St. Maarten trip report part 6 - the food!

St. Maarten doesn't just have some of the best beaches I've seen, it's also got some of the best food! And it's really got a little bit of everything, from beach bars to fine dining. In fact, we didn't realize it in advance but most people seem to think that St. Maarten's the go-to island for good eats in the Caribbean.

One thing we learned on St. Maarten is that you've got to get used to "Caribbean time" - a 15 minute wait before a server even takes your drink order is pretty normal. The service is almost universally sloooooooooow, unless you find a restaurant staffed by Europeans. Just sit back and relax and enjoy the beautiful weather.

We realized after leaving that the only meal on the entire trip that we ate indoors was at McDonald's. Literally every half-decent restaurant in St. Maarten is outdoors. There's no reason not to be - it's 80 degrees and clear about 95% of the time, including at night. Most restaurants do have roofs in case it rains, but no walls. Some don't even have roofs - if it does rain, you're gonna get wet!

Here's a rundown of some of the more memorable meals we had, organized by location:

Oyster Pond
Since our hotel was in this area, we did a lot of eating there. Our first meal on the island came courtesy of Big Fish, which lives up to its name - my mahi mahi was so big, I could barely finish it. (And yes, that's a lobster tail on top.)

Mahi mahi's local to St. Maarten and fresh caught. We asked the waitress where the other fish comes from, and she simply waved and said "someplace else".

We also met this little guy there (but did not eat him):

Since most restaurants don't have walls, you're liable to see all manner of wildlife in the restaurant itself.

In the same general area as Big Fish is Mr. Busby's Beach Bar/Daniel's by the Sea, where we fittingly ate our last meal on the island.

My wife and I shared our food - I had a crab baguette (which was probably "krab" with a "k", but it tasted fresh), and my wife ordered a jerk chicken sandwich. Probably the best jerk chicken I've personally eaten (though I can't say I have a huge sample size for comparison), and of course the view is tremendous.

A lot of restaurants are peppered around the sprawling town of Oyster Pond too - we also randomly ate at L'Oasis one night, which turned out to be a nice southern French place (where we maybe stupidly ordered Italian, because the pasta was cheaper than their French items).

Still, my wife's tagliatelle carbonara was probably the best carbonara I've ever tasted. HUGE pieces of panchetta, and tons of them.

Notice the bottle on the table - one thing about St. Maarten is that we were told repeatedly that you really don't want to drink the tap water. Restaurants don't serve water unless you ask, and then they give you a bottle (and charge you for it).

Grand Case
This is a tiny little densely packed beach town on the French side that's just wall to wall restaurants, and most of them (obviously) French.  Walk around a little early and most of the restaurant owners will be outside trying to convince you to come in - it's a really competitive area.  (That said, these are *not* cheap places to eat.)  Our first night there - well, the first night we managed to find a place to park - we decided on Le Tastevin because we saw empty tables at beachside from the open doors in front.

It was a great experience - I had a delicious onion soup (you know you're at a real French place when they just call it "onion soup"), grilled mahi mahi with a lemongrass sauce, and of course the creme brule.

Yes, that's a picture of me taking a picture of my creme brulee.

Amazing view from here as well, and the service was the best we had on the island - constant attention by the all-French wait staff!

On our second visit to the town, we wanted to try some real west Indian creole food at a "LOLO", which stands for "locally owned, locally operated".  St. Maarten is really two islands, and I don't mean the Dutch/French divide - I mean tourists see one side, locals quite another.  Most tourists never eat at real local places in the interior towns where most locals live, but there are two LOLOs in Grand Case that happen to be right next to each other, and both serve creole food.

We basically chose between them randomly.  The one we picked was Talk of the Town, though I later found out the place next door (called "Sky's the Limit" - who's coming up with these names?) is rated marginally higher on TripAdvisor.

I was happy to be able to try the lambi, which is a traditional Caribbean conch stew that I don't think I can get in New York.  Otherwise, though, the food here was just okay and the service was super, super-slow. (My food's actually in the background above - I had the lambi, grilled snapper and mac & cheese.)

