Anguilla restaurants

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A Blue lunch

Cap Juluca beach

The beach in front of Blue at Cap Juluca. Photo by David Lansing.

I am having a hard time getting out of bed every morning. Is it the heat of the day? The air-conditioning at night? The cocktails? You’re right—probably the cocktails. By the time I make it down for lunch (breakfast is impossible), everyone else is finished. Bail-Out has staked out a lounge chair on the beach and is working on his tan. T-Bone is walking along the shore collecting shells (I hear she gets up by six every morning, which is just crazy). The Man—I never really know where The Man is. And I’m not sure I want to. Only Luscious and Mrs. Poopsie are still at our table in Blue, working on a glass of champagne or a rum punch.

I order a lobster roll and a Carib. Luscious and Mrs. Poopsie watch me eat. No one says anything. It’s…just…so …relaxing.

The restaurant closes. The servers come by and take away the salt and pepper shakers, the condiments, our placemats. The bar is closing shortly, they say, would we like anything else?

We look at our watches. It’s almost four. Dinner is in three hours.

“Do you want another rum punch?” Luscious asks Mrs. Poopsie.

“Are you going to have one?”

“I was thinking about it.”

“Well, if you’re going to get one I might as well, just to keep you company.”

“Give us a round,” says Luscious.

“You too, sir?” the server asks me.

“Sure. Why not.” After all, it’s almost five.

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Cap Juluca

Pimms and Spice restaurants at Cap Juluca. Photo by David Lansing.

“Linda is hosting cocktails up at the Main House around six,” Luscious told me. “And then dinner at Pimms.”

She didn’t say Don’t Be Late, but I knew it was implied. Linda is Linda Hickox. She and her husband Charles own Cap Juluca, where we are staying, or most of it. The story Luscious told me is that they were staying on Anguilla back in the early 80s and happened upon the white sands of Maunday Bay (where there was nothing but a fisherman’s hut or two) and decided to build a luxury resort. In 1988, the first of 18 villas was opened for business.

After that the story gets a little cloudy. The Hickoxs took on some business partners, who basically took over the resort, in 1997. Then there were some bad loans, a default of payments, and in July of 2011, the group that had taken over Cap Juluca failed to make final payments to Charles and Linda and so defaulted on the loan. Or something like that.

In any case, Charles and Linda are basically back in charge and have spent a small fortune to upgrade the resort and bring it back to its former glory. And I have to say, she does look marvelous.

Leslie Caron

Anyway, I arrived early for cocktails and when the owner arrived, stood and shook her hand and said, “You must be Leslie…I’ve heard so much about you!

Linda Hickox

“My name is Linda,” she said, shaking my hand.

Of course. Linda. Only an idiot like me could make that mistake. “My apologies,” I said. “I think I called you Leslie because when you walked in, I thought to myself how much you look like Leslie Caron.”

“You’re full of crap…but that’s not bad,” she said, smiling.

After that, Linda and I got on famously. And you know, she really does look remarkably like Leslie Caron.

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Our musical guide, Lloyd, in front of The Pumphouse in Anguilla. Photo by David Lansing.

We’d had two (maybe three rum punches) and still no Elvis. Which is when Lloyd suggested we head across the street to The Pumphouse, another well-known musical destination in Anguilla.

“You know Bankie Banx?” Lloyd asked. I didn’t but nodded as if I did. “Well, his son, Omari Banks, plays at The Pumphouse all da time.”

If I don’t know Bankie Banx it’s probably a good bet I don’t know Omari Banks, right? And how come the father and son can’t agree on how to spell their last name?

I told Lloyd I wasn’t a big reggae fan. So Lloyd asked me what sort of music we played. I told him I had no idea.

“You don’t know what kind of music you play?”

“We’ve actually never played together before,” I told him.

“Never?”

“Never.” And then I added, as if this might explain everything, that we were still sort of trying to figure things out. In fact, I told him, we didn’t have a name for our band yet. And we didn’t know any songs.

Lloyd thought about this while slowly nodding his head. “Maybe you should play reggae,” he concluded. “Anybody can play reggae.”

I nodded in agreement but I have to admit that it’s very unlikely that a bunch of mostly white folk playing the viola, ukulele, mandolin, and violin are going to be jammin’ and jammin’ (’till the jam is through).

Besides, I think if I have to listen to No Woman, No Cry one more time in my life I’m going to stick chopsticks in my ears and burst my ear drums. Anyway, I was more interested in The Pumphouse’s salt history than its reggae cred. See, before there was any tourism on Anguilla (mind you, the island didn’t have electricity until the ‘70s), salt mining was just about the only industry. From the 1600s until 1986, they pulled salt out of the pond behind The Pumphouse, which was used to regulate the water in the salt ponds.

If you’ve read some of my previous blogs about harvesting sea salt in Hawaii or France, you’ll know I like sea salt a lot more than I like reggae. So I was very sorry to hear that you could no longer buy any Anguillan salt. I mean, I’m sure listening to Omari Banks is great. But, frankly, I’d rather stick my head in a bag of sal de mer any time.

Before there was a Bob Marley, there were Anguillans like this hauling out salt from the Road Salt Pond.

 

See that building in the background? That’s now The Pumphouse.

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A platter fo crayfish at Jacala in Anguilla. Photo by David Lansing.

