Cré Olé’s Plat de la Semaine is a weekly feature (changing every Saturday) in which we ask the chef of one of Trinidad & Tobago’s well known restaurants (not necessarily a fine dining one – we love all good food at Cré Olé) to select for your palate’s delight an appetiser, entrée & dessert he or she might himself or herself orderCré Olé asked new head chef Ronford Henry of The Pavilion restaurant, Stonehaven Villas, Stonehaven Bay, Black Rock, Tobago – which offers spectacular views of the sunset on the Caribbean Sea – to choose the Plat de la Semaine.

For his appetizer, Henry prepared rack of crusted lamb, mustard-soaked, seared and coated in seasoned breadcrumbs before being baked and served on a colourful bed of mixed vegetables sautéed very lightly, accompanied by a mint-mango chutney sauce. This was an exceptionally tasty dish with a real possibility of overpowering whatever Henry might have thought to send out next.

For his entrée, Henry dropped flavour levels noticeably without lowering taste, via his own creation, sugarcane scallop kebabs. He pan-seared scallops before skewering them on chopstick-sized lengths of sugarcane with chunks of pineapple, onion, bell pepper and tomato and putting them on the grill. They were served on a bed of sweet potato mash with assorted vegetables in a garlic-tomato white wine sauce.

Even within a plat de la semaine so filled with tastes and flavours, Henry managed a standout dessert: a pineapple and lime sorbet served with a strawberry coulis in an edible coffee-mug-sized cup made from a quartered pineapple (with part of the hide shaped and re-attached as a handle).

EAT THE DISH “Assistant chef Matthew Alfonso and I really wanted to do the lamb as an appetizer because it just has such a great flavour on it. I’m a 95 per cent vegetarian, you know, but I taste my dishes as a chef and I particularly like to taste some items. This lamb is one. We’ve done it for cocktail parties and have had such a great response to it, I’ve decided I’m putting it on the Pavilion’s a la carte menu. It’s very, very nice. For the entrée, I really wanted to do something different and I don’t see much scallops as main course on the island. I wanted to get away from the lobster, the shrimp, the fish. With all that taste – we have the pineapple, very tasty, nice flavour in the kebabs, all the other tastes, the sharpness of the onion, the crispness of the peppers, I also wanted colour to match. I love these colourful veg, the deep green of the broccoli, the bright red of the peppers. We like to use as much inputs from the island as we can: keep our meals fine dining, of course, but add as much fresh local produce as possible. Keep people healthy while serving them good food. We used our own mangoes in the chutney in the starter and our own sweet potatoes in the main course. We try to create high end cuisine from stuff we can get on the island. Good local produce is so fresh and tasty. And what could be fresher or more local than a lime-pineapple sorbet? It is very light and refreshing – you want something that’s up there in taste but still very light, after that meal, and very refreshing. It’s a really lovely dish, sweet, but clean and light. I love it myself and I hope everyone will. The pineapple cup takes a little work but I like it for the presentation and, like the sugarcane skewer for the scallop kebabs, it’s a nice touch, I think, to be able to eat the dish as well as the thing it’s served in.”