Guyanese foods and restaurants

Last week, “Restaurant Week” – officially the “Guyana Restaurant Week” (GRW) – kicked off under the theme “Explore, Eat and Repeat”. With many gourmets and aspiring ones fearing foods “repeating” on them, maybe the theme was not the most felicitous, but the intent was to have domestic and foreign tourists – and hopefully food loving natives – sample our local “fine dining”. That is a worthwhile endeavour.

As part of the ongoing “Tourism Awareness Month”, GRW is in its second incarnation and will continue to the 15th of the month. Serendipitously, GRW’s launch coincided with the 2nd Caribbean Agri-Business Forum in Barbados which brought together experts from across the region and Europe to address the long identified need for the region, including Guyana, to wean their citizens off imported foods. Formed as they were as transplanted colonies dominated by European colonial powers, the Caribbean has always looked abroad for almost all its needs, including foods.

It was more than ironic that these territories, which produced the first successful industrial-type mega farms, have still not adapted that technology and know-how to produce its own foods. Harking to Guyana’s example and experience in attempting to introduce a greater percentage of local foods into the local menu, the conference was cautioned not to proceed by “banning” any foreign foods (such as wheaten flour and Irish potatoes), and imposing local foods (such as rice, cassava flour, and yams). It was suggested that the populace have to rather be convinced that the local foods are as nutritious and delicious as any of the foreign foods.

And this is where we believe that institutions such as GRW can play a greater and more proactive role in fostering new eating habits. The preference for foods is seen as very idiosyncratic and the expression, “there’s no accounting for taste” might also be considered quite apropos in applying to foods. But taste is acquired and as such can be encouraged in particular directions.

As colonials, our native foods were derided by the ruling class and the “import syndrome” started early in the day to continue into the present. In fact it has recently become exacerbated with the invasion of “fast food” chains from the US now that their government has finally began cracking down on their methods of preparation that leads to unhealthy outcomes such as obesity and cardiovascular challenges.

And this is where institutions such as GRW can play a critical role in changing our “taste” for foreign foods. One initiative might be to offer incentives to the fifteen upscale restaurants that are participating in a promotion where patrons are rewarded if they sample at least five of them during GRW to be creative in preparing local foods in innovative ways that would appeal to the palate of one and all. As the participating roster of restaurants increase, so will the demand for local foods.

One irony of our culinary challenge is that as “the land of six peoples” drawn from four continents, Guyana has such an astounding variety of local dishes. We have African, Indian, Chinese, Amerindian as well as European cuisines at our disposal, all of which give us an almost infinite number of permutations and combinations of foods that we can offer our own citizens and the world.

Our biggest challenge is to convince our own people that our foods are as good as any in the world, and possibly better. All the institutions of government and the private sector must get behind this goal.

A second movement that the Ministry of Tourism can encourage is for restaurants outside of Georgetown to be brought up to a higher standard that can cater to international norms of hygiene and presentation. Many of these restaurants serve very delicious local dishes that would appeal to the palate of tourists but because they are thought not to be “sophisticated” they never get any attention.