TRAVEL + LEISURE / JANUARY 2017 109
“What happens now,” Robinson said, “is we fi nish on the
grill, and break out the lanterns and fl ashlights.” He laughed.
“Price of paradise, man.”
By evening, the outage had endowed the Christiansted streets
with a decadent air. The cooks at 40 Strand Eatery, another
newcomer that focuses on local fi sh and produce, were working a
grill in the street between tables whose inhabitants were only too
happy to have an extra cocktail while waiting. Away from the
emergency lights, the town’s warren of boutiques, restaurants,
and hotels—each somehow accommodated to a centuries-old
Danish-colonial edifi ce—felt like a ship that had temporarily
submerged under the nearby waters.
That night, I had dinner at Savant, a veteran of the island’s
fi ne-dining scene. Passing through its
cavelike front room on the way to the low-lit
stone grotto that serves as its courtyard,
I found it easy to forget that the electricity
had come back. But St Croix, it turns out,
feels that way a lot of the time, even when
he power is on. By 9pm, Savant was out of
most of the day’s catch, mahi mahi, so I
settled for the fi sh tacos and beer-battered
fritters, both made with wahoo. That late in
the day, after a power outage, no less, that
fi sh had no reason to be as good as it was.O
n an island as fertile as St Croix, the shift to locally
sourced food shouldn’t have been so recent or so
challenging. St Croix, which fl ew the fl ag of fi ve
nations, plus that of the Knights of Malta, before
becoming a US territory in 1917, was once the breadbasket of
the Caribbean. Unlike many of the region’s islands, it enjoys
relatively fl at, nutrient-rich, arable soil: here, ‘foraging’ is
just another word for walking. The profusion of plants and
fruits—breadfruit, Moringa, maubi, guava, golden apple,
mespila, eggfruit, dragon fruit—was dizzying to me after a
New York winter of old apples and pears.
“St Croix was under sugarcane production as late as 1966,”
Dale Browne told me. He runs Sejah Farm, near the old
Bethlehem Sugar Factory in the interior, and supplies produce
to Balter. We spoke in a lean-to surrounded by boxes of peppers
and papayas that doubled as the market stand most mornings.
“But then the Department of the Interior decided light industry
and tourism would be the thing. People moved into government
jobs, and agriculture disappeared.” Soon, St Croix was
importing nearly all its food.
In 1998, Browne and his wife, Yvette, decided to “get some
goats so our children could understand eating right, being
connected to the land, what it means to care for another life,”
they got really into it. Today, the Brownes farm vegetables and
raise livestock on 15 acres and supply four CSAs. It’s a time of
great promise. “For forty years, the land has been dormant,”
Browne said. “It’s as virgin as land can be.” The Department
of Agriculture is off ering subsidised plots to aspiring farmers.
Many Crucians have been asking not only what the island lost in
its embrace of industry but also what food dependence means
during a time of weather extremes caused by climate change.
“The supermarkets are asking for local, because customers are
asking for local,” Browne said.
Ridge to Reef, the only certifi ed-organic farm on St Croix,
sits deep in the rain forest in the island’s northwestern corner.and mozzarella, but Zion is most eff usively
Crucian behind the bar. “There are fewer
rules, fewer people,” Frank Robinson,
the restaurant’s resident cocktail wizard at
the time , said of St Croix when I stopped by
one afternoon. (This past fall, Robinson
opened his own farm-to-glass spot,
Bes Craft Cocktail Lounge, leaving two
mentees behind the bar at Zion.) “You can
get lost in it—it’s like New York in that way.
But it can uplift you, too.” Robinson,
who was born and raised on the island ,
produces his own bitters and infusions:ginger and gooseberry rums, guava and
marjoram vodkas, sweet-pepper-and-
cilantro tequila. He squeezes all his juices
from fresh local fruits. “If you’re
consuming alcohol, why not make it as
healthy as you can?” he joked. Robinson
told me to pick a liquor, and he’d invent a
cocktail around it.
I asked Mary Orr, the manager,
why she had made her home on St Croix.
She shrugged: “You have to bring a book to
the post offi ce, and there are forty-seven
potholes on the way there. But those are
little things when you can put your feet in
the water on the way to work.” Robinson
set down my drink: plum-infused Bulleit
bourbon mixed with lemon juice, orange
juice, tamarind, and tarragon, poured
over unstirred passion-fruit juice.
It tasted as good as it sounds.
It was 4 pm, the sun molten and the air
heavy with late-April heat, but even with
the fl ames and steam of dinner prep in
the open kitchen several feet away, the bar
felt cool—no doors and no windows
means a draft all the time. Pressure
Busspipe’s Run Away was loud on the
stereo system, and little by little,
the entire staff , from the servers laying
out silverware to the line cooks, picked up
the words until the whole place was
rumbling in one voice: “Run away...you
can’t run away...from yourself—”
And then the power went out.
“What happens now?” I asked, a rookie
ready to go home.THE PROFUSION OF
PLANTS AND FRUITS—
MAUBI, GUAVA, GOLDEN APPLE—
WAS DIZZYING TO ME AFTER A
NEW YORK WINTER OF OLD
APPLES AND PEARS.
TRAVEL + LEISURE / JANUARY 2017 111