On our way out we stopped and got some crepes from La Crepe en Rose, which is a guy running a street stand (I think his wife or possibly girlfriend or sister also runs it sometimes):

Kinda like Japan! Although the crepes themselves are very different - these are French-style crepes where the crepe is really the star, and you have to eat them with a knife and fork unless you want to get very, very messy.

We got Nutella crepes, because all the people ahead of us in line did. (Peer pressure!) My first time having Nutella crepes and holy crap, were they good.  Pardon my French.


Marigot
This is kind of a weird marina city that's jam-packed full of cars but also strangely empty. The streets and shops have the feel of a "dead mall" but then you look out, and it's just wall to wall cars as far as the eye can see. It must be that all those people take boats to other places from the city, leaving their cars there and making it hard for people who actually want to use the city itself to park. (We had to park on the edge of town and walk back.)

Still, the one place we ate there (again randomly) was *really* good - a really authentic French bakery called Sarafina's.

I had one of their pre-made baguette sandwiches - prosciutto and mozzarella - but it was still one of the best sandwiches I've ever had. While we were there, we saw at least one woman come in and walk out with a person-sized paper sack full of baguettes - obviously this is where restaurateurs get their bread, and that's always a good sign.

Palm trees actually grow through the restaurant, right in front of the bakery case.

After the sandwich I got a couple of macarons - because I have to get French macarons any time I see them - and they were also delicious. Like a little meringue hamburger.

Other areas
I gotta mention the Sunset Bar and Grill again, which was our home base on Maho Beach and which probably anyone stumbling onto this post through Google as they plan a trip is going to want to visit. Their food is actually really not bad, although the portions are a little small:

That's a teriyaki chicken sandwich (minus one chicken strip that's sitting on the plate waiting for me to eat it) and in the background is my Dutch croquette sandwich. That croquette is literally the only Dutch food we found on the island. The French side really does have mostly French food; the Dutch side, on the other hand, has a mix of American, Italian, Chinese, some French, etc. Basically it's like being in a mid-size American city, as far as the choices go. But no Dutch!

Well, that about wraps it up - for this post and the trip report. We might go back next year around the same time - it was a nice break in our endless northeastern winter.

St. Maarten trip report part 5 - the beaches!

If you're going to St. Maarten, chances are you're going to the beach. It's the Caribbean - why else would you be there? The amazing architecture?

I've already written about Maho Beach, but St. Maarten actually has more than 20 beaches on its tiny coastline - too many to visit in one trip! We had actually planned to take a day trip to St. Baarth's while we were there, but realized we paid all this money to go to St. Maarten - we may as well enjoy it first.

We ended up spending time on four beaches on St. Maarten, carefully picked from a combination of online sources and recommendations of the locals. These four were Maho Beach, Mullet Bay Beach, Orient Beach and Dawn Beach. All of these beaches are serviced, meaning you can get drinks and food from an adjacent beach bar. Just these four will give you a good variety, although if I went back, I'd love to explore the Coralita/L'embouchure/Oyster Pond area some more - this area reminded me a lot of Northern California, with a lot of walkable sandbars, mini-islands and rocks, and not a lot of people. We only saw it from the car on this trip - it teased us pretty much every time we went anywhere.

Below I'll run through the other beaches we did visit.

Note: because I know this is vital info (either because it makes you uncomfortable or the opposite), I'm going to rate the topless factor of each beach. St. Maarten is generally a top-optional island, and while that was fine with us, families with kids or those with a more conservative world view might want to avoid some of these beaches (or St. Maarten altogether, quite honestly - this island might just not be for you).

Maho Beach
Check out my previous post on planespotting on Maho Beach for an in-depth report, but here's another photo of this beach just for the heck of it:

Maho Beach is a small, steeply banked and busy beach - it's really there for a single purpose, and that's watching planes landing and taking off at the airport across the street. Still, it's fun to do that while swimming or just lounging on the sand. Maho Beach is also smack in the middle of the Dutch tourist area of the island - if you're the kind of person who likes staying "in town", then you'll probably want to visit this beach.

The people on this beach are a complete mix of young and old (though skewing older).

Topless factor: 2. We saw just one person without a top on two visits to this beach, though the Sunset Bar and Grill gives free drinks to topless girls. We didn't see anyone partake in that while we were there.

