Mauritius, Africa is amazing… it’s like Maui, Hawaii but on steroids, mostly because it is full of French food and so much cultural diversity! I’ll try to do it justice through my posts, but I know I won’t be able to get across how I felt. It’s not a third world country, even though it’s in the middle of the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. A tiny blip on the world map, most people I’ve talked to have never heard of it (and before fall 2018 I didn’t know anything about it either!). There is no malaria, no yellow fever, and I felt as safe as I feel at home in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
My first day on the island was a wonderful experience. A cab driver picked me up from the airport and drove me the hour to the condo. I was able to ask him lots of questions about the country the whole way there! English and French are the main languages in Mauritius – just like Canada. While everyone speaks French, the majority of English speaking people live or work in the capital city or in towns where tourists often visit. Only once did I talk to someone who couldn’t speak English, and that was at 2am when I got lost in the country on my way to the airport!
I was there on my own for the first day due to flight changes for my friend, so I checked into our Air b’n’b in Grand Baie – a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom condo just blocks from the main street of the main tourist town in the country. After showering (my trip was about 36 hours total) I got the rental car, bought a local SIM card at the mall (5GB for just $21 CAD!!) and took off on my own with Google Maps on my phone. On this day I learned quickly that Google Maps eats my cell phone battery… I almost didn’t make it home!
The freeway is great – 2 lanes each direction and a 100 km/h limit (and hardly anyone speeds in Mauritius). The small town roads are another story! Very narrow, with no shoulder, you have to be able to quickly maneuver around cars parked on the street. There are generally no parking lots for businesses that face the street, so people just park right on the street while they do their business – it’s up to you and oncoming traffic (including big buses) to weave around the parked cars. I had to figure out how to do this pretty fast, and by myself (all while driving on the opposite side of the road for the first time in my life!). Oh, and I kept turning on my windshield wipers instead of my turn signals because they were opposite as well. Thankfully the rental car was an automatic and I didn’t have to shift gears on top of all this!
My lunch reservation was for 1:00 at Escale Creole in a town called Moka. I had made previous arrangements and told the owner that I am a food blogger from Canada – there was no way I was going to miss this foodie experience even with the jetlag! Finding the actual restaurant following Google Maps was an experience in itself. I saw a little sign with the restaurant name and turned down a very narrow single lane gravel road – what we would call an alley here – and I kept driving and driving and driving… I almost stopped and backed out of there until a lady in her driveway told me in broken English to keep driving some more. Finally the road opened up into a beautiful property and the cute open-air restaurant. The restaurant was actually packed full of people when I arrived so I had to wait a few minutes for a table.
Escale Creole is a mother-daughter business – Majo (the mother) does the cooking while Marie-Christine (the daughter) runs the front of the restaurant. I had the pleasure of enjoying my dessert and a little taste of traditional Creole rum with Marie-Christine at the end of my meal. She is a genuinely nice and caring person who loves her country, her food and her people. If I lived in Mauritius I would definitely be a regular at this restaurant! Chatting with Marie-Christine definitely set the stage for an awesome vacation.
To start I was given a tray of appetizers, including onion fritters with a coconut chutney. The chutney was deliciously spicy with a crunchy, salty and tangy kick. The bowl of pigeon poo (as they call it) was various fried and puffed treats, similar to some Indian treats I’ve seen here. The fried banana was tasty and the pineapple juice made of just the peel and the eyes was refreshing and not too sweet. What a great way to start off a meal!
I had to go for the gourmet menu (I mean, I came from the other side of the world – go big, or go home, right?!). The gourmet tasting menu comes with 4 meats, rice, the daily pulse (which could be lentils or beans), various chutneys and a dessert. 880 Mauritian Rupees works out to about $33 CAD, and tipping is not typically expected in Mauritius (and it was never an option on the credit card machine).
For each dish, Marie-Christine gave me pointers on how to eat it – which order to eat it in, what to eat it with (which chutney’s go with which meat dishes, etc.). I think I mostly followed her directions but after the first go-around I just ate more of what I liked the best. The lentils were delicious – so simple, but tender and subtle. My notes say that I could eat it every day… that’s a pretty big thing for me to say!
The papaya pickle was really good and one of my favourite dishes. The pickled cucumber salad was also great. The eggplant mousse with celery tasted like potato salad to me – not a fan. Every restaurant in Mauritius had their own homemade chilli sauce – theirs had delicious flavour but was OMG HOT. I’m glad she warned me before I took too much!
There was an octopus curry with green papaya. It was an interesting dish – I found it quite fishy tasting.
The fish vindaye was a cold pickled dish – not salty, with a kick of citrus flavour and quite oily.
Surprisingly, the sautéed cabbage and salted fish wasn’t salty at all and quite good!
I didn’t write any notes about the pork dish except to say that it was one of my faves. Marie-Christine noted that typically only Creole people, caucasians and Asians eat pork on the island. My photo of it was blurry so it’s not shown here.
The venison was cooked in red wine. It was super tender for a wild game meat; hunted on the island. Another fave!
There was an awesome eggplant dish. Soft and flavourful, I could definitely eat it regularly (my list of favourite dishes is getting long, isn’t it!). I actually bought a couple Mauritian cookbooks – I’ll have to see if there’s a recipe for the eggplant dish.
The sausage they make is not as chunky inside as ours – they grind the meat fine so it is a smooth texture in your mouth. Excellent flavours.
You may have figured there’s no way I could eat all this food! You were right… it was definitely too much for one person but it was a foodie experience I’ll never forget!
I ended the meal with a cappuccino sweetened with a local dark sugar… so delicious! The coffee in Mauritius reminded me of the coffee in France – a flavourful experience to be savoured. I tasted 3 different Creole desserts (surprisingly, none were too sweet) and a small taste of the traditional Creole rum. I can’t remember what all is in it, but they just keep adding fresh fruit to it until the rum is gone.
I send a sincere thank you to Marie-Christine (and her mother) for the splendid hospitality, the good conservation and the great food. It was truly a great experience to sit down with Marie-Christine after the restaurant cleared out and just chat with her about life. I learned a lot about the culture, the country and the traditional foods of the Creole people on Mauritius. I was shocked to hear that there is an epidemic of diabetes within the local population… that being said, as I enjoyed my 12 days on the island I grew to understand how this could have happened – people love their sweet foods here. And, it was the busiest McDonald’s I’ve ever been to!
My first day was awesome – what a great start to a great vacation!
[…] coconuts are available everywhere, you should not miss drinking from a coconut on a beach in Mauritius. Coconuts are extensively used by Mauritians to make chutneys and cakes. Made from grated coconut […]