by Larry Smith
Fifteen Nassau restaurants are showcasing special dishes and offering fixed price menus this week as part of the Great Bahamian Seafood Festival, which climaxes on Friday and Saturday downtown.
My assignment was to review a couple of them. Options ranged from the casual (Da Fish Fry and Traveller's Rest) to the opulent (Greycliff and the Bahamian Club). I settled on Seafront Sushi and Aqua at the British Colonial Hilton.
For purists, the ultimate seafood experience is Japanese. Sashimi and sushi both require a variety of high grade, very fresh, raw fish - anything from octopus to tuna. And it's damn good for your cholesterol level. Sashimi is thinly sliced raw fish served with garnishes and soy sauce. Sushi pairs the fish with vinegared rice, and other ingredients.
The earliest reference to sushi in Japan was in 718, when it was fermented fish that smelled like blue cheese. The sushi that we are familiar with today was created in the 1800s - a small piece of fish served on a pad of seasoned rice.
In Japan, sushi was sold by street vendors until after the Second World War, when restaurants became popular. By the 1960s, articles on sushi were being published in American lifestyle magazines. The California Roll was invented by a Los Angeles chef in 1970, and the New York Times covered the gala opening of a sushi bar in 1972.
Over the past 30 years, sushi has gradually transformed itself from an exotic ethnic specialty into rarefied haute cuisine, and has lately become one of the most ubiquitous culinary choices around the world. In Nassau there are now four sushi restaurants (Nobu, Ichiban, Indigo and Seafront).
But many Bahamians still roll their eyes at the mere mention of the word - including some of the staff at Seafront. This has always seemed rather strange to me, considering that strombus gigas sashimi (or scorched conch) is one of our most popular delicacies.
Although Seafront Sushi is barely a decade old, it's new location on East Bay Street has a much longer history. Built around 1900 and called Seaway, its 18-inch thick, cut limestone exterior walls are almost the only part of the original house (built by a merchant named John Pinder) that remains.
Ron Lightbourn's family owned Seaway from the 1930s until the early 1950s, when famed photographer Stanley Toogood bought it. After operating a studio and camera store on Bay Street for number of years, Toogood moved his business to Seaway in the early 1980s. After his death in 1987, the business was operated by his sons - Andrew and Mike.
Tom and Debbie Wong acquired the property in 2005 and invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to convert it into the "dress casual" Japanese restaurant it is today. Seafront Sushi is without doubt one of the best restaurant values in town, offering well-presented, high-quality food in a comfortable environment at a reasonable price.
"Over the past 10 years my prices have gone up only about 10-15 per cent max," Tom told me. "At the new location we have doubled our capacity (to 80), doubled our staff ( to 23) and doubled our business - 90 per cent of which is local."
Tom's father came to the Bahamas in the 1950s from China, as a chef for the old Golden Dragon Restaurant. Although born in Nassau, Tom was raised in California and when he returned in the 1990s to take over the family food store business, he was disappointed at the lack of restaurant choices.
"I always liked cooking, and my wife's brother, who managed restaurants in Florida, agreed to help set things up and train staff," he recalled. "We opened just before 9/11 and had a real struggle for the first three years. Bahamians were not into sushi back then, so we were throwing food away. When Nobu opened on Atlantis, sushi became chic and demand picked up."
During the festival week, Seafront is offering a fixed price menu at lunch and dinner. For just $30 you can get an appetizer with a sushi platter (featuring cooked or raw ingredients), tempura ice cream and a glass of sweet Japanese Umeshu (plum wine).
Restaurant manager Garvin Cleare (formerly of Sandals) will greet you at the door. Ask for Fox Hill gal Katrina Roberts, who has been waiting tables at Seafront since it opened in 2001. She can tell you all you need to know.
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Portia McClean, of Yellow Elder, has been working in the dining room at the British Colonial Hilton for the past 10 years and will be able to expertly guide you through their interesting menu. Now re-branded as Aqua, the restaurant underwent a full makeover last fall, together with the adjacent Bullion Lounge - which claims to have the largest rum selection in the country.
