new approaches to burgers were tempting.

Beach reading: You probably won't take this to the beach, but we chicken farmers liked this book: The Complete Book of Chicken from Cook's Illustrated. It was the James Beard Foundation/KitchenAid Book Award Winner for Best Single Subject Cookbook. Cook's Illustrated is known for doing detailed tests, making this a book for anyone who wants a recipe that works the first time out. Moreover, the book is vast and authoritative, with 38 chapters containing nearly 500 recipes and 300 illustrations. It offers readers the very best methods for preparing chicken, as well as turkey, duck, goose, quail, squab, and pheasant. Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane is a good beach read. Private investigator Patrick Kenzie is in the middle of a personal crisis--he's lost his passion for the profession, and is tired of people with their "predictable vices, their predictable needs and wants and dormant desires." Angie Gennaro, his occasional sweetheart, lifelong friend, and fellow investigator has quit the business. The suicide of a former client, Karen Nichols, gives Kenzie his investigative itch back. Six months earlier, Kenzie tracked down a stalker who had been harassing Nichols, and put an end to his heinous hobby. But Nichols needed more help than this PI could ever have imagined. The successful, middle-class young woman had been sinking into a sea of drugs, alcohol, and prostitution, hitting the bottom when she jumped from the Boston Custom House. Her death consumes Kenzie--he is convinced that someone pulled her into the vortex, although her nearest and dearest simply call her weak. Kenzie teams up with his explosive, loving, gun-toting friend Bubba Rogowski, and, after a boozy reunion, Angie Gennaro joins them. This fearless threesome must surely be the most original team in contemporary crime fiction. Good at the core--but seriously screwed up by various demons from their pasts--tact and decorum is hardly their style. They work their way across Boston, doing whatever it takes to question Nichols's family and acquaintances. By unveiling the real Nichols, tragic family secrets, betrayals, and conspiracies are also unmasked. And speaking of crime novels, Robert Parker, creator of the Spenser and Jesse Stone series, died of a heart attack at his desk at his home in Cambridge, MA last week.

Also dieing last week was Erich Segal, a Yale classics professor and author of "Love Story", a hugely successful book in 1970. The movie came out late in that year starring Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw and became the first "blockbuster". “Love Story” was in the news again in the late 1990s, after Al Gore, then the vice president, was reported to have described himself as the inspiration for Oliver Barrett. Mr. Segal set the record straight: Oliver, he said, was mainly a youthful incarnation of the actor Tommy Lee Jones (Gore's housemate at Harvard). He did say that he had modeled Oliver’s freighted relationship with his father on the Gore family. (Al Gore, Sr was a senator who lost his seat in 1970, partially because of his opposition to the Vietnam war.) Mr. Segal had met both Mr. Jones and Mr. Gore in the late 1960s, when they were students at Harvard and he was there on sabbatical. Construction: Here's the new pier on the western end of the boardwalk, near Sea Palace Hotel and Fusion Restaurant. The pier is finished, but tenders will not be allowed to use it until restrooms are constructed.

Sapphire Beach Club: We are in our condo until mid-April but it is available after that for $900 to $1000 per week until 15 Dec, when high season kicks in. You'll get a 10% discount from Unity Car Rental, one of the longest running and most trusted on the island, and many more coupons as well. Check the calendar on our website for available dates. For those of you who wish to sell or rent their week or unit, we have opened up the Sapphire Beach Club website for that purpose. We charge $25 per year. If you wish to rent or sell your unit, send us some text (and $25 to esk@sxm-info.com via Paypal). If you wish to rent or buy a unit without high middleman fees, check out the website. Given the large assessment that Sapphire just levied, there may be a lot of sales. At present, there are 20 sales and/or rentals available directly from owners. Given a 25 to 35% standard rental commission, there should be some bargains in eliminating the middleman and dealing direct.

Activities: We stopped in at Pineapple Pete's on Friday evening to catch Ronny "Santana". He's there Wednesday through Sunday from 7:00 to 10:00 PM and House of Blues plays on Tuesdays starting at 9:30 PM. Ronny put on an extended guitar session toward the end of his set, including a piece that he had written. Martha and I noticed a bit of Spanish classical guitar motifs. Sure enough when Ronny came over after his set, he told us that he had started out on a gut stringed classical guitar, but he has always liked steel strings as he kept breaking the gut strings. That's his new guitar, essentially acoustical with steel strings and an amplified pickup. He's well worth seeing. Ziggy Chan waited on us and when we asked what he has been up to he sent us to this new video clip. The Head Pineapple, Pete (aka Pierre), has built quite the empire here on the shores of the lagoon. It seems the latest addition is a video editing facility. It'll knock almost six minutes out of your life to watch it, but it will transport you the island when you are watching the snow pile up and the temperature drop.

Shopping: Alert readers may have noticed that the model used in the beach reading section with the chicken cookbook is none other than Deepti from DK Gems. Knowing how much she likes chicken, we bought two of those cookbooks, one for us and one for her. We stopped in for the usual chit-chat about restaurants (We'll be reviving the Dining with Deepti section as we head out to Auberge Gourmande on Monday.) and some business. Martha had some old jewelry that we took in to have reset. Deepti choose the good stones, drew up a pendant, and took everything. Eventually we'll get something for the gold and get charged something for making a new pendant that Martha likes. She says she would do this for any customer, so if you have some old pieces that are collecting dust, bring them down.