Mullet Bay Beach
Just about 1,000 feet from Maho Beach as the crow flies - walking distance, really - is probably my favorite beach of those we visited. Mullet Bay Beach is the perfect Caribbean beach - perfect white sand, beautiful water (usually calm), and lined with palm trees in a a near-perfect semi-circle. There seems to be only one bar/restaurant but that's enough, and it means the rest of the beach is quiet and pristine.

This is looking south from about the middle of the beach.

A boat parked itself while we were there and let people off to swim around it.

This is looking in the other direction; you can see how quiet the other side of the beach is.

Incidentally, the beach is close enough to the airport that you can still watch planes if you want, without the noise or the sandblasting:

That gives you an idea how close it is to Maho Beach, which that plane would be flying right over just a second or two later.

There were more young people at this beach than other beaches we visited - a mostly European and pretty hot crowd, to be perfectly honest.

Topless factor: 1. We actually didn't see any, but no doubt the beach is not immune, like all St. Maarten beaches. It just doesn't seem that common here.

Orient Bay Beach
Some people consider this to be "the" St. Maarten beach, so we felt obligated to check it out. In fact, we spent almost an entire day there. It's definitely a destination beach, almost more like a theme park than somewhere you'd go to try to relax. I think it's more like Long Beach (either California or Long Island, take your pick) than what I think of when I think of a prototypical Caribbean beach... but hey, some people want a party beach, and I don't judge them. We enjoyed our day there.

One advantage Orient Bay Beach has is that there are literally about a million beach chairs for rent from the beach bars spaced about every 100 feet, so even though it gets really crowded, the chairs never totally fill up like on other beaches. We got there pretty late and still got a set of chairs in the "front row" at the Bikini Beach bar.

Parasailing is one of the activities you can do on this beach - they also have waverunner tours. (Honestly, the parasailing looked pretty fun, but I'm still getting over a bad rib muscle strain so I was kind of afraid to try it this time.)

We actually didn't get too many photos on this beach because we'd read that photography was not allowed, and that's probably because it's partially a nude beach. Not the area we were in, but there was definitely a lack of tops on along the entire beach. (This is not as titillating as it sounds - most of the people who go topless are older and just don't care anymore.) So we have basically no shots with people in them, but trust me when I say this beach was crowded.

Topless factor: 9. Lots. Mostly older people. There's also a fully nude section of the beach, though we didn't see it. (Probably just as well.)

Dawn Beach
Right next to our hotel - and the huge Westin resort - is Dawn Beach, so named because you can sit on it and watch the sunrise:

I was there five days and that's the best I got - sue me!

Dawn Beach is bigger than we initially thought - there are actually two parts of it, both accessible through resorts (though it is a public beach). We went through the Westin on our first visit.

That's the south end looking up towards the Westin.

This part of Dawn Beach is really quiet, and strangely kind of "dead". It may be more of a morning beach because of the sunrise - we went kind of late in the day. It had a weird vibe to it, and my wife was not very comfortable because she thought all the Westin people were staring at us - it's a public beach, though, so who cares? There really weren't many people on this beach at all besides people who were obviously Westin guests (they were all using their chairs), and those people had kind of a zombified look to them - like they were still shell-shocked from seeing their overinflated hotel bills.

On our last day in St. Maarten - literally just before going to the airport - we decided to eat at Mr. Busby's Beach Bar in Oyster Pond, which we only then realized actually opens up to the north end of Dawn Beach:

That's part of the view from our table at the restaurant - can you believe that? And that's where we ate before going to the airport. I love St. Maarten! Hey man, I'm from New York - we don't have this kind of thing. Here's a panorama shot:

The full size of that (which also has my wife on the right side of the frame) is one of my favorite shots from our trip.

Anyway, this part of the beach felt more alive, and I'd like to come back here again.

Topless factor: 1. We saw not a one.

Coming up next (and probably last in this trip report): the food of St. Maarten! To whet your appetite, here's a shot of the Grand Case beach - we didn't actually spend any time on the beach there (we just ate and ate and ate!), but we got this great panorama:

St. Maarten trip report part 4 - planespotting at Maho Beach

A lot of Caribbean islands can offer you perfect weather, brilliant turquoise water and white sand beaches. But only St. Maarten can offer you this:

That's Maho Beach, one of the most unique experiences in the world. The end of the runway for Princess Juliana Airport is literally across the street from the beach. It's not just that you're watching planes land 20 feet above your head. It's not just that you're on a beautiful Caribbean beach. It's that you're on a beautiful Caribbean beach watching planes land 20 feet above your head.

