I have been to Saint Martin/Sint Maarten, the French-Dutch shared island, several times and have always enjoyed superb food. Today's tour of the island with Samuel brought us to the small French seaside town of Grande Case, known to many as the gastronomical capital of the Caribbean, as it is chock full of gourmet restaurants, mostly French, though now quite varied. With Samuel in tow we stopped at the open air spots in town known as "lolo" which are simply local food cooked on grills and served fresh. We loved it all.
We started with the simple JOHNNY CAKES (called "pain" meaning bread) which are more like Navajo fry bread and taste yummy with the hot,hot,hot Creole sauce in the jar on the table. FISH FRITTERS were next and a superb dish called CHRISTOPHINE which is a breaded fish dish in a hollow eggplant shell. YUM YUM.
Boudin noir was the typical French blood pudding, but BOUDIN BLANC was its local cousin made with FISH! WOW!
The ribs were the dry version, barbecued and tasty as was the chicken, and we chose yummy sides of vegetables, rice and beans, and plantains. While I use the word dry, I say this in a complimentary way, and there was a yummy barbecue sauce on the side which I chose to mix with the HOTHOTHOT sauce (just a tad) for a nice dip every now and then.
We asked where the term "lolo" came from and we were informed it was the name of the neighborhood. Well, Grande Case is about 7 blocks long, so I am not quite sure about that, but it didn't matter because we all had a finger-licking good meal of local food before rejoining our ship for two more days of gluttony before returning home.
