Alba's Bar & Restaurant

    For all its natural beauty and sunny climes in winter, St. Croix is not a gastronome’s destination. But, then, neither are most of the islands in the Caribbean, where the majority of food ingredients needs to be shipped in rather than raised or caught locally. The same goes for the absentee chefs, who are usually recruited from hotel chains elsewhere, like Dune by Jean-Georges Vongerichten at the Four Seasons on Paradise Island or Blue by Eric Ripert at the Ritz-Carlton in the Cayman Islands.

    The idea of finding a plethora of native cooks turning out local dishes from local ingredients is largely a myth, and the concierge at your hotel is unlikely to tell you where to find a modest place serving indigenous fare that he might actually eat in.

  

The Boardwalk in Christiansted

 I did find two such modest places on St. Croix, and they provided me with the best food and experience on the island. More on them later.

    Otherwise, over four days eating breakfast, lunch and dinner on St. Croix I found none of the restaurants I ate exemplified “Crucian” food, avoiding dishes like kallaloo, johnny cakes, mafi soup or “fish and fungi,” made of  fish with cornmeal and okra (pronounced “foon-jee”). Most menus are a mix of bar  and continental items like Buffalo chicken wings, burgers, French onion soup and filet mignon, perhaps a grilled Caribbean  snapper or wahoo––there is no seafood market on the island, though some fishermen bring in their catch to sell off their boats to the locals.

    My first meal was at Harbour Prime, next to the Hotel Christian on the boardwalk (right). It’s a big, pleasantly lighted place with open windows and wrought iron grating, ceiling fans, and wicker chandeliers, roomy booths and tables and an active bar that made a good daiquiri. No A/C. Its menu insists they buy fish from the local fishermen, although only one fish was listed on the menu. I ordered onion soup that was sour and saltier than sweet with onions, and fried whole snapper that was meaty but boney and very salty, sided with a mound of mashed potatoes/

    Savant (4C Hospital Street) had a pleasing intimacy, with café curtains, glass-topped tables and a small bar up front (left). It is also air-conditioned, which is not always a given in restaurants here. The staff is cordial enough but the lumbering manager, who was barely in evidence for most of the night, had the demeanor of a prison guard, when he was.

    The menu is called “eclectic,” which means anything from shrimp potstickers and chicken lollipops to a noodle bowl and various cuts of beef and pork, in addition to a Caribbean curry. None of it I tasted was out of the ordinary.

    There seems no reason why the Bombay Club (5A King Street, Christiansted; right) is called the Bombay Club, and I was hoping it might be an Indian restaurant. But, despite its rough stone walls and tile floor that evoked a Caribbean tavern from long ago, the menu was the usual mix of ribeyes and lobster, oast duck and grilled salmon, fettuccine with steak and parmesan cream. It does have some good conch fritters and crab chowder, but the specialty beef brisket had the texture of rope.

    I had higher hopes for Estera (39A Strand Street, Christiansted), with its rustic dining room and bar counter and a menu that shews Italian. I was buoyed by a starter of bruschetta lavished with goat’s cheese, tomatoes, basil and a counterpoint of balsamic vinegar (left), but the bucatini all’amatriciana tasted like little more than tomato concentrate and chile peppers. Gelato was okay. The wine list is in serious need of bolstering.

    Unimpressed by these established tourist restaurants, I was taken by a local guide to two local eateries that could not have been more enticing or savory.

    Despite its aristocratic moniker, La Reine Chicken Shack is indeed  a roadside shack outside of Christiansted. It is open-air and always crowded with people who come for the daily menu, which is composed entirely of Crucian dishes like stewed oxtail and goat, barbecued ribs, saltfish stew, wahoo and fungi, mashed cassava, breadfruit tostones and pork kallaloo. While I went to the bar to get two rum punches, my guide ordered all over the menu, and everything we had was rich in spices, moist and hearty. They make a point of letting you know that Martha Stewart ate here, which must have made Martha very happy.

    Over in Frederiksted I had a similar meal at a little place called Alba’s Bar & Restaurant (327 A King Street) was a complete delight: A small room with a small bar and a small patio outside, it is a downhome spot with wonderful island flavors in every dish. You go up to the kitchen window to see the day’s specials arrayed in a steam table. The menu sounds simplistic––pork chops, parrot fish, conch with butter sauce and so on––but does not hint at the myriad seasonings used, not least in the side dishes of yams, corn pudding and rich potato salad. The fish was impeccably grilled and serve with spicy rice, the chicken perfectly fried, the goat’s meat tender and suffused with flavors from the braising liquid.

  
 The people who run Alba’s couldn’t be friendlier to both local friends and visitors, which include many who get off the cruise liners lucky enough to be clued in about the place.

There are places like the Chicken Shack and Alba’s throughout the Caribbean, but you’ve got to ask the locals where they go and you will eat every bit as well.

