Nassau food tour showcases Bahamian fare beyond the resort

Washington Post

Alanna Rodgers, above, founder of Tru Bahamian Food Tours, explaining the signature confections of the Tortuga Rum Cake Co. in Nassau, the Bahamas. The decadent chocolates at Graycliff, right, reflect the estate's past life as a residence of British royalty.

It's Day 3 of our family vacation in the Bahamas, and so far I'm not impressed by the conch.

I want to love it. The exotic-sounding conch, with its ostentatiously horned, pink-fluted shell, is the national dish of this beautiful chain of islands. And naturally, like so many culturally important foods, it's also considered an aphrodisiac. So I keep trying it. I've had conch salad, conch fritters, cracked conch and conch chowder. At two restaurants. With the exception of the fritters, in which the conch is minced or pulverized, the conch in every dish has been tough and tasteless, like choking down rubber bands. The conch salad, especially, always seems so promising: a fresh, cold, ceviche-style salad tossed in a light lime-and-orange-juice dressing with fresh tomatoes and chilies. But no. Yuck.

And then, a couple days later, I find out why.

"Conch has to be tenderized before you work with it; otherwise, it's like chewing rubber," says Alanna Rodgers, founder of Tru Bahamian Food Tours. We're at a stop on the "Bites of Nassau" tour when Rodgers tells us that the rubber-band factor is a sign of how adept a Bahamian chef is with conch.

The 11 of us on the tour, including my husband, Brian, and 5-year-old daughter, Chloe, are gathered around a long wooden table upstairs at Van Breugel's Restaurant & Bistro, a power-lunch kind of place popular with politicians, lawyers and offshore bankers. The waitress brings us the restaurant's take on conch chowder, and she seems to read my mind when I wonder whether Chloe will like it.

"No, no, no! This will be too spicy for her!" she says, giving a bowl of chowder to everyone but Chloe.

"This is for the baby!" she exclaims with a lilting accent and a big smile, plopping a massive bowl of vanilla ice cream, topped with hot fudge and a cherry, down on the table in front of Chloe's face.

Van Breugel's conch chowder is indeed spicy, but delicately so, with a coconut-curry broth and hints of sweet Thai basil instead of the dish's traditional tomato base. The chowder is delicious — and finally, thankfully, so is the conch.

By now, a couple of hours into the food tour, it should come as no surprise that the conch chowder here is wonderful. Millions of people visit the Bahamas every year, but few of them will actually taste authentic island cuisine, Rodgers says. It's a fate that won't befall us. Rodgers has promised authentic, off-the-beaten-path Bahamian food, and she delivers on this four-hour tour that winds its way through downtown Nassau, largely eschewing tourist-thick Bay Street in favor of side roads and family-run eateries.

Before we set off, Rodgers fills us in on a bit of history, because the story of Bahamian food is laced with colonialism, piracy and slavery.

For years, the Bahama Islands were deserted (or nearly so) after Christopher Columbus arrived and the Spaniards decimated the native Lucayan people with disease and slavery. Later, the Bahamas became a haven for pirates, who flocked to its shallow waters and 700 islands' worth of hiding places. The British eventually cracked down on Blackbeard and his ilk and established colonial rule. But for generations after the pirates were run out of town, the Bahamas remained a magnet for illicit activity — a base for Confederate blockade runners during the American Civil War, a bastion for rumrunners and gangsters such as Al Capone during Prohibition and a pipeline for cocaine trafficking in the 1980s.

Slavery continued to stain the islands after the Spaniards left. British Loyalists brought their slaves with them after fleeing the American Colonies during the American Revolution. When Britain intercepted slave ships after it abolished the slave trade, it liberated and relocated captured Africans to the Bahamas. Still more slaves escaped to the Bahamas from nearby Florida.

All that history shows up in the people (most Bahamians are black descendants of slaves) and in their traditional foods, from the pigeon peas in "peas 'n rice" that found their way from Africa to the Caribbean via the slave trade, to that staple of the American South, macaroni and cheese.

Influences of West Africa and the American South are especially evident on the tour's first stop, a nearly 30-year-old restaurant called Bahamian Cookin'.

Bay Street might be crowded under the shadow of massive cruise ships and the crush of tourists who haggle at the Straw Market, sip daiquiris at Junkanoo Beach and snap pictures with Royal Bahamas policemen in front of the pink-hued buildings in Parliament Square. But it's strangely quiet just a few blocks away at Bahamian Cookin', where we dine on a typical island lunch, Bahamians' biggest meal of the day.

"If it does not have both rice and meat included, it's not considered a proper meal," Rodgers says.

Lunch here certainly fits the "proper meal" definition. Our plates are mounded with savory, fall-off-the-bone steamed chicken, sweet grilled plantains, crispy conch fritters with a spicy dipping sauce, coleslaw, peas 'n rice and a square of rich, casserole-esque macaroni and cheese made with evaporated milk. The restaurant is dimly lit, but it's brightly decorated with yellow-and-white fish-print curtains made of a batik fabric called Androsia, and oversize beaded headdresses from Junkanoo, a Bahamian street parade reminiscent of Brazilian Carnival.

"This is the most down-home, traditional stop on our tour," says Rodgers, and after this huge meal, I can't believe we have five more tasting stops to go.

As we leave, Bahamian Cookin's owner, Cookie, says goodbye by handing each of us a glass of iced switcha, a sweet Bahamian lemonade, to sip on as we walk. Outside, it's sprinkling, or, as the Bahamians call it, "sprying," so Rodgers pulls plastic ponchos from her messenger bag for everyone in the group.

"No thanks," I tell her, turning down the poncho. After all, it's 85 degrees outside, and it's only sprying.

From the down-home cuisine of Bahamian Cookin' we move on to its polar opposite: the regal opulence of Graycliff, a historic estate-turned-hotel that packs a little bit of every kind of culinary decadence: one of the Caribbean's first five-star restaurants; a chocolatier; a cigar factory; a 250,000-bottles-strong wine cellar filled with rare vintages from around the world. It's also a hotel, where lush gardens, tucked-away courtyards and a mosaic-tile swimming pool give hints of its past life as a home to British royalty.

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