106104 TRAVEL TRAVEL ++ LEISURE / JANUARY 2017 LEISURE / JANUARY 2017
The exuberant, 33-year-old chef helms the kitchen at Balter,
the most ambitious new restaurant on St Croix. When I visited
his Christiansted establishment this past April, a month after
its opening, the bright dining room, with its wooden tables,
iron railings, and brick-and-stainless-steel open kitchen,
was still fi guring out its aesthetic, and the eager servers were
checking on their tables so often that I considered asking ours
to join us for dinner.
But what a dinner it was. A friend and I worked our way
through popcorn dusted with leek ash; local wahoo accompanied
by pork-belly mofongo and mango kuchela, a Trinidadian
chutney; and a slab of pork belly cured in shaddock, a local,
pomelo-type grapefruit, and served with Haitian pickled slaw,
chayote coulis, and a sauce made from caramelised yucca juice.
Cocktails crafted with ginger beer and herbs from the
restaurant’s garden kept us hydrated. Not every dish reached its
goals, but you could taste the promise of magic down the line,
like the right word moving toward the tip of the tongue.
After I introduced myself, Stridiron invited me to go foraging.
From our loot, he would improvise lunch. “Like, seven tomorrow
morning?” he said. My eyebrows rose. “Eight, maybe?” I replied.
St Croix is the largest of the US Virgin Islands, and the most
elusive. If St Thomas off ers cruise ships and commerce, and
St John unpeopled majesty (two-thirds of it is a national park),
then St Croix is ‘where the real people live’, as the local saying
goes—it’s the best of both worlds. No beachgoer could wish for
a sweeter shoreline than Point Udall, the easternmost point in
the territorial United States. Meanwhile, there are two vibrantly
disparate versions of Crucian life: one on the western end, in
Frederiksted—scruffi er, louder, and more ‘Crucian’—and theANYONE WHO’S
USED THE PHRASE
ISLAND TIME
HAS NEVER GONE
FORAGING FOR WHELKS
WITH DIGBY
STRIDIRON.
other in Christiansted, a Danish-colonial
jewel heavy with ‘Statesiders’, to the east.
Such distinctions are more freighted in a
place where, as a local acquaintance told
me, “we’re still healing” from slavery,
which makes the island’s relative racial
harmony feel all the more miraculous.
Over the past several years, St Croix has
experienced a radical shift toward better
food —which is remarkable in a region
where importing ingredients is still the
norm, and farm-to-table cooking is a
relative rarity. Balter, which sources more
than half of its products locally and intends
to increase that fi gure by 15 percent every
year, feels like a culmination. It has its own
garden, and infuses its own oils, vinegars,
and liquors with local fruit and other fl ora.
The restaurant uses no plastic foam, saves
gray water for its garden, and will soon
invest in solar panels. The wood I saw was
native red mahogany, the iron railings came
from the local metalworks, and the bricks
were 240 years old—they served as ballast
for Danish ships on their runs to the island
(rum was the ballast on the way home).
While Balter fi nds its way , Zion Modern
Kitchen, a casual, two-year-old
Christiansted restaurant run by chef-
owner Michael Ross, off ers St Croix’s most
consistently satisfying menu; its tuna in
citrus beurre blanc and gooseberry
gastrique has infi ltrated my dream life.
Ross also makes his own breads, pastas,