 

 

 

 

Neither Katie nor David slept well that night, thinking over all they’d been through and what they’d heard from Judith Baer. The next morning, they re-booked their flights home, and Katie called both Catherine and Alan to tell them what had occurred. Catherine told her she’d probably have done the same thing and believed Baer would never have agreed to a video interview.
    Alan also agreed that his investigative reporter should protect her sources and not have called the police after the interview and was delighted that Katie had gotten such a scoop, one that could be followed up, one he’d even agree to send Katie to Israel for, if a great article came out of it.
    Meanwhile David called Borel, who was stunned by the news but said he would probably have had little success in keeping Baer off the plane the night before. He, too, felt that such an act by someone who had been a hero to Parisians would have been difficult to prosecute. Borel then checked and found out that Baer had, in fact, traveled on an Israeli passport and that now she was beyond apprehending.
    “We will make the usual requests for her return,” said the detective, “but there’s little chance of that happening.  I might have done what you did, mon ami. I’m not sure I would want to be the one to arrest Louise Jourdan. I will reserve the right, however, to try to follow the virus back to the Pasteur Institute. Then I can make the public announcement that there seems little likelihood there will be any further hotel attacks. The public needs that assurance at least.”   
    “Catherine can probably help you with that part of it. I’m sure she wants to be the first to report the story, even without Baer on camera.”
    Katie and David met with Catherine and Borel that day and shared all they knew thus far. By then Borel  had found that Baer had arrived in Tel Aviv, where she apparently kept an apartment. He would have colleagues in the Israeli police find out if she checked into a hospital there. He also found out from Baer’s colleagues at the Institute that, yes, she had been suffering for some time from lymphatic cancer and had made plans to go to Israel weeks before, telling them she would not be returning to Paris.
    There seemed nothing to celebrate about what had happened, so Catherine and her two American friends simply had a drink, not dinner, and said goodbye to one another.  The next day Katie and David took the ten AM flight out of Charles deGaulle.

         Once back at her office, Katie had long conversations with Alan Dobell as to how her story was to be crafted. Alan thought that there should be no question that Baer was in fact Louise Jourdan, despite her weak denial. Katie thought the truth should be left for the reader to make the final judgment.
         “In any case,” said Alan, “I think you should try to contact Baer, ask her how things are going and ask if you could fly to Tel Aviv for a further interview. See what she says now that she’s safe from French law. She may be more comfortable a few weeks from now.”
         But there was not to be a few weeks left to Judith Baer. Despite state-of-the-art treatment at the world-famous Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (left), the cancer raged through her. Ten days after arriving in Tel Aviv, Dr. Judith Baer was dead.
         She had no relatives in Israel but colleagues who knew and had enormous respect for her work mourned her passing, and she was buried according to Jewish rituals. The rumors of her being Louise Jourdan, French hero, were mentioned with propriety in the local Israeli media, while the Paris newspapers generally wrote sympathetic accounts of her life and death, surveying her career as a leading infectious disease scientists, with ample quote from her colleagues. Catherine had been the first to report the story and garnered further praise from her CNN bosses.
         The Paris media did find that resurrecting the story of Louise Jourdan and Hôtel Allemagne allowed for two or more follow-up stories, along with more sensational histories of the Nazis brothel hotels—a topic most Parisians had little or no knowledge about—and articles that stoked again the debate on who and who did not act with honor during the war while Paris was occupied. Old stories about Coco Chanel (right), who survived the war and thrived, untainted by scandal, were published as memoirs from those who knew her. More  than one account quoted Chanel’s cryptic motto, “I’ve done my best, in regard to people and to life, without precepts, but with a taste for justice.”
        Chanel died in 1971, but her fashion house never ceased functioning under other designers.

         In New York, Katie assembled all the French material and followed up on all aspects of what was, basically, a crime story with a very unlikely hero. She interviewed dozens of hotel personnel, guests who had come out of the hospital and were willing to speak, Baer’s  colleagues at the Institute, as well as infectious disease specialists in New York research hospitals.
         Her research revealed that after the liberation of Dachau, Louise Jourdan would eventually find her way back to Paris,  but, owing to the prospect of being accused of being a collaborator, she changed her name, taking Judith Baer—the first name perhaps to honor the Old Testament heroine who beheaded the Israelites’ enemy general Holofernes. She was only seventeen and managed to return to school, then to study medicine, becoming an esteemed research scientist in her field. She never married. Everything related to Louise Jourdan was rumor or hearsay, while Judith Baer went on to devote her life to wiping out viruses.

         When Katie’s article appeared in McClure’s several months later under the title “The Hôtel Allemagne: The Story of a World War II Parisian Heroine and the Pandemic of 2002,” she did not attempt to prove conclusively that Judith Baer was Louise Jourdan, though the reader would have little doubt about its probability. The last line of the article was somber yet hopeful: “Judith Baer died of her cancer on May 9, 2001, but the spirit of Louise Jourdan has been brought back to life in the minds of the good people of Paris.”