When I think about it, opening a restaurant on Bequia in 1979 was an incredibly brave thing to do. Foraging for food supplies was pretty much a full-time job, there wasn’t much to be had in the local stores and I had to “wing it” often. I didn’t even know how to cook when we opened, so the lack of ingredients made me a rather inventive chef! It all boiled down to trial and error and for some lucky reason it worked.
Food shortages were something I had become used to, and with restaurant patrons to feed I tried my best to ensure I had the supplies I needed. Butter, sugar, eggs, onions, garlic, canned tomatoes and cheese were of the utmost importance, not to mention fish and lobster. I realized early on that we needed freezers, and quite a few of them, or we would have major problems.
Buying freezers was one thing, keeping them running another! We learned to keep spare compressors on hand so that we could quickly fix our freezers, coolers and refrigerators when they broke down due to power surges. When the power went out (usually just after sunset) we would scramble to unplug anything electrical because when the power returned the electrical surge would blow the compressors. If the power went off and came back on when we were closed we ran into trouble, and Mac became pretty adept at fixing our equipment.
Christmas was a terrible time when it came to food shortages. That’s when eggs and sugar would suddenly be scarce and I had to make sure I had plenty of both. I can remember buying whole cases of eggs (imported from England) and smearing them with lard in an effort to keep them from spoiling. I would buy huge sacks of white and brown sugar and pray the ants wouldn’t get into them …. I needed a lot of sugar for the Christmas baking. As for butter, I always kept two whole cases in a freezer at home to see me through the many times it wasn’t available in the shops. Even now in 2018 Bequia has been without butter for almost a month!
Lobster and fish were crucial items for the pizzas, lobster for the tourists and fish for the locals. Lobster was plentiful in the off-season when there was no money to spare, and once the money was flowing during the winter months the divers were no-where to be seen! They always migrated to Mustique and the Tobago Cays where they could get more money for their efforts. I had to stock up on lobster from September to December and was often forced to get a bank loan to finance it, I simply could not afford to run out. We would boil and clean copious amounts of lobster and freeze it, hoping it would last the season. I would also buy hundreds of pounds of fish at a time to filet and freeze, it was the pizza topping Bequians liked most.
Then there was cheese, the most important item of all! With no cheese there was no pizza, and I cannot recall a time when I had to close my doors due to a lack of cheese. I certainly came close, but always managed to get my hands on some even if I had to send to other islands for it. Mozarella did not exist, we used white cheddar on the pizzas, and the supermarkets periodically ran out. I can recall getting a large shipment of cheese that was a bright orange, so bright it almost shone in the dark! It was incredibly oily (not to mention salty) but it was all I could get and I was forced to use it. We frantically patted the tops of the cooked pizzas with paper towels to remove some of the oil before sending them out to the dining room. The customers back then were very understanding, they knew what it was like in the Islands when it came to food shortages. I am not so sure what the reaction to bright orange cheese on the pizzas would be like today!
