Image credit: ChefsdeTahiti. Retrieved from bbc.com
Foie gras. Escargots. Steak frites. 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. An overseas country of France, the Islands of Tahiti, as French Polynesia is sometimes known, continue to feel an outsize influence from abroad. Even the price of baguettes is controlled by the government, set to roughly 50 Pacific francs.
But 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.
One such person is Heimata Hall, Moorea-born chef and the founder of Tahiti Food Tours. 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. 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.
“A lot of times when people come to Tahiti, they get stuck going to the same mainstream restaurants,” said Hall. “We went stagnant for a while, and it was really French cuisine that took the upper hand. I realised, ‘Man, there’s all these other little [Tahitian] 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. Most visitors don’t even know that they exist.”