Heat up corn tortillas in a hot pan by turning every few seconds until cooked to your liking. Refrigerate while you cook the corn tortillas. You can adjust the sauce to your liking by adding more hot sauce.Ĭombine the fish, avocado, papaya, onion and garlic in a mixing bowl and stir in the oil and lime juice. To make the sauce, combine all the ingredients in a bowl and season with salt and pepper. Hall first recalls noticing this movement at Teao Maiarii's Maru Maru, a fine dining restaurant in the capital of Papeete that pays tribute to Tahiti's deep terroir. While celebrating the land and returning to Tahiti's roots has become part of the country's culinary present, many of its youngest chefs are imagining how they can carry these traditions into the future. Two of the most beloved Tahitian dishes, fafaru (a notoriously pungent fermented fish eaten with fermented coconut) and ahima'a (a cooking method named after the ground oven used to slow bake everything from wild pig to chicken) require little more than patience and time. We work closely with the land and the ocean to get our food." Don't be surprised if the prawns you're dining on were plucked from the water a couple hours ago or that your mango is fresh off a tree.Ĭooking on the Islands of Tahiti is an equally thoughtful process. When it comes to Tahitian dishes, she said, "It's always a matter of remembering to respect what you're eating. Next, it's on to a roulotte (food truck) or snack (a casual canteen best known for big portions and small prices) for lunch, where you can order a Tahitian or Chinese fusion meal like poisson cru (recently caught, raw parrot fish with creamy, rich coconut milk), ma'a tinito (fatty pork belly with starchy red beans and vermicelli), or – a crowd favourite – chow mein sandwich (exactly what it sounds like, yet more delicious than you could ever imagine).Īccording to Hall, these modest, "quick service" spots, including Snack Rotui and Snack Mahana, are gradually becoming easier to find, thanks to their good value, high quality and a demand for authenticity from residents and tourists alike.Īlexandrine Wan, Tahiti-born CEO of French Polynesia tour company Nani Travels, has also discovered a rise in guests looking for meaningful travel. On a typical afternoon with Hall, you might stop on the side of the road to buy ripe soursop or some crunchy mango with plum powder, as sweet as it is tart. Most visitors don't even know that they exist." I realised, 'Man, there's all these other little mom-and-pop snack shops where we as locals eat, and tourists aren't tapping into that.' These places use incredibly diverse ingredients, especially from the sea. "We went stagnant for a while, and it was really French cuisine that took the upper hand. "A lot of times when people come to Tahiti, they get stuck going to the same mainstream restaurants," said Hall. He wanted to show travellers bite-by-bite how his homeland's bounty has more to offer than imported duck confit and how it bears the mark of two other prominent cultures: Native Tahitians and the Chinese who, brought here to work on coffee and sugar plantations in the 1860s, now make up the third largest population on the islands. After spending five years in Honolulu working with the now-closed Town restaurant's Ed Kenney, a leader of the Polynesian farm-to-table food movement, Hall returned to his community with a similar "local first" ethos.
One such person is Heimata Hall, Moorea-born chef and the founder of Tahiti Food Tours. Even the price of baguettes is controlled by the government, set to roughly 50 Pacific francs.īut in recent years, young Tahitians have been reclaiming their heritage, putting traditional ingredients like lagoon fish, taro leaf and star apple on the menu, and making them more accessible to their community – as well as tourists.
An overseas country of France, the Islands of Tahiti, as French Polynesia is sometimes known, continue to feel an outsize influence from abroad. Visit French Polynesia and you'd be forgiven for forgetting that you're in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, nearly 26,000km away from Paris.
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