CARIBBEAN : ANGUILLA - EPICURIANS DELIGHT
by Ed Brivio



For 7 days each summer, Malliouhana Hotel, Leon and Nigel Roydon’s little bit of paradise in the Caribbean, holds its annual Midsummer Epicurean Delight.

World-class chefs and top-flight vignerons bring their know-how and products to this tranquil cluster of buildings above Meads Bay, one of the loveliest beaches on the island of Anguilla. The rest of the island – a 16-mile long and not very wide outcropping of coral with rather minimal vegetation and many salt ponds, as well as 33 gorgeous beaches with immaculate water – may be baking in the mid-summer heat, but at Malliouhana all is 'luxe, calme, et volupte".

Leon Roydon, having sold his business interests in England, purchased land here in 1981. The next 3 years were spent in a monumental construction project on an island with (at the time) minimal electricity, only the most basic road system, and very, very little water. Even the sand needed for making cement could be had only by blowing up a small hill and then pulverizing the results.

From the beginning, Roydon’s idea was to provide European standards of luxury in a relaxed Caribbean, beach-front setting. The rooms in the main house are enormous, and all open out onto terraces of equal proportions overlooking the sea. The bedroom of our junior suite, #307 in the Terrace complex – really a suite since it had a separate living-room as well – was a spacious 500 sq. feet with a wall of large French doors opening onto a covered upper terrace, and a sun-drenched lower one, both looking over secluded Turtle Cove. The powerful air-conditioning was quite welcome in mid-July. Most of the buildings here sit on a bluff, leaving the beach level relatively uncrowded. Zoning on the island limits elevations to only 3 stories, so there are no high-rises to diminish any feeling of having really gotten away from it all.

The hotel is beautiful, especially the main house: an airy, graceful, vaguely Moorish structure, with large arcaded terraces opening up the façade on all 3 floors, unadorned but for railings and tall louvered shutters made of dark brown, weathered, Brazilian walnut. The open-air, multi-level lobby has high ceilings to allow the trade winds free passage. Throughout the hotel, casual, unfussy elegance is the rule. Every detail of the interior design is in the best of taste, and made from materials befitting the tropical locale – exotic woods, cool terra cotta tile floors, spare white stucco walls, and airy rattan furniture.

The beautiful paintings and sculptures, inspired by the flora and fauna of the region, were chosen with a connoisseur’s eye. I particularly liked the heavy, squat, brass candleholders, each furnished with a single wide, cylindrical candle and a tall hurricane glass. There are 3 large pools (even, that rarest of birds, one for diving) and the largest Jacuzzi I’ve ever seen - we thought at first it was another pool.

The service is of a piece with the surroundings: everything that one would hope for. Many of the employees we spoke to have been with the resort since its opening 18 years ago. Everyone was pleasant, polite, and helpful.

The large, open-air dining room here, under a deeply overhanging roof, perches on a promontory above Mead’s Bay, a beautiful stretch of white sand, and brilliant turquoise and emerald water, illuminated by night.

This year’s event took place early in July, and even though it can get hot in the dining room when the trade winds momentarily stop, it didn’t seem to affect anyone’s enjoyment of the meals. And what meals – prepared by seven of the best chefs working today, this year from France and the US, and six of the world’s greatest winemakers, five French and one Californian.

80 guests, more or less, participate in the Epicurean Week every year – Roydon has no intention of increasing this number, lest the personal touch be lost – and about 70% percent of them are repeats. It resembles a family reunion, but one in which all the family members have not only done quite well for themselves, but are also truly glad to see one another. And it’s easy to see why.

Night after night was like this: one great dish, and 2 or 3 great wines following one upon the other, and one or another of the winemakers or off-duty chefs sitting at your table! These wine dinners are paradigms of the genre. Jacques and his large dining room staff moved things right along, and there were never any of those dreadful "longueurs" that mar so many multi-course, multi-wine events. The 5-course dinners started at 8 and were always done by 10:30 at the latest. Never were we rushed, but never were we agonizing over the wait.

Saturday night, the "home team" – Chefs Alain Laurent and Michel Rostaing – were in the kitchen. Saturday was, coincidentally, le Quatorze Juillet, so at dinner’s end, the Frenchmen and women present rose to sing the "Marseillaise" that most revolutionary of national anthems, and perfectly suited to close a week of feasting here, as Anguilla had its own very small-scale, but no less nationally significant, "revolution" in 1967.

At first sight, the island, apart from its gorgeous beaches, is anything but picturesque. The lush rain forest that covered it when the Arawaks, who called it "Malliouhana", lived here, has disappeared without a trace. Low scrub, wind-blown trees, alkaline ponds, and many questionable roads now seem to make up much of the topography. Partly constructed houses dot the landscape because the Anguillans refuse to pay interest – still considering it usury – and build their homes room by room as they can afford to.

After a few days however, this parched, windswept, unpromising place begins to reveal its own gritty, back-handed (hard-won) charm. This very lack of instant appeal has kept it from being gentrified, homogenized, and overrun. No hills mean little rain. There is still a "here" here. Local life – with its small shops, subsistence farms, numerous, well-attended churches of all denominations, and car radios playing local Calypso singers, as well as several avidly followed boat races throughout the year, culminating in the annual, raucous Carnival – goes on as it always has, with only a passing nod at the mostly well-heeled tourists. Small herds of goats and sheep – goats: tails up, sheep: tails down – still pay them no heed at all.

If you can drag yourself away from the beach, be sure not to miss, in East End Village, the Heritage Collection, a small, unpretentious, surprisingly interesting and informative, user-friendly storefront museum of Anguillan history and artifacts, personally put together and still "curated" by Coleville Petty OBE, whose knowledge of the island’s distant past is prodigious, and of its more recent past, firsthand.

For true works of art, drive to Cove Bay, where sculptor Cheddie Richardson turns pieces of twisted driftwood into highly polished, precisely observed, and lovingly rendered portraits of the island’s fish and birds, while retaining the natural, roughhewn beauty of the wood, or to the Devonish Art Gallery in nearby George Hill filled with wonderful paintings by local artists and featuring the wood sculptures, pottery, and stone carvings of world-renowned, native artist, Courtney Devonish.


Photo: courtesy Anguilla Tourist Board
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