There was Top Chef know-it-all Tom Colicchio proudly wiping sweat off his own famed chrome dome as he kept the food coming for the blessed at a not-so-shabby polo estate. There was Ming Tsai, the Bostonian who doubles as a modern-day Confucius of Chinese cooking, giving knife lessons within the chi-chi environs of Sandy Lane Resort. And there, oh, was Canada’s own Mark McEwan mincing lamb.
To the idyll island of Barbados we went the other week, both eaters and voyeurs, to hang with some of the most seasoned practitioners of the culinary craft. Food. Wine. Rum. So went the sell for this particular festival, and it wasn’t a particularly hard one. With food demonstrations set against the crashing backdrop of no-Instagram-required waves, and one particular crescendo of a dinner meant for The Cliff (one of the world’s all-time great restaurants-with-a-view), it was also an opportunity — let’s face it — to discover how a celebrity chef marriage works.
One tactic: make up for all your long hours, and unavailable evenings, by craftily arranging for your wife to meet the President of the United States.
That’s what I learned! While hanging out, that is, with the coolest of cats, Marcus Samuelsson, whose trajectory has been oft-told: from Ethiopia to Sweden (where he was adopted) to America (where he gained fame with his New York restaurant, Aquavit) to his experimentation with any number of cuisines (a one-man melting pot, he) to that tele-Darwinian contest that is Top Chef Masters (which he won last year!) to Harlem (where he’s now behind the renaissance-leading restaurant Red Rooster) to, well, Barbados, where I found him tossing tomato watermelon salad and conjuring up King Fish ’wiches.
The love of his love, Maya Haile — a model-wife in more ways than one — sat al fresco with us during this particular cook-and-tell. And it was this where one-half of the stylish couple for the ages gave me the scoop on the dinner that Samuelsson cooked for Barack Obama on the occasion of his presidency’s state dinner.
“I got into a chef’s coat,” Haile was telling me, remembering with a laugh. Embedded with the rest of the cooking staff, she was able to meet Obama.
Normally, i.e., when the commander-in-chief is not present, she leaves the cooking to Samuelsson. Although — being Ethiopian herself — she does occasionally whip up some homeland grub. Today, like I, she was happy just being a spectator.
Samuelsson, who clearly has the recipe for charisma down flat, was cooking this day in his Converses — as per usual; it’s part of his brand! — and took the opportunity in this otherwise gluttonous affair to stress the importance of using leftovers. People in developed countries throw out 32% of the food they buy, he told us. He also stressed the upshot of food as cultural conversation.
“These hotels are amazing,” he went on, referring to the some of the more posh tableaux that the fest had unfolded at, “but you have to go to Oistens [a famous fish fry on the island]. You have to buy a fresh coconut.”
A message to savour.
As is the memory of a party held, during my Bajan adventure, in the Concorde Museum. It’s not everyday one moves like Jagger, or beats it like Jackson, underneath the ginormous corpse of a plane. Not your regular after-party spot, that’s for sure. A remnant, that’s for sure, of the jet set-erati’s glory years, when Barbados was one of four regular Concorde destinations.
Crowding the hangar on this occasion were foodies and revellers alike, and at one point Adele’s Rolling in the Deep came on, getting people on their feet as the BA jet that once cruised at about 60,000 feet — five miles higher than the average plane — looked down on us. As did the traces of Muhammad Ali, Naomi Campbell and yes, even Mother Teresa, all of whom once soared on this flying machine.
It was a fun party, and like all great meals, it was the sort that seared into the memory, its satisfaction still lingering the next day.