Anguilla’s culinary culture is rooted in making do – and making something better | Canada Voices

The first night of the Anguilla Culinary Experience didn’t feel like a festival so much as a reunion.

By the pool at the hotel Malliouhana – the grande dame of the island, as people here call it – the light was glinting off water and white stone. Buffet tables were heaped full of the remarkable cuisine, such as jerk mahi and conch ceviche, that has made Anguilla a culinary destination.

Attendees from around the island, a place that prides itself on its “barefoot elegance,” had decided on this night to dress up. Young Anguillians in swanky outfits stood shoulder to shoulder with chefs, elders and people who have been feeding this island for decades.

A long-time visitor, I had come back to the tiny Caribbean island for ACE, the annual island-wide food and wine festival. Over five days, it pairs local talent with acclaimed chefs from around the world to showcase a rich epicurean culture and raise money to train a new generation of food professionals. And it celebrates an excellence that Anguilla has made on its own.

Food here has never been about excess. For centuries, Anguilla had few natural resources beyond salt ponds, surrounding seas and the ingenuity of its people. Full electricity didn’t arrive until 1971. With no ice, fish was sold “by the strap” and assessed by how long it had been hanging.

Out of those constraints has emerged a cuisine of extraordinary confidence and depth – one that today anchors Anguilla’s reputation as one of the culinary jewels of the Caribbean. “Anguillians have an intuitive sense of how to cook, and how to add flavour, because they made do with so little for so long,” says chef Carrie Bogar, one of the organizers of ACE, which takes place May 13 to 16 this year.

Bogar and her husband, Jerry, own Veya restaurant, one of the island’s high-end spots, along with two other restaurants here. They arrived nearly two decades ago with their young family from the United States, a trail blazed by Bob and Melinda Blanchard, who opened the island’s first destination restaurant, Blanchards, in 1994.

The Blanchards sold their restaurant two years ago, for a below-market price, to three Anguillian employees – Miguel Leveret, Clinton Davis and Huegel Hughes –who three decades earlier helped Bob demolish a dilapidated beach-side structure and then built what became Blanchards. (Leveret and Hughes were teenagers.) Once it opened, they stepped in as dishwashers and servers. Davis and Hughes are now co-head chefs, and Leveret is the sommelier and general manager.

Their journey in some ways encapsulates the Anguillian culinary scene and its mix of local and international talent and influences. Dale Carty, the Anguillan chef-owner of Tasty’s restaurant, started as a dishwasher at Malliouhana and trained as a young man in France. Lowell Hodge, the owner of Sharky’s, one of the island’s most popular restaurants, began in the front of the house at Blanchards. He, like the restaurants’ other local employees, travelled during the off-season to learn overseas.

No one needs to dine exclusively in Anguilla’s many white-tablecloth restaurants. Even if you stick only to the beachside shacks and roadside joints, you will be very happy and well-fed.

Anguilla Culinary Experience, now in its fifth year, exists to show off the island’s culinary lineage and push it forward. It is part party, part competition, part classroom and part fundraiser, supporting scholarships and training programs for young Anguillians who want to step into professional kitchens. But it is also something harder to define: a public affirmation of self-reliance.

Anguillians were brought to the island as slaves, as in much of the Caribbean, but the island is basically a piece of coral in the middle of the Atlantic and not a thing would grow. Not sugarcane. Not citrus. (There’s a bit of farming now, but not much.) When the enslavers realized this, they got back on ships, sailed away and abandoned the Africans there. So, Anguillians can do anything for themselves.

I could see that tradition in a quiet conversation by the pool between Chef Kerth Gumbs and his mother, Daphine. Gumbs, compact and powerfully built, still carries the energy of the track star he once was. Today, he is a successful chef in London and the director of the culinary program at Malliouhana, returning home to Anguilla several times a year to shape the hotel’s food program.

His mother is the reason he cooks.

“She cooked for everything,” he told me – celebrations, community events, wakes. “People would eat her food and say, ‘Let’s do this again.’ And I’d think, but someone just died.”

Food here has always been about gathering, integral to a jollification, regardless of the occasion.

Gumbs grew up eating traditional Sunday meals: two proteins – pork chop or goat, sometimes chicken – served with rice and peas, coleslaw and other familiar sides, including johnny cakes, the island’s staple starch. “That’s where you learn flavour,” he said. “Before technique.”

At home he’d learned how to season rice, how to build one-pot dishes with chicken or beef – food designed to feed people well with what you had. Listening to Gumbs, I began to understand how deeply the island’s culinary culture is rooted in making do – and making something better.

That theme echoed again when I spoke with David Carty, the founder of Rebel Marine, a boat-builder, and one of the island’s great storytellers. Carty is the only exporter of manufactured goods in Anguilla, building high-speed ferries that travel throughout the eastern Caribbean and custom boats he ships north to the States. He is also, in many ways, a living archive of Anguilla’s self-reliance.

“This is an island that told everybody for generations, ‘Up yours. Stick it,’” he said.

His family has been on Anguilla since 1655, descendants of Irish indentured servants – the “wild Irish,” as he calls them. His grandfather built the Warspite, a legendary wooden vessel launched in 1909. When it was destroyed in the 1984 hurricane, Carty remembers people crying.

He told me about famine in the 1890s so severe that England proposed evacuating the entire population to Guyana. Anguillians refused. They foraged tiny berries in the bush. They trapped lobster and crayfish with limited equipment. “People were starving,” he said. “But they would not leave.”

Over the course of the ACE festival, I watched chefs compete with focused intensity. I saw students hover at the edges of demonstrations, soaking up technique and confidence in equal measure. Tourists and locals mingled at the afternoon beach barbecue, sampling johnnycakes, ribs, chicken and crayfish before settling in to cheer on their favourites in the mystery basket chef and mixologist battles. Chefs from the U.S. and Britain teamed up with local chefs to create multicourse dinners around the island.

Knowledge flowed freely – no hoarding, no gatekeeping – with the shared understanding that when one cook gets better, the island gets stronger.

Gumbs, who spent a morning talking to local students, takes pride in how far Anguillian chefs have come. “What I’m impressed by,” he said, “is we have chefs making sushi to a good standard.”

The progress has been swift. Carty was director of tourism when Anguilla first began attracting visitors. “In the beginning, no one knew how to set a proper table,” he told me.

As ACE wound down, I realized the festival wasn’t about proving Anguilla’s culinary excellence – that’s already been proven. It was about ensuring continuity. About making sure that the creativity and perseverance that sustained this island through scarcity can now fuel its future.

On that opening night, under lights and music at Malliouhana, Anguilla wasn’t performing for anyone. It was setting its own table. And inviting the next generation to take a seat.

If you go

The Anguilla Culinary Experience, from May 13 to 17, features food, wines and rum at a variety of venues across Anguilla’s 35 square miles of coastline and sugar-white beaches. Tickets are available for individual events online.

The writer was a guest of Anguilla Culinary Experience, which did not review or approve this article. Stories are based on merit; The Globe does not guarantee coverage.