Cuisine of Tortola for gourmets. Places for dinner - best restaurants

In general, Tortola lives by tourism, and therefore you can find dishes of English, French, American, German, Japanese, Chinese and Indian cuisine in local cafes and restaurants. However, if you want to fully plunge into the atmosphere of the island culture, it is best to order the dishes that the locals have been cooking for centuries. Alas, there are very few dishes left by the culture of native Indians, but Tortola chefs modified dishes brought from the metropolis for many years after the settlement of the island by Europeans and came up with their own. So today you can find dozens of authentic dishes for every taste made of vegetables, fish or meat.

Dishes made of Okra (this is one of the specific local vegetables), all sorts of seafood and fish dishes, as well as fruit desserts are quite common on the island. However, meat dishes are also cooked here. For example, those who love meat will surely enjoy the sauce of the pork products. It may seem strange that you can get different variations of this dish, just changing its recipe. Nevertheless, there are almost five dozen types of sauce are cooked here, and each cook has his own secret of its creation. Meat is also a part of a well-known callaloo soup. This is a very thick dish, more like a stew, which can be made of pork or chicken with the addition of vegetables, okra, seafood, herbs and spices in quite large quantities.

One of the few surviving dishes of Indian cuisine is roti. This is a flat cake, with a filling of meat or bread. Roti is often eaten on the go as a dish for a quick snack. In general, hasty tourists who do not like to spend a lot of time for lunch or breakfast will love Tortola. Not only roti is very common on the island. Be sure to try a dish called pates. It consists of a thin cake resembling pita bread, which is wrapped with meat and spices, seafood or vegetables and fried in a frying pan. Many islanders eat this dish on the go, and it is cooked very quickly. Copyright www.orangesmile.com

If you love fish dishes, Tortola is a culinary paradise for you. Old wife is a delicious fish fillet cooked with vegetables and fruit, or pancakes made of fish or seafood. Shark soup and grilled fish with vegetables and okra are also popular. Local restaurants usually serve snapper, wahoo, grouper, mahi-mahi and tuna, but you can find here fried, boiled or stewed almost any inhabitants of the sea. Don’t miss the chance to try dishes from local lobsters, which have a different structure of the body from lobsters from other regions and are considered to be the most delicious in the world. Different fish soups are served in local restaurants. They often have a quite difficult and strange recipe, with the addition of vegetables, okra, herbs and sometimes even meat. Mussel pie is also a delicious dish.

As a side dish, you can order different vegetables, okra and local grains, which are somewhat similar to the Italian polenta called funghi. Fish is usually served with potato pudding, fried bananas and vegetables. Johnny-cake is quite a popular local dish. It has a lot of variations of cooking, and it consists of fried dough. Most of the local desserts are fruit platters. Indian dates, papaya, pineapples, guava, mango, and passion fruit are popular here. The most popular fruit dish is a Virgin dessert, which consists of a large number of different fruits, seasoned with a light sauce.

Black tea and Bush tea are very popular drinks on Tortola. The second one is almost can’t be found outside the island. You can find fresh local fruit, lemonade and good coffee in all cafes. There are almost all kinds of imported hard drinks on the island, from beer to wine, tequila and vodka. But you should definitely try rum, which is made on Tortola. Cruzan rum and Pusser’s rum are the most popular. The latter is known as a drink of the highest naval ranks of the UK. A great number of different cocktails, most often with local fruits or their juice are made on the basis on local rum.