TIAMO Cooking with Heart

Posted on 12/07/2015

Five star food on islands in the sun is something we can all applaud. Celebrity chefs such as Eric Ripert with Blue at the Ritz Carleton Grand Cayman, Jean-Georges Vongerichten at The One and Only Ocean Club in the Bahamas, Bobby Flay with Mesa Grill at The Atlantis Paradise Island Resort and Marcus Samuelsson at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess in Bermuda are making waves on their respective islands. Then there are the local chefs who are stars in their guests’ eyes for making beautiful meals with scarce resources.

At Tiamo, a Small Luxury Hotel resort on south Andros Island in the Bahamas, Chef Keith Erolle has some unique challenges. There are no commercial produce growers on the island, no roads to the resort and the supply boat only comes twice a week. When bad weather hits those mail boats might not make it to Tiamo for two weeks and the kitchen can quite literally run out of gas. (It happened one New Years with 30 guests to serve.) Andros Island is the largest of the 26 inhabited Bahamian Islands and geo-politically is considered a single island. Its land is mass greater than all the other 700 Bahamian islands combined. However this archipelago within the archipelago of Bahamas, is dissected by hundreds of creeks and waterways. At Tiamo you can see the thick growth of mangrove trees establishing new little islands with their seedlings and roots. Andros has the most expansive area of mangroves and saltwater flats in the world. It’s perfect for birds, fish and other wildlife. Land crabs are so numerous there’s an annual All Andros Crabfest in June with culinary contests, cultural shows and crab life-cycles displays. There’s also a Conch Festival, a Coconut Festival and the highest concentration of specialty fishing lodges in the Bahamas.

Chef Keith who was born in Nassau on the island of New Providence took his culinary schooling at the College of The Bahamas there. His first jobs were at the fishing lodges and then other resorts on Andros Island. Now he lives at Tiamo cooking with heart and plenty of local knowledge (with one week off a month to go back to Nassau to see his wife and children). Though the mail boat does bring supplies from Nassau, Chef Keith builds his menus from local first. He sources salad greens, spinach, kale, grape tomatoes, broccoli, herbs such as basil and thyme from residents who have a little extra from their gardens to sell. He’s found one who is raising ducks which means access to duck meat and eggs, others with chicken and chicken eggs to offer. Fishermen bring him local grouper, stone crabs, conch, lobster and shrimp – all which appeared on the menu while I was at the resort. Mangos and wild sour (a sour bitter orange) grow on the island and are used for salsas, fruit salads and drinks.

His menu is on a two week cycle so long-stay guests don’t get bored with the food but of course things can and do change depending upon who appears with what at Tiamo’s dock in the morning. Chef Keith says he’s familiar with everyone on the island and they know to call him if they have excess produce to sell. Local fishermen just show up with their catch of the day. That means last minute decisions on the daily menu can be the norm. All the meals we had during our stay were delicious, creative and expertly cooked. Salads were super fresh, eggs had deep yellow yolks, fish was moist and tender and flavour combos inventive. That New Year’s Eve when the kitchen was running out of gas, Chef Keith said he was borrowing portable electric burners from local staff and getting fires going to have enough heat to cook. “That was a lot of fun,” he said, clearly up for whatever challenges cooking with love on Andros Island throws at him.