The combination of those two things is what makes this place so special. Normally when you think of watching planes land, what probably comes to mind is dingy industrial areas or getting strip-searched by an overzealous cop who thinks you're planning another 9/11 - at least if you're in the United States.

But on Maho Beach, you can relax in the sun, swim in the warm, tropical water or enjoy a beer at the Sunset Bar and Grill - all while large commercial jets fly so low above you that they can literally blow you into the water if you're not careful.

Here's the Air France A340 landing right on top of us:

There aren't that many widebodies at St. Maarten - that A340, a KLM 747-400 and an occasional Corsair 747-400 charter.  The Sunset Bar and Grill posts an arrivals board on a surfboard.  There are plenty of smaller commercial jets, though, and tons of commuter and private planes.  It's a busy airport.

We caught the KLM flight just as we arrived on our first day there (we went back a second time later) - this photo was literally shot from our car:

We were lucky enough to "see" it takeoff as well. Takeoffs can be an adventure too, as I found out. No, I wasn't completely stupid - I did not try riding the fence during a 747 takeoff like these guys. But I did stand directly behind the #4 engine. And yes, I was sandblasted, and blown into the water. It was nuts - I was crashing into people running in all directions, it was like a mosh pit in a fog of sand. Video of this exists, but my wife won't let me post it because she's embarrassed.

Here's proof, though - I took a screengrab of the plane turning towards the runway. That's me in the red shirt on the right:

I did get video of a 737 takeoff - watch the poor little girl on the beach below.  A private plane took off just after this that I really wish I'd filmed; one guy went completely end over end into the water, and the entire Sunset Bar laughed.  It would have gone viral.  But you'll have to settle for this.

If you want to check out the beach yourself, the best time to go is between 12 and 4. You'll catch any of the big jets coming in, a bunch of other commercial jets and most of the noteworthy takeoffs during that time.

Maho Beach itself is not the best beach on St. Maarten - the reason you go is to watch the planes. It's why everybody's there - you see how everybody's into it in these videos. Otherwise you may as well go to Orient Beach or Mullet Bay Beach. (More on those later.)

A little tip: a great place to watch takeoffs is in the car rental area on the side of the runway. Our first day there, we were surprised to hear the A340 screaming towards us and then see it lift off right next to us at the Dollar Rent a Car outlet. Didn't get a photo of it, but the JetBlue flight to San Juan was probably the next to depart, if I remember right:

A couple other photos from the beach - here's an AA 757:

This is probably the best photo of the beach and a plane that I got - and it was a throwaway cell phone pic as we were walking back to our car to leave on the second day:

The lowest landing we saw - Insel Air MD-83 - looked like he was going to take someone's head off!

Here's a 360 degree (yes, not 180!) panorama of the beach:

And lastly, if you go to Maho Beach, you're probably going to want to make the Sunset Bar your base of operations - here is it from the outside:

Their beach chairs go quick, so if you want one, go early. But you can sit in the bar as long as you want, their beer is cheap and their food is good. They also have a souvenir shop where you can buy t-shirts to commemorate your tumble from the top of the beach to the water at the hands of a jet engine.

This was actually a bucket list experience for me and the main reason I wanted to go to this island, and it exceeded my expectations. How many people can say they've been sandblasted by the jet blast from a 747? Even my wife had to admit it was pretty cool - you can hear her laughing at the end of the A340 video above.

St. Maarten trip report part 3 - driving

I feel like I write about transportation in my trip reports a lot more than most people, but it's important! How are you going to enjoy your stay if you can't get anywhere, or if it takes you hours to do it? Driving in St. Maarten is also kind of a unique challenge, so it's worth talking about.

First of all, do you need to drive? Yes. What are you gonna do, take taxis everywhere? That may work if you're on a half-day cruise stop, but not for a multi-day stay. We rented a car from Dollar, which you can do over the internet like renting anywhere in the United States. This is the car we got: a Hyundai Getz!

