“You’re going to eat like a Bajan today. We don’t stop until our waistlines stretch,” says Paulette de Gannes to the group of us standing in Bridgetown’s Independence Square. With Paulette, from Lickrish Food Tours, as our guide we’re about to embark on a walk, stopping at restaurants, markets, food trucks and more on a three-hour culinary marathon. “Bajans love their food,” says Paulette laughing. “Eating the way we do in this heat, you start to feel heavy and slow. You’re going to want to sleep.”
Sleep isn’t an option, however, as I’m here during the annual Barbados Food and Rum Festival and, as well as knowing how to eat, Bajans know how to throw a party. The festival is a mash-up of rum-fuelled street parties, sunrise beach events, rum distillery tours and tastings, plus cocktail demonstrations. There are cooking demos too, with local chefs exercising very un-Bajan portion control to dish up mercifully bite-size, refined versions of traditional dishes.
It’s a celebration of the island’s increasingly innovative modern food and drink scene, but I’m squeezing in a grassroots food tour to get an insight into Barbados’s culinary heritage.
Roughly triangular in
