‘Dining with a Bajan’ helped me discover the real Barbados

Most visitors to Barbados follow a familiar script.

Friday night at Oistins Fish Fry, where calypso music is loud and the mood upbeat; a lazy catamaran cruise; and, of course, long afternoons on a beach chair with a rum punch.

I’ve done all of it after more than 20 years of visiting Barbados, and I still love these rituals. But in mid-June I arrived looking for something different. I wanted to see the island beyond its postcard image, to get to know some of the nearly 300,000 Barbadians – often called the friendliest people in the West Indies – and to better understand how a country shaped by plantation slavery remade itself into one defined by independence, tourism and cultural pride.

Barbados is small – just 34 kilometres long and 23 km wide – but it contains two very different coasts: the calmer Caribbean side to the west, known as the Platinum Coast, lined with luxury hotels and beaches; and the Atlantic-facing east, which is rougher, wilder with waves surfers love. Between them lie villages, sugar cane fields, roadside bakeries and rum shacks in a kaleidoscope of colours.

A former British colony, Barbados gained independence in 1966 and became a republic in 2021. The plantation era still echoes in Georgian architecture, former great houses and the cuisine, where slave provision dishes (flying fish and the porridge-like cou-cou) are national favourites today.

I was invited to the island to be part of the “Deeper Stories” travel program, which included a highlight called Dine with a Bajan – the local term for a Barbadian citizen. But before we sat down to that memorable meal, our guide showed us a few areas where you can experience the real Barbados that most visitors never see.

At Pebbles Beach in the capital of Bridgetown, the day begins at the crack of dawn. Visitors can sip coffee and watch thoroughbred racehorses from nearby Garrison Savannah being led into the sea for their morning swim.

Due north, in Speightstown, PRC Bakery has been serving the community for decades. Painted bright pink inside and out, its shelves overflow with jam puffs, meat pies, rock cakes and lead pipes. The Bajan dialect is literal: A lead pipe is a coconut sweet shaped like a water pipe, while a rock cake resembles a stone but is sweet and crumbly inside. The locals will help you order. Take their advice. The unappetizing-sounding rock cake is delicious.

Bridgetown’s Cheapside Market, dating to 1810, offers another glimpse of everyday Barbados. Vendors sell mangoes, breadfruit and spices alongside homemade remedies and fruit wines.

Umar Destang enthusiastically promotes his shark and whale oils as cures for, well, pretty much everything. “These oils will make your skin dewy, your hair shine, help with inflammation and keep you regular,” Destang tells me.

Nearby, Richard Pinder has spent five decades making wines from golden apples, cherries and sea grapes. “In my village,” he says, “you had to learn a skill. Wine-making was mine.”

But nowhere is the heritage (and pride) more evident than in the country’s food scene. Chef Damian Leach, owner of UVA Restaurant and Cocktail Kitchen, says visitors once came for the beaches. Now, they want “to experience our culture through our food,” he says.

Visitors search out stalls that sell fish cutter sandwiches (both Cuz’s and The Caboose are good options), Bajan-owned roadside restaurants like Velma’s Place or Yelluh Meat, and finer dining spots such as UVA, where the dishes are a delicious fusion of Caribbean and Mediterranean flavours.

Yet nowhere did we receive a richer lesson in Barbadian hospitality than at the home of Juliet (Jools) and Franklyn Jeffers in the parish of St. Joseph.

Their restored plantation manager’s house sits at the end of a long, dirt drive lined with 29 towering royal palms. The Jeffers are among eight local households chosen to be part of Dine with a Bajan, launched earlier this year to promote food tourism.

I spent four leisurely hours in their home. We had rum punch and small bites on the verandah, a cooking lesson (pumpkin fritters), and an eight-dish smorgasbord of Bajan comfort food with specialties like shepherd’s pie made with black belly lamb, macaroni pie, rice ’n’ peas and rum-soaked bread pudding. As well as great jazz, lots of wine and many belly laughs.

The Jeffers joined the tourism board’s program because Jools loves to cook, Franklyn enjoys entertaining and both relish meeting people from around the world. They also tried to help us understand Bajan dialect.

Each place setting included local sayings for us to decipher, such as “Cat luck ain’t dog luck.” Translation: What works for one person may not work for another. Or, “When yuh en’ got horse, ride cow.” Use whatever resources you have. We failed miserably trying to figure them out.

Eventually, one of our group asked a serious question: “What is it like, as people of colour, living in a house that had once been part of a plantation estate?”

Franklyn took his time answering. “Some people buy these houses and tear them down,” he said. “We chose to reclaim it. We bought it ourselves. We made it ours.”

Then he added quietly: “I can walk around here at night and think about what happened on this land. That can be difficult. But there is also a spiritual beauty here. We try to focus on that while still respecting what came before.”

As we drove out the long drive, past the palms and recently harvested sugar cane, Franklyn’s answer stayed with me. What will stay with me from this visit is not the postcard version of Barbados, but the people who invited us to their tables, markets and homes, showing us Barbados is best understood one conversation at a time.

If you go

Lunch or dinner can be booked with local families. Dine with a Bajan can be booked through dinewithabajan.com. Meals start at the equivalent of $134 a person. Cricket fans can consider booking “Legends at the Table” where a former player talks about the glory days of West Indies cricket over a Bajan meal.

The writer was a guest of Barbados Tourism, which did not review or approve this article. Stories are based on merit; The Globe does not guarantee coverage.