So last week I told you the story of our trip to Sint Maarten, the Dutch side of that tiny island in the Caribbean.  We had heard that the food was legendary on the French side, so we planned to visit the town of Grand-Case (pronounced grahn cahz) to see about lunch.  At the suggestion of Alton Brown in his show Feasting on Waves, we decided to seek out the lolos, cheap outdoor restaurants on the beach.

 

So, how to get there? St. Martin has lots of cars, but not a lot of roads, so getting anywhere takes a while.  We hailed a cab, and told our driver where we wanted to go and what time we needed to be back to the ship.  He told us it would be virtually impossible to get a cab to bring us back from Grand-Case, but he didn’t want to see a pair of tourists stranded in a foreign country, so he offered to wait for us while we ate, then drive us back to Philipsburg himself.  I said if he would be willing to do that for us, I’d buy him lunch. This turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made on a vacation.

When you arrive in a foreign country on a cruise ship, you are a tourist by definition.  There’s nothing wrong with that, especially in a country whose primary industry is tourism.  Yet, somehow, it never felt quite right to me to identify myself as a tourist.  Somebody just there to see stuff and leave.  If I’m going to go all the way out to some island, I want to make some kind of connection with the place and its people.  I have found that food is one of the fastest ways to make this connection.

Our cab driver’s name was Roberto Pantophlet, but everybody on the island calls him “Choo-Choo.”  We hit it off immediately, as he commented on my ubiquitous Chicago Cubs cap. It turned out that his son, Simon, was pitching in the Cubs farm system that year.  All the way around the island in the slow, slow, traffic, we talked about baseball, family, faith and island living. By the time we finally reached Grand-Case, I felt a lot less like a tourist.

So, the lolos.  My goodness, where to begin.  Have you ever been to an outdoor barbeque, maybe at a county fair or some such place, with huge amounts of meat cooking on a grill right in front of you? And the incredible smells making you want to permanently excise the word “diet” from your vocabulary?  Where the only thoughts jockeying for position in your mind are what you want to try first and how much of this can you eat without dying?  OK, now multiply that by about six, and you’re starting to get the idea.

We chose The Rib Shack, the last Lolo on the right, for no other reason than due to sensory overload, we just needed to sit down.

Honestly, I could have spent at least a week in this place.  There was so much to try, a single visit didn’t even make a dent.  Of course, you have to get ribs at the Rib Shack. They are marinated in lime and cider vinegar with onion and garlic and served with “rice and peas,” which we would call “red beans and rice” stateside (see photo at top of post). We also tried several other local favorites, all of them fantastic.

This experience was over way too soon.  Yes, the food was great, and I wanted more of it, but this day remains the best “local” experience I have had on a cruise.  For a few hours, I wasn’t just in another world, but felt like I was actually part of it, not just some foreign interloper with American money.

Hurricane Irma update

The pictures in this post were taken in 2010.  On September 6, 2017, Hurricane Irma tore across this island as a Category 5 storm. As you can imagine, it made a hell of a mess.

Six months later, as I write this, the island is making a near-miraculous comeback.  Many hotels and restaurants have reopened, and many areas have been cleaned up. The Huffington Post has some remarkable before and after shots, published just a few days ago.

I never did hear what happened to Choo Choo or his family.  Facebook isn’t really much of a thing on the island.  I found a couple of people who might be relatives, but they didn’t respond to messages (not surprising, I guess).

I hope they’re OK.