A food-lover’s tour of Cayman Brac

Cayman’s food lovers have been out in force for October’s annual Restaurant Month in Grand Cayman, but chefs and restaurant owners in Cayman Brac are keen to show that the food scene there is also worth exploring.

The Cayman Compass was invited to the Brac by the Cayman Islands Tourism Association, which organises Restaurant Month, to experience some of the island’s many hidden culinary gems. It was a calorie-fuelled whistlestop tour of the island and, after last year’s food blowout, arriving hungry was a must.

Brac Flavours food truck

This Bracker-owned and managed food truck sits in front of the family home and offers fast-food staples such as burgers, fried wings and chicken tenders, as well as local favourites such as Cayman-style beef and oxtail soup. Brac Flavours’ best-selling dish is bang-bang chicken tossed in chilli oil. Customers can enjoy their fare al fresco outside the truck or across the road in the cool shade of the Bluff itself.

Co-owner and chef Laurel Martin is a great-grandmother and recently celebrated her 77th birthday. With a lifetime of cooking, working at the likes of Cayman Brac Reef Resort, at schools and at the Buccaneer’s Inn, now closed, Martin is taking the cooking in her stride.

“I enjoy every minute of it,” she said. “I enjoy knowing that people are enjoying my food and it gives me the opportunity of meeting other people.”

The idea of starting a food business from her front yard was her son’s, who found the truck and brought it to Cayman Brac. Martin’s favourite dish, both to cook and eat, is oxtail, while she also enjoys cooking Cayman-style beef.

“The trouble is, I just like cooking,” she said. “My husband used to say, ‘if Laurel cook a nail, you’ll eat it.’”

Sookie’s Kitchen

Sookie’s Kitchen bills its menu as “Caymanian comfort food with a twist,” and provided some of the stand-out dishes of the day, including a unique salt beef-and-conch chowder with breadfruit chips, Cayman-style beef with plantain and pink potato salad, and chocolate chip bread pudding.

Chef Sarasue McField, the culinary force behind Sookie’s Kitchen, said that she has been cooking “for as long as I can remember … I come from a long line of cooks.”

Both of her parents – her mother is from Cayman Brac and her father from East End, Grand Cayman – were, says McField, “excellent cooks” and so it was only a matter of time before McField followed them into the industry.

“A lot of people would ask me to make a traditional heavy cake, like a cassava cake,” recalled McField, “and I ended up doing it so much that I decided that I would do it on a more regular basis. I took it upon myself to try to learn cakes that people aren’t making anymore, or recipes that are literally dying out because people never used to write their recipes down.”

McField started teaching traditional Caymanian recipes in schools, as well as educating people on the medicinal properties and uses of native plants, such as mint tea, including how to grow them and prepare them.

In her spare time – her day job is in insurance – McField is a mobile caterer, doing pop-ups and private events as well as teaching in schools, and hopes one day to run her own kitchen if the opportunity arises.

Maui’s Island Cuisine

Few food trucks in the world can boast the stunning views offered to diners at Carl Solomon’s food truck on Tibbett’s Turn on the northern shore of Cayman Brac. Waves crash just below the shaded picnic tables while Solomon – aka Maui, thanks to his resemblance to the character from the film Moana – serves up fresh, locally-sourced fare including coconut shrimp and fish fritters.

“This spot became available to me early this year, and I took the chance to jump at it,” he said. 

“Before that, I was doing home deliveries and then I started adding wraps and salads and different meals and supplying events such as the tree lighting and agriculture fair.”

Solomon discovered a love for cooking at an early age.

“I think I started cooking when I was about four,” he said. “I was standing on a chair next to the stove trying to fry an egg. I didn’t know it needed oil or anything, I just wanted something to eat.”

With both parents working in hospitality, it came naturally to Solomon.

The menu at Maui’s Island Cuisine is predominantly local food, including stew turtle, fried fish, fritters, plantain done local-style, without flour but just seasoned and fried, and, of course, Cayman-style beef.

“I try and introduce it to visitors so they can taste our local dishes,” said Solomon, who said that the food scene in Cayman Brac has changed over the years.

“Some people want food that you can get in Grand Cayman or the States or around the world, but there’s a lot of local food on island too, as well as some that are more mixed, with foreign and local influences. I cook many different things from all over: Chinese, Spanish, Jamaican, Caymanian, American, you name it, I try something and go right ahead and do it.”

Cayman Brac Beach Resort

Beef Wellington, chicken curry and Peruvian ceviche aren’t usually found sharing a menu in the finest Michelin-starred restaurants, let alone a hotel known for its great diving location, but Indian-born Chef Costa is proof that the only limits are skill and imagination.

Serving up a menu, which, as well as the above, contained lobster bisque and a trio of deserts, was quite the culinary showcase at the Cayman Brac Beach Resort, with each dish telling its own story and representing cuisines from around the world with a huge attention to detail.

“I really wanted Chef Costa to show his creativity, and so I kind of let him have free reign,” said Caz Brazington, general manager of Cayman Brac Beach Resort. “We are embracing the many nationalities in our kitchen, as we’ve got Filipinos and Indians working with us. And we’ve also included some classics that we have for our international guests, such as the Beef Wellington, which is a Wednesday evening staple here at the resort. So, really, I let Chef just go for it this year.”

The quality and quantity of the food was proof of the hotel’s claim that “no one ever leaves here hungry,” and, said Brazington, part of the reason for the hotel’s longevity.

“We’re an institution in some respects,” she said. “We started in 1985, and we’ve been serving the Brac community since then, and also the wider visitors from around the world.”

Weekends are particularly busy, with the Friday night barbeque starting things off and then the popular Sunday lunch.

Eats & Treats Cafe

A short distance from Laurel Martin’s food truck is the Eats & Treats Cafe, next door to the L&M Super Store. The location is no coincidence, as manager Pauline Tibbetts explained, as the building now used by the cafe was the site of the original shop, opened in 1967, until it moved into the larger premises, leaving the site as a storage facility.

In 2014, however, the Tibbetts family decided to open Eats & Treats Cafe which now serves the local community.

“We employ four members of staff and serve fast food such as burgers, chicken tenders, pizza, chicken wings and mozzarella sticks as well as sides including potato salad and coleslaw,” said Tibbetts. “Every day we put on lunchtime specials, so that could be something like fried chicken, oxtail and beans, curried chicken, curry goat, roast beef, kingfish … it varies all the time.”

The most popular dish, she said, was the sweet and sour chicken. “But everything sells well,” she said. “We don’t have a lot left at the end of the day.”

Restaurant Month on the Brac

While Restaurant Month is currently purely a Grand Cayman event, that doesn’t have to be the case, said Monica Ramgeet, CITA director and treasurer.

She said, “We’d love to have more restaurants participate, especially in Cayman Brac. It’s incredibly important for the Sister Islands to be involved in everything that we’re doing and be part of this spectacular event.”