These things are basically junk, but you see them all over the island. They're kind of the standard rental car and I think a lot of locals own them too. They remind me of when Hyundai first sold the Excel in the United States for $4,995... no power anything, no intermittent wipers, no automatic turn signals (you need to turn them off manually after a turn - this hasn't even been *available* on most US cars since the 1970's), and just cheap creaky plastic everywhere.  Also, a cassette deck!  But they're fine to get around in on St. Maarten's roads.

You can rent better cars if you want.  If you do go upmarket, I recommend springing for a Jeep.  It's pointless to just get a bigger, more expensive sedan or coupe on this island - you either want as small a car as you can stand, or a 4x4.  We saw a few people driving around in rented Mustang convertibles (and Dollar has them), which is actually ridiculously stupid on this island for a whole bunch of reasons. St. Maarten is not California.

We also rented a GPS, even though a bunch of people told us we wouldn't need one. Wrong! We would have been hopelessly lost from day one without it. I think people who say it's not needed just must not go anywhere - we had to drive from the airport all the way to the opposite side of the island for our first trip, and we went to all four corners of the island after that. St. Maarten doesn't have highways - every road is practically a back country road, and they all look the same. Don't count on using your smartphone, either. My phone actually does work in St. Maarten but data roaming costs are ridiculous, and there's no offline Android GPS app (either paid or free) that seems to have decent St. Maarten maps. (All too bad, because the rented Garmin Nuvi did nothing if not make me homesick for Google Navigation.)

I like driving (well, in ideal conditions), but I do get stressed out/annoyed/pissed off if I see other drivers being stupid. I found driving on the island to be incredibly stressful to the point that my wife ended up taking over halfway through the trip and I never touched the wheel again.

For one thing, traffic on St. Maarten is a bitch. Parts of the island are still pretty quiet but other parts are really built up (and seem to be getting moreso), and it seems like you have to drive through those areas to go pretty much anywhere. In the photo above, you see a long line of cars - the car directly in front of us doesn't have his brake lights on because he's actually in park.  The tiny single lane roads just can't handle all those cars, and certainly not the idiot drivers on St. Maarten that will think nothing of stopping in the middle of the street to talk to a friend they happen to pass by or read a restaurant menu as they decide where to eat. Because of how small the roads are, there is no way to pass these jackasses. You can get backups for miles caused by somebody who has just decided to stop in the middle of the road for no good reason.

Ditto for parking.

This is Marigot, on the French side. We had to park on the edge of town. In Grand Case, we had to make three trips to the town before we could park at all.

This is Grand Case. There is a parking lot (which was full) and otherwise it's street parking, but you have to find an actual spot, which can be challenging. Here we're - what else? - stuck in traffic. This photo also illustrates another reason why you don't want a convertible - we'd been hit by a sudden and intense rain shower a few minutes before (which seems like it didn't even make it to Grand Case), before things completely cleared up 5 minutes later.

To be fair, the parking problems aren't true everywhere - like anyplace else, St. Maarten has its busy areas and its not so busy areas, and its busy times. This was peak season and it also makes a difference how many cruise ships are in port.  When we first got to St. Maarten, there seemed to be four or five large cruise ships in port at the same time, and it was a weekend.

The roads themselves seem like they were built about 50 years ago and then not maintained since. There were several areas we had to drive through on a daily basis that literally looked like the surface of the moon. (This is one reason why a 4x4 isn't a bad idea.) On our road to the hotel, which is actually a private road, we did see some homemade patchwork repairs being made using a trowel and what looked like that concrete stuff you buy in a tub at Home Depot. Better than nothing, but I guess there's no budget on this island for pothole repair crews.

Tailgating is a problem too. Because of the slow speeds that are most common on St. Maarten's roads, drivers have probably gotten used to being stuck to the back bumper of the car in front - even when speeds do pick up. There are some quiet stretches of road where you can get up to 70 or 80kph, and if you happen to have someone behind you, they'll still be so close that you can't see their headlights in your rear view mirror.

You see how close those cars are - it looks like bumper to bumper traffic, but on this stretch of road everybody's doing about 70kph.

