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Restaurants Overview

First-class restaurants and hotel dining rooms serve quite sophisticated cuisine -- prepared by chefs with international experience -- which rivals that served in the world's best restaurants. Most menus include seafood: dorado (also known as dolphin -- a fish, not the mammal -- or mahimahi), kingfish, snapper, and flying fish prepared every way imaginable. Flying fish is so popular that it has officially become a national symbol. Shellfish also abounds, as do steak, pork, and local black-belly lamb.

Local specialty dishes include buljol (a cold salad of pickled codfish, tomatoes, onions, sweet peppers, and celery) and conkies (cornmeal, coconut, pumpkin, raisins, sweet potatoes, and spices, mixed together, wrapped in a banana leaf, and steamed). Cou-cou, often served with steamed flying fish, is a mixture of cornmeal and okra, usually topped with a spicy creole sauce made from tomatoes, onions, and sweet peppers. Bajan-style pepper pot is a hearty stew of oxtail, beef chunks, and "any other meat" in a rich, spicy gravy and simmered overnight.

For lunch, restaurants often offer a traditional Bajan buffet of fried fish, baked chicken, salads, and a selection of local roots and vegetables. Be cautious with the West Indian condiments -- like the sun, they're hotter than you think. Typical Bajan drinks, besides Banks Beer and Mount Gay rum, are falernum (a liqueur concocted of rum, sugar, lime juice, and almond essence) and mauby (a nonalcoholic drink made by boiling bitter bark and spices, straining the mixture, and sweetening it). You're sure to enjoy the fresh fruit or rum punch.

The dress code in Barbados is conservative and, on occasion, formal -- a jacket and tie for gentlemen and a cocktail dress for ladies in the fanciest restaurants and hotel dining rooms, particularly during the winter holiday season. Other places are more casual, although jeans and shorts are always frowned upon at dinner. Beach attire is appropriate only at the beach.