IMAGES: ALAMY; COCKTAIL KITCHEN
FOOD & DRINK
Damian Leach Chef and co-owner of Cocktail Kitchen, Barbados
“I used to get into a lot of trouble at school. They kicked me out of art
class and made me take food and nutrition,” says 40-year-old Bajan chef Damian Leach when asked what sparked his love aff air with cooking. The art world’s loss, it turned out, was the
culinary world’s gain. “I fell in love with cooking that fi rst week. I wasn’t good at much, but after I made my fi rst coconut curry, I went home and told my mum I wanted to be a chef.” Cooking, combined with a desire to see the world,
took Damian to Ottawa in Canada, where he worked at the Courtyard Restaurant under award-winning chef Marc Lepine while earning his Le Cordon Bleu Grand Diplôme in pastry and cuisine. For a Caribbean chef, dalliances with French
cuisine are nothing unusual, he points out. “It’s a mindset you’ll see from a lot of local chefs. We see French cuisine as the highest standard and don’t appreciate our own. I was guilty of that, too, but when I came home in 2008, I took the techniques I’d learnt and applied them to ingredients here. It made me fall back in love with Bajan food.” In 2016, shortly after being named NIFCA
Chef of the Year by Barbados’s National Cultural Foundation, Damian opened Cocktail Kitchen, the neon-painted Christ Church restaurant he co-owns with a friend. Seafood features heavily on the locally sourced menu, although the most popular item doesn’t just sate guests’ appetites, but benefi ts the environment, too.
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NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM/TRAVEL Lionfi sh is an invasive species which has
wreaked havoc in the Caribbean Sea since the 1980s. “They eat coral, as well as other fi sh, and they don’t have many predators,” explains Damian. Lionfi sh also reproduce with startling frequency, and many Caribbean islands, including Barbados, hold competitions — usually followed by cook-off s — during which locals compete to catch as many as possible. But Damian’s love of lionfi sh doesn’t just relate
to the damage they do. “It’s great that we’re helping the ecosystem, but it’s also got this beautiful, clean fl avour. In the restaurant, we season it with pepper sauce and I love to use it in poke.” The breadfruit tattoo on his hand hints at
another favourite ingredient. “Growing up in Barbados, we’d roast breadfruit on the beach and stuff it with cheap foods like canned tuna. I decided to elevate it by adding saltfi sh — a very traditional ingredient — along with lobster, aioli and Bajan pepper sauce. It’s a fancy version!” Damian’s reluctant to pit Bajan cuisine
against other islands, but he’s certainly elevating Barbados’s food scene. “I don’t like to say Bajan food is better, but we’ve started to place more importance on our cuisine here. Fine-dining restaurants elsewhere often focus on European dishes, but here we take our own fl avours to a higher level.” HOW TO DO IT: Damian’s Cocktail Kitchen restaurant is in St Lawrence Gap, Christ Church, Barbados.
ckbarbados.com
Clockwise from top: St Lawrence Gap in Christ Church is one of the parish’s most lively neighbourhoods; Damian is a dab hand at cocktail- making as well as cooking; Cocktail Kitchen serves fresh, seasonal dishes such as tuna carpaccio
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