You also need to be careful of wildlife. Like this guy:

These goats were also in the road when we first came upon them:

And while I surprisingly have no photos of them, there are tons of stray dogs you need to dodge.

Lastly, there are some monster hills in St. Maarten. This almost never comes through in pictures, but probably the best illustration I captured of it is the pic of our hotel entrance from my last post:

The main road there is actually a steep slope downward, and the hotel entrance is a steep slope upward. If you go to the right into the hotel there, you can also make a quick left to go to the office, which you can't even see because it's another blind hill that goes almost straight down for a second. You can see all the hills around in this pic too, and imagine that they all have similar roads to this. Our car was just barely able to navigate these roads with its little lawnmower engine, and there were definitely a few times I really wondered if we were going to go flipping down the side of a mountain. (There's one particular strange upward curve on a hill by our hotel where I swear, we were only held onto the road by centrifugal force as we drove around it - if we'd have stopped, I feel like our car would have tumbled off.)

Driving's a necessary evil on St. Maarten, but it's probably not going to be the most pleasant part of your trip.

Incidentally, we had no problem with Dollar Rent-a-Car.  A lot of horror stories are floating around about various car rental agencies on St. Maarten, but our experience was smooth.

St. Maarten trip report part 2 - the Princess Heights hotel

My wife and I stayed at the Princess Heights condo hotel, which is on the east side of the island in a quiet area called Oyster Pond, just barely on the Dutch side of the border. It turned out to be a really nice hotel and it was much cheaper than anything else that looked halfway decent. We stayed in a brand new building (they have another that's a bit older) with huge rooms that each have a kitchenette and a balcony that overlooks Dawn Beach... ok, and the roof of the Westin resort below. Honestly though, overlooking the Westin like that, and with a much better view of the surroundings, I felt kind of superior to those people who spent $450 per night down below us. Especially because Princess Heights guests are allowed to use all of the Westin's facilities... except for their beach chairs.

I had told the hotel that it was our anniversary and they made the room up special for us, with flower petals on the bed and a bottle of wine set out for us. It was a nice surprise. Our room (like all their rooms) also had a balcony, and we spent every night there just sitting outside, enjoying the view and talking. St. Maarten weather is nearly always perfect - the temperature when we were there only varied between 77 and 80 degrees from night to day, so you can sit outside in total comfort at any time.

A couple nights, I just went out there by myself and sat and listened to the waves. When I was a kid, my family used to rent a house every couple years at Holden Beach in North Carolina, and I remember a similar feeling of serenity then. I haven't felt that feeling again until now. Given the frigid weather and constant noise back home, I sure needed it.

Ok, ignore the sound of the car struggling to get up the hill, and imagine that's at night. (I actually did take a night video, but it was almost completely black.)

We did visit Dawn Beach and the Westin itself one day. Dawn Beach is a quiet little beach that's mainly used by Westin guests, and because of that my wife was a little uncomfortable on it - she felt like people knew we weren't staying at the Westin. But it's a public beach that just happens to be surrounded by the Westin on its south side, so who really cares? I didn't.

It's a nice beach and if you stay at the Princess Heights, you really should go. You can park at the Westin for free - they allow the public to park there. (My guess is that they had to make certain concessions to be allowed to serve as the entrance to the beach.) You can also walk, but it's easier to drive.

In the middle of this photo is the Princess Heights as seen from the Westin pool.

The Westin was surprisingly dead inside when we were there - it's a huge hotel with a casino in the middle of the giant lobby, but only one guy was using it that I could see. There were other people in the pool area and on the beach but they all looked like zombies! No talking, very little movement. It was kind of a weird atmosphere.

Incidentally, our hotel was literally the only place on the Dutch side of the island where I saw a mainly Dutch staff. Apparently the hotel is owned by Chinese but we didn't see them - the manager and all the workers are at least European and mostly Dutch. They seem to have a rotating internship program, so the staff is very young but eager to work. The person who checked us in (her name was Nina) actually rode with us in our car up to the second building to show us how to get there and then to show us around the room. She was really helpful! I somehow don't think we'd get such personalized attention at the Westin.

I got a little unlucky with the clouds in the mornings that I was able to get up this early, but apparently you can get some great sunrises from either Dawn Beach or our hotel: