07.20.07 culinary review

Caribbé ready

For most people a picture of the Caribbean includes images of ports swarming with sleek cruise liners, beaches littered with skimpily clad women and streets choked with dancing and swaying bodies. That's the bright, sunny and touristy side.

In the shade, the picture includes and the slightly suspicious looking skinny man with dreadlocks, garishly painted offerings of stuff that would be immediately illegal in most of the world and, most fearsome of all, voodoo rituals with skulls, daggers and blood.

None of these pictures include food. At least, in the local imagination. It is as if the natives did not eat and the tourists brought their own baon, their own food.

“Caribbean food is actually very similar to our own,” Chef Ludo Estingoy intones. “At least the ingredients are. We are both tropical islands, after all. It's just the way of cooking that is different.”

This was something we did not know. For us, who frequent the Outpost Restaurant, it was only fitting, if not long in coming, that there was this Fine Food Festival and that, at the time we had our opportunity to sample this culinary event, Caribbean cuisine was in the menu for the month.

We say fitting because the Outpost Restaurant is, after all, is a strong supporter and exponent of reggae music and most things rasta. On any given weekend evening, this place hosts the biggest single concentration of the dreadlocked crowd than any place in the city.

Pork, poultry and seafood are the main foundation ingredients for Caribbean cuisine, says Chef Ludo. Familiar, indeed. Grilling, too, he adds, is a commonly shared cooking method, but in the Caribbean it involves more marinating with more spices in the marinate.

In fact, the dinner for that evening consisted of a main course of either meat or fish with three side dishes. Both set-menu offerings came with a welcome cocktail, a Margarita, a starter or appetizer and desert.

This is the common pattern for this Food Festival that started last month with French cuisine.

The Margarita was light with a twist of fruit, a bit of bite of the white rum and the unmistakable pull of cinnamon. This lubricated the conversation at the table, which, as happened, revolved around a recent activity that most of those present there were involved in.

This was disrupted, pleasantly, with the introduction of the appetizer. The dish, an avocado, yellow corn and cream dip decorated by stalks of spring onions – which one could eat for added edge -- surprised us with its slightly sour-salty taste that owes its regard as a vegetable instead of a fruit, which to our palates must necessarily be sweat.

This Avocado Creole originates from Sta. Lucie.

I opted for the seafood main dish, fish gumbo. From Les Barbades or the Barbados, this main dish shows how similar Caribbean cuisine is to our very own table tenants.

My side dish consisted of a vegetable stew of green peas, 'Marquechou' and okra.

Okra is the mainstay of all gumbo dishes we associate more commonly with New Orleans, or Cajun cuisine. Gumbo comes from an African word for okra, okambo.

The okra was boiled then coated with a light batter of corn meal with its accompanying white sauce dip contained in a slice of cucumber with its center seed column gouged out that one could proceed to munch after the okra and the dip were history.

The fish ingredient was three pan de sal size fillets of grouper (Molmol) lightly battered and fried. It's tender but firm texture went well with the crunchiness of the other vegetables, the crackling stringiness of the okra and the cool milky coating of the dip.

After polishing off the main dish, we were ready for desert although truth to tell our stomachs, – at least mine was, -- were already stretched to bursting. But being the consummate gluttons that we were -- I am -- we actually could not wait for next Caribbean culinary creation of Chef Ludo.

On the face of it, it may sound or look like an anticlimax. Pineapple? Only? But, the Fruits Foster from Jamaica looked and tasted divinely inspired by none other than Jah himself through the instrumentality of our humble chef.

Creatively cut in alternating advancing and receding cubes, this desert with glazed sugar was a perfect round up to an exquisite though familiar enough meal.

It wasn't only food for the stomach, it was also food for thought as well. The thought that it is simple enough to try at home. And you don't even have to tell the difference between Jamaica and Jamaique. They're the same difference.

There is more to come with the Fine Food Festival, says Chef Ludo. We will keep everybody posted, he adds. We will be on the look for that, we all agree.

Now who says that the Outpost Restaurant is just a drinking, jamming, chilling out place for slackers? Say what, mon?