One of Aqua's pluses is the fact that you can choose between an extensive Bahamian buffet as well as a variety of a la carte seafood entrees. Select a table by the window and you can enjoy an interesting harbour view while you dine. The expansive dining area features restrained art deco styling.
In fact, the entire experience at the British Colonial is reminiscent of a time when steamships anchored off the bar and white-jacketed gentlemen cooled off with Colony cocktails while the ladies sipped champagne punch. Back in the 1920s this hotel was the epicentre of Nassau society during the heyday of prohibition and upscale winter tourism.
Managed by Hilton Hotels since the late 1990s, the British Colonial is one of the most historic properties on the island. It was occupied by Fort Nassau from 1695 and later used as a barracks for the West india Regiment. The site was acquired in 1898 by Florida developer Henry Flagler who built a large wooden hotel called the Colonial.
When that building was destroyed by fire in 1922 the hotel was quickly reconstructed by the New York-based Munson Steamship Line, which hired hundreds of Bahamian and West Indian artisans. It re-opened with great fanfare in 1923 as the New Colonial Hotel.
As a 1926 advertisement proclaimed, the hotel was "The centre of Nassau's social life (with) hundreds of rooms commanding magnificent panoramas of islands, sea and sky—and the society of people of distinction."
Canadian millionaire Sir Harry Oakes acquired the hotel on a whim in 1932, and following his celebrated - and still unsolved - murder in 1943 it was owned by the Oakes estate for more than half a century, operating under various hospitality brands. In 1997 new Canadian owners invested over $70 million to restore the iconic building to its original grandeur.
Aqua's assistant manager is Steve Glasgow, who arrived four years ago from Tobago via Grand Cayman and supervises a staff of about 30. Since 2005, culinary production at the Hilton has been under the overall command of executive chef Kabuti Lockhart, who received his grounding in the industry at The Bahamas Hotel Training College.
Lockhart''s guava ice cream was a big hit at the recent Hands For Hunger fundraiser called Paradise Plates. The Hilton team attracted a lot of attention by making the ice cream on the spot using liquid nitrogen. The guava ice cream was topped with a mini guava duff and drizzled with guava sauce.
Aqua's fixed price menu for the seafood festival is outstanding. For $50 (plus tip) you can feast on their signature seafood chowder (laden with conch, clams, shrimp and lobster and spiced with bird pepper sherry.
The entree is shrimp scampi simmered in a wine, lemon, garlic, basil and cream sauce served with basmati rice and grilled baby carrots and asparagus. Dessert is Kaluha Ice cream topped with cherries and whipped cream in a Kaluha reduction. A glass of wine is included with the meal.
According to Vaughn Roberts of the Downtown Nassau Partnership, the idea was "to create a signature activity in the downtown area that could quickly become a destination event, drawing in thousands of visitors and residents. We saw seafood and wine as great themes to build on. Other food and wine festivals internationally have become quite successful."
The goals of the festival are to provide a great experience downtown for a wide range of people, to promote culinary tourism and our rich marine resources, and to develop a sustainable event to help finance other downtown activities.
This week's selection of restaurant specials is only one aspect of the festival. On Friday, $125 will get you in to the gala event at Jacaranda House (circa 1840) where you can enjoy "amazing seafood dishes created by top chefs and a variety of wines." This event includes music, dancing, fireworks, an art exhibit and a silent auction.
Saturday is festival day - a family-friendly event at the British Colonial waterfront site just west of the Hilton that will include interactive experiences, live music performances and culinary displays, including a farmer's market and a kids zone. There will also be conch cracking, fish scaling, culinary and mixology competitions.
The Bahamas is one of the few territories where indigenous fisheries survive on a commercial scale. In most other countries of the region, for example, conch and grouper are commercially extinct. And catching spiny lobster is prohibited in the Florida Keys. One reason for this is that industrial fishing is not allowed in Bahamian waters.
This state of affairs provides a good foundation for a seafood festival to help kickstart the redevelopment of the city of Nassau both as a tourist attraction and as a living Bahamian community.
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