Now, for the good stuff....

Reunion is really a culinary delight. The mix of cultural influences from France, Madagascar, India, China, Portugal, Indonesia, and other locals makes for a particularly vibrant mix of ethnicities, often all blended together in the same meal. Add in the fact that the island has a shockingly wide range of agricultural products of their own (guava, papaya, banana, sugar cane, pineapple, chayottes, and mangos in particularly all grow like, and sometime as, weeds, and there's a strong spice industry as well) makes for some particularly great, and sometime unique, ingredients to work with. There's also enough French influence (the island is actually part of France, not a colony) that if you are on an actual road, you are also guaranteed to be never more than a 20 minute drive from a decent boulangerie or patisserie, even when in the middle of the island in the mountains.

When it comes down to it, however, the foundation of nearly every single menu and meal is the "carri" (curry, also spelled "cari" or "cary"). A variant of the Indian-style curry, it's generally meat simmered in a sauce of tomatoes, onions, garlic, ginger, thyme, turmeric, and saffron, and can be found with just about every type of protein, ranging from chicken (carri poulet), to duck (carri canard), swordfish (carri espadon), shrimp (carri camarons), and even octopus (carri zourite). The carri is, without variation, served up with a mountain of rice, and some sort of simmered bean (lentils and lima beans being the most common). The carri itself is always very heavily spiced... but unlike Indian or Chinese curries, the carri itself is almost never actually hot in flavor: they don't use hot peppers in the carri itself. Much of this is a byproduct of the French not particularly liking hot food. But don't think that there isn't heat... Each carri is also served up with either "piment" (a hot-pepper salsa made with the tiny hot peppers grown locally), or a rougail, a spicy chutney that usually mixes tomato, garlic, ginger, and chile peppers, often with other local ingredients like lemon, lime (including kaffir limes), thyme, mango, and the like. And while a few of the rougails were more tart than hot, a few of them were about as fiery as you can imagine, so only a tiny little dab of rougail was enough to flavor your entire plate. More than a few times, my American Southwest-calibrated palate with many years of Indian and Thai experience surprised the locals with my love of some of their hottest rougails.... but just as many times I found myself having to search out a "carafe d'eau" to put out the fires.

Variants of the carri also exist. Confusingly, a "rougail" can also be the main dish itself, since a carri made with either smoked pork (boucane) or sausages (sausisses) is also known as a "rougail" (e.g. "rougail sausisses"). And there's a civet, with is a stew-like variant of a carri with more vegetables.

Breakfast is pretty much French-standard: bread (both baguettes and proper croissants being common), butter (one of the few French imports that was comment was Breton butter, oddly enough), and jams made from one or more of the island fruits (mango, guava, and pineapple being the most common, often with vanilla or other spices mixed in).

So you'll see that most of my meals consisted of some sort of carri, a big pile of rice, and some lentils and rougail on the side. But wow, the variety...