Groceries: On Tuesday morning we drove off to Pburg for a nice lunch at Fusion Restaurant (see below), a visit with Deepti from DK Gems, and some grocery shopping at Cost-U-Less and Sunny Supermarket. At CUL we were looking for the wonderful frozen filet mignons wrapped in bacon that we got inexpensively last summer. No such luck. We then looked for the Cornish Game Hens. They had these, but a four-pack for $18 is not a doorbuster. I did pick up an entire beef tenderloin (fresh) for about $70 or $11 per pound. After Martha trimmed it and cut off the silverskin, we will get about seven meals from it. The first one, a luscious slice of tenderloin, was quite good especially with some reconstituted dried mushrooms from Grand Marché and garlic-mashed potatoes with truffle oil.

We headed on up to Sunny Foods and picked up some vegetables at about 80% of the cost at Grand Marché, but the selection is considerably smaller. They did have the Angostura 1919 Rum that we like so much, albeit at $20 per bottle it should be pretty good. Later in the week we stopped in at the fish market next to the Simpson Bay bridge. It is finally being used by several fish vendors, a restaurant, and some shops. When we first arrived, there were no large fish, just small reef fish and we worry about ciguatera, especially prevalent in smaller reef dwelling fish. This gentleman told me that he expected larger fish on a boat due in at 11:00 AM. We came back on the way to Pburg for lunch and got the back half of this mahi for $24. The fresh mahi done Créole style that evening was wonderful and we froze enough for four more meals.

Alcohol: We tracked down François Prudhomme (email: francoisprud@hotmail.fr and cell 590 690 87 29 78). He's working as a freelance wine supplier. He uses his contacts in the local industry to bring wine to you. I don't believe he is looking to discuss a single bottle purchase, but if you were interested in a case or two he would probably save you some time and money. For the last couple years he has supplied us with a wonderful Pommard. Unfortunately his shipment hasn't arrived yet. It appears that everyone on this island is waiting for their ship to come in. He did have some other nice Burgundies from Faiveley. We bought a bit of the 2004 Santenay and the 2006 Mercurey. We also bracketed these two wines with a bottle of 2005 Nuits-Saint-Georges (a very good year and a better vineyard) and 2006 Domain Chanzy Borgogne, an everyday drinking wine. We had the Santenay with a salad Niçoise on our balcony and can report it was quite nice, smooth and flavorful, but neither 2004 nor Santenay will bring tears to the eyes of serious Burgundy drinkers. I'm convinced that the cost of better Burgundies is responsible for no small part of those tears. That evening we had the Mercurey and thought it was a bit better, although a bit more expensive

Travel: The photo should be all you need to figure this out, but there is a rain forest at the top of Mt Scenery, the extinct (we hope) volcano that produced Saba. The rain is essentially mechanical. The warm tradewinds head from Africa across thousands of miles of warm water, becoming saturated with water vapor. When they hit a mountain, they rise up and via adiabatic expansion, cool down. That causes clouds to form and water to drop out of what was a clear blue sky. It falls, of course, at the top of the mountain - and nowhere else. This leads to some interesting and unique flora and fauna. The steep sides of the volcano preclude beaches over on Saba but do provide some of the best wall diving in the Caribbean. There are only about 1500 Sabans on the island and not more than a couple dozen places to stay counting small hotels, villas, and cottages but there is a School of Medicine. Thus, there are some things happening and a bit of nightlife, but it's a great spot for doing nothing. There is much more info on this website. Being 26 miles away it's a difficult daytrip by boat, but quite short by air. Then again you could travel by boat and stay a night or two before or after your timeshare week, avoiding the Saturday snafu at the airport and spend some time on our quieter neighbor.

Small Island story: On Tuesday, after an hour's worth of exercise at Marci's Mega Gym, we headed to Pburg, arriving rather quickly thanks to the new roundabout and minimal traffic. Simpson Bay had power when we left, but as we walked down Front Street, all the shops were dark. Yes, GEBE had struck again. Power was out from about 10:30 until 12:30 making the restaurants especially happy. It was out in Simpson Bay as we exercised on Thursday morning.

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We stopped in at Bonita's Cantina on Sunday afternoon to watch the early NFL playoff game because Sapphire does not get the Fox channel. We settled into some comfy chairs facing a rather large screen TV and watched Brett Favre eat up the Dallas Cowboys while we drank several pints of Presidente. Eventually we ordered some chicken wings and Bonnie asked whether we wanted six or twelve. Being a chicken farmer, I'm well aware that a chicken wing consists of three parts. Having grown up in Buffalo, I'm familiar with the concept of chicken wing appetizers wherein the two larger and meatier sections of the wing are separated from each other and the smaller wing tip is tossed out. Not so here at the Cantina. When they say wings, they mean wings and give you the whole thing. Consequently, we received twice as much as we expected. That's not a problem because they were quite tasty, as was the dipping sauce. When it was all over we paid a mere $21 for five pints and two large orders of very tasty wings.