So we’re dining at Jacala on the beach in Anguilla and Jacques brings out the whole snapper meunière which he’d pretty much insisted Luscious order. It looked nice, even though I’ve never been a big fan of eating animals who stare back at you. There was the little fishy, cloaked in a few bright spears of asparagus, and topped with a lemon hat as if it were wearing a yellow derby. Very pretty. Oh, and, of course, the meunière (which is really nothing more than browned butter with parsley and lemon).

Jacques stood next to Luscious, his arms lowered, his hands crossed, waiting for her to say something.

“Well…that looks nice,” she said.

Jacques, satisfied, nodded and quickly left the table. A minute later he was back with my Anguilla crayfish.

“Oh!” said Luscious when she saw it. “Oh! Oh!”

Now if you’ve ever had crayfish in New Orleans, you probably think of crayfish as being these little critters not much bigger than a finger that, after much work, give you maybe a single bite of food. But that’s not Anguilla crayfish which are actually a smaller, sweeter lobster (the spotted spiny lobster or Panulirus guttatus) than the traditional Caribbean spiny lobster.

I figured I’d get a couple of the gorgeous crayfish Jacques had showed me earlier. But no…I got six! A platter full of crayfish! A bounty of crayfish! A pot of crayfish! Which is why Luscious had gasped when Jacques brought them to the table.

So Luscious had her little boney bug-eyed snapper with a French sauce she didn’t want and I had a turkey platter spilling over with just-caught Anguilla crayfish.

Now some people in this situation might be tempted to share. To say to Luscious, “Hey, that boney goldfish you have looks really yummy. How about if we split our meals and I’ll give you some of my sweet, delectable, just-caught lobsters, since I have so many of them, for a bite or two of that gimlet-eyed fish you haven’t touched?”

But here’s another one of my rules when eating out: I don’t share plates. Ever. With anyone. If you just happened to order the crappiest thing on the menu because you don’t like to get the same thing someone else is getting, well too bad. No lobster for you. Sorry. I ordered the lobster, I’m going to eat the lobster. So keep your goddamn fork away from my plate. Oh, and bon appetit!

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Jacala restaurant, Anguilla

The entrance to Jacala on Anguilla. Photo by David Lansing.

Luscious and I have arrived early to Cap Juluca. Our other bandmates—Bail-Out, T-Bone, Mrs. Pookie, and The Man—will wander in sometime in the next couple of days. Then we’ll settle down to the hard work of figuring out just what sort of band we are and, more importantly, what our album cover is going to look like.

But for now it’s just me and Luscious. Who suggests that, since we don’t really have any plans, maybe we should go eat.

I like her thinking.

Luscious suggests Jacala, a newish restaurant somewhere on the other side of the island (I haven’t quite got my bearings yet so as far as I’m concerned, everything on Anguilla is “on the other side of the island,” even if it’s just down the road. Like Jacala.)

We’ve commissioned Mr. Glennis Connor, Anguilla’s Patron Saint of Lost Luggage, to be the band’s driver on this trip and he picks us up at seven from the resort to take us to the other side of the island. Three, maybe four minutes later, we’re there.

“We could have walked,” I say as we get out of the car.

“You could’ve,” agrees Glennis.

Jacques and his bucket of crayfish. Photo by David Lansing.

Jacala is owned by two ex-pats from France, Jacques Borderon and Alain Laurent (from whence comes the Jac-Ala). Alain is the chef. Jacques runs the front of the house. And that’s exactly what it looks like: someone’s house. A house on the beach. In Anguilla.

Jacques is one of those guys of indeterminate age (could be 50, could be 70) who looks very hip. He’s sporting a little bippy on his chin, a Mr. Clean dome, and thick black glasses that frame his dark eyes in such a way as to make him look very, very serious. In short, he has an air of authority about him that suggests “Don’t mess with me.”

The first thing Jacques does is bring a tub of just-caught crayfish to our table. Which makes it very easy to decide what I’m having for dinner. Luscious was thinking the same thing but she’s one of those gals who doesn’t like to get what someone else is getting. Don’t ask me why. Instead, she’s looking at the breaded breast of chicken or maybe the filet mignon. I tell her she can’t order either.

“Why not?”

“Because we’re on Anguilla. You don’t come to Anguilla to have steak or chicken.”

It’s not that I think I should tell people what to eat. It’s just that I hate to see anyone go to a restaurant and order chicken. Or salmon. I really hate it when they order salmon. Don’t people have any idea what sort of a markup restaurants make on chicken and salmon?

Besides, as the founder of our unnamed band, I feel a responsibility to set the tone. So no chicken. No steak.

Luscious asks Jacques about the mahi-mahi and the whole snapper. Jacques tells her to get the snapper.

“Okay. And I’ll have it grilled,” she says.

“No,” says Jacques. “Meunière.”

“I don’t like heavy sauces on fish,” says Luscious. “I’ll have it grilled.”

Jacques says nothing but does not write her order down. He simply stands beside the table glowering at her through his thick-framed glasses.

After what seems like 20 minutes, Luscious says, “You really think I should have it meunière?”

“This is the only way,” says Jacques.

“But the menu says it can also be grilled.”

“It can be. But it shouldn’t be. You can, of course, order it any way you wish. But the best is meunière.”

Luscious gives me a startled look. I say nothing. I don’t want to get into it with Jacques. I’m guessing in his free-time he’s a kick boxer or something.

Luscious sighs. “Fine. She says. The whole snapper meunière.”

Maybe I should have let her order the steak.

(More on Jacala tomorrow.)

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