Cook it! Caribbean Flair
The Restaurant at Drake’s hosts chef Craig Jones of The Cliff at Cap Restaurant at Cap Maison Hotel in St Lucia
Forgive me if I sound a little blurry today. I went to a rather amazing dinner last night and ended the evening with too little coffee and too much delicia Solera rum, distilled on the island of St Lucia.
It was the finishing touch of a rather fine meal prepared by chef Craig Jones who works exclusively at a very beautiful hotel that overlooks the Caribbean in St Lucia.
The dinner was a new International Chef Exchange initiative from the Brighton and Hove Food and Drink Festival and had been coordinated by the lovely Carla ter Maat at Drakes.
Drakes have been supporters of ICEx from day one and chef Andy MacKenzie was our first exchange when we took him to Maastricht.
Since then there have been seven more, all successful, a coming together of great culinary minds and brilliant producers.
Chef Craig is used to a life in the sun and one might have thought we might at least have been able to show him Brighton in the sun – but the wind and drizzle was relentless. Fortunately he brought a burst of sun into the restaurant with his vibrant food.
We started in the bar with excellent rum cocktails, packed with power and it was a job to drag the guests away from the cocktails. Once there though everyone was very happy to start.
I think that perhaps there was an expectation that the food from this Caribbean paradise would be all spice, you know the recieved idea of curry goat and jerk chicken. It was not; in fact those dishes are solely Jamaican. Instead our meal was a refined affair that took influences from the great cuisines of the world.
“Chef Craig is used to a life in the sun”
Bread rolls can be a bit of a too much too soon affair – but with the delicious seaweed butter they were irresistable. I ate far too much of both the bread and the butter.
We started with a refreshing ceviche of red snapper, exciting stuff, crisp, clean tasting and very moreish. I love ceviche when it is well prepared and this was delicious.
Next came a ravioli of prawn with a coconut nage and cucumber. The pasta was good, the nage – well a nage is a breath of an idea that teases but disappears all too soon. It was the prawn that really impressed though, packed with intense flavour and wonderfully taut in texture – a very nice dish indeed.
To follow our meat course was oxtail. I love this sticky and intensely flavoured cut of beef. I like nothing more than braising a couple of tails at home and eating the tender meat from the bones – but that would hardly be an elegant dish in a fine restaurant and Craig and the team at Drakes had stripped the flesh from the bones and pressed them into tall discs of succulent loveliness. So good was it that it rather eclipsed the pumpkin and tiny deconstructed sprout leaves.
Dessert was an amazing array of flavours, a brilliant chocolate ganache, intense banana cream, confetti of ripe tropical fruits, a wee doughnut and avocado ice-cream – yes, you read that right. All in all a wonderful meal and a great challenge fron Drake’s chef Andy MacKenzie when he visits the island in autumn for the return ICEx leg. Wish I was going too!
To find out more about the hotels go to capmaison.com and to drakesofbrighton.com – to find out more about International Chef Exchange go to brightonfoodfestival.com
