Rarotonga Part 5: Kai (Food)

While we were in Rarotonga, we ate a great deal of impressive food, and I feel that an account of our trip would be incomplete without some acknowledgement of all the deliciousness.

Of course, we had lots of fabulous drinks on fabulous beaches. J's almost always included alcohol, and mine never did, and both were good. Notice the lovely starfruit on this one! I also got to taste delicious star fruit on our quad adventure, when the guide picked one straight off the tree and gave it to me. Just the right way to enjoy them.

At that same restaurant, I had battered yellow fin tuna, caught right there, of course. Little did I know it then, but I was going to eat yellow fin tuna prepared an astonishing number of different ways during our time there.

This is that restaurant from the beach.

We went to Island Night, which I will write more about in my next (and last Rarotonga) post, but look at all this food! We misunderstood what time dinner was, and ended up waiting around for an hour, enjoying the peaceful evening but getting very hungry, which turned out to be a good thing, as we both ate so much food!

Here was my first plate of food. Notice the brown and white stuff at the bottom. It doesn't look very appetizing, but it's actually a local delicacy called poke (pronounced poke-ay), made from bananas. You boil them, mix them with arrowroot starch, and bake them, and they end up jelly-like, and then they're served with thick coconut cream. We both thought it was divine.

Next to it, by the chicken leg, is a food I've forgotten the name of, but it's also a local specialty, and it's made from the top green parts of taro plants, which are like spinach, and it was also delicious.

Multiple people recommended Le Bon Vivant, or LBV, as the best restaurant on the island. We biked quite a long way (in island distance) to get there, and we were not disappointed. J had a burrito and I had chicken tacos, and they were both out of this world. Also, a shy but eager waitress came over to ask J if he was a movie star, as apparently all the waiters and waitresses were in the back Googling him, as they thought he was the actor who played Superman in the new movie! So funny! 

We also enjoyed Vili's, which some say has the best burgers on the island. We liked our burgers, and also enjoyed the chickens hanging around hoping that they could steal some fries.

We both enjoyed drinking coconut nu, which is the milk from the young coconut. We learned that in the "olden days" (as my children like to call any time more than 5 years ago), if mothers had trouble breastfeeding, they would feed the newborns nu, and even that once when they ran out of liquid for the IVs in the hospital, they used nu! (J was not a fan of either of these practices, but agreed that in times of scarcity, it's probably not the worst option.)

One of the places where we drank nu was at The Lazy Trout, which had this delightful guy relaxing out front.

J claims that this carrot cake was the most delectable thing he's ever tasted, although I should mention that he was reasonably generous with such praise during our time there. The beautiful drink next to him was quite tasty as well.

This is ika mata, which means raw fish (in NZ Māori as well as Cook Island Māori). It is prepared with coconut milk (a major staple), lemon, cucumber, onion, and often other veges. I had it quite a few times while we were there, as it was amazing. Often, it was made with yellow fin tuna.

I also had yellow fin tuna at a fancy restaurant we accidentally found, where they'd cured it with beetroot, which was probably my favourite way to eat it, actually. Plus, look how gorgeous and red it made it! (This whole salad was incredible.) I also had grilled yellow fin tuna, and I think there was another style, but I can't remember.

I debated putting these next pictures in my last post, which will be about culture, but I decided to put them here and save some others for that one. These pictures our from the Progressive Dinner we went to on our last night there, during which we were welcomed to the homes of three local families who served us food and taught us about their lives in Rarotonga.

This was the first place, where we had appetizers.

There was taro and manioc to try - both root vegetables a bit like potatoes, but starchier. The whitish stuff in the bigger bowls to the side is homemade ika mata (raw fish), and it was better than any I'd had at restaurants. And then the orange stuff is pawpaw... salad, maybe? Not sure what you'd call it, but it was mind-blowingly good. I didn't even know that I liked pawpaws, but now they're a favourite!

This is the next house we went to, and we ate on the terrace by that beautiful balcony. It was fabulous. Sadly, I didn't take any pictures of the food here, but I remember that we had amazing poke (the banana dish) and "Island chips" which are fries made out of taro and manioc, which I just could not get enough of. They also had amazing fruit smoothies.

Apparently I only remembered to take a picture of my plate of food at the last house, which is unfortunately not very exciting looking, but the food was amazing, especially the bread-coloured stuff on the left, which was an incredible banana dish. Rarotongan cooks can do an impressive number of things with bananas and coconuts.

In conclusion, if you go to Rarotonga, I recommend trying all the food on offer, because it was all impressive.