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Tobago is a small island but its Caribbean music and cuisine are second to none. From steel pan to seafood and curry goat, it’s all part of the experience, in villages and hotels, in street stalls and stylish restaurants.
Relaxed and unpretentious, Tobago caters to all budgets and invites everyone to share its traditions. It’s a place to enjoy fresh Caribbean food, meet the locals on Scarborough market and feel the beat of the drums on a balmy night.
Caribbean Music, Steel Pan in Buccoo on Tobago Island
Steel pan music was born in Trinidad, Tobago’s big sister island, in the early 20th century. It evolved from traditional bamboo percussion popular at carnival time. Made from an oil drum and struck with straight rubber-tipped sticks, the steel pan is the national instrument. Notes moulded into the surface give different sounds according to their size.
Almost every village in Tobago has a steel band to entertain hotel guests, perform at weddings and festivals or simply have a good time in Buccoo. Every Sunday night, the usually sleepy village of Buccoo greets the coming week with fun and dance, and often a spot of romance, until the early hours. The night is filled with calypso, soca, reggae and more. There are a few craft stalls and plenty of cheap rum punches and street food.
Caribbean Cuisine, Seafood and Curry Goat
In the streets or at home, traditional food in Tobago is based on fresh produce from land and sea. All along the coast, from Crown Point to Charlotteville, fishermen haul in their catch at least once a day. Red snapper, grouper, flying and king fish are popular, alongside conch and other seafood, but pride of place in Caribbean cuisine goes to Tobago’s signature dish, the savoury and filling curried crab and dumpling.
Other hearty options include oil down, or meat and breadfruit cooked in coconut milk, curry goat and thick soups flavoured with dumplings, callaloo, green banana, cowheel or cassava. There’s bush tea made from plants and herbs, root vegetables known as blue food, salty conch souse and Pacro water, a sea cockroach broth for the brave, which claims to be an aphrodisiac.
Tobago Scarborough Food Market
It all comes together in Scarborough, Tobago’s own capital, an overgrown village rather than a city, where pan music blares out of the bars and the smell of frying fish and dumplings hovers in the streets. On a hot day, cruise passengers head straight for the beach at Pigeon Point but the weekday market is well worth exploring, especially on Fridays and Saturdays when myriad stalls spill out into the streets.
There are souvenirs and T-shirts but most colourful is the food section where local housewives bargain for fish, live chicken and seafood, including blue crabs. Pumpkins and eggplants mingle with callaloo, coconuts, dried sea moss, knobbly vegetables, papaya and grapes, home made pepper sauce, bottled herbs, maube bark and saffron root. It’s a great place to snack on roti or cassava cake while swaying to the hypnotic beat of a steel pan band across the street.
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