Travellers

Fiji's Cooks Are . . .

Unkind To

In the last 20 years Fiji has gone a long way towards providing international travellers with the kind of accommodation they need but the same thing can't be said of efforts on behalf of international stomachs.

TO my mind, the food in Fiji hotels in 1945 was a great deal better than it is in 1965.

Then it was plain, Colonial fare; today it is too often a sloppy mish-mash that sounds grandly international on the menu and tastes like hell on the palate.

There are, of course, the inevit able exceptions to this generalisa tion but they are unfortunately too infrequent.

In a recent 10 days in the Colony I drank numberless cups of tea that had been stewed until they tasted as though concocted from Senna leaves; I ate curry that seemed to be composed of hard, bouncy little rubber balls instead of meat; and I had “grilled Walu steak” so dry it could have been made from papier mache and had probably been out of the sea for at least 10 years.

And British, Too!

All these things, you might imagine—in a place that has been British since 1874, where fish is part of the native diet and where most cooks are curry-eating Indians—would turn out to be f.a.q., even if such exotica as American hot-cakes must of necessity be a calculated risk.

While some of the last that I’ve sampled would not cause Aunt Jemima to blush, others are noth ing but poor relations of crepes suzettes —but all crepe and no suzette. What’s more, instead of the specified maple-syrup there was that good old by-product of the sugar-cane industry, known in Australia as Bullocky’s Delight and in more refined circles as golden-syrup.

American tourists who like hot

cakes for breakfast should try to see a sample before risking it.

As far as I can find out there are no imported chefs in Fiji and probably the Immigration Depart ment would refuse them entry even if hotels were willing to employ them; at the same time, few if any of the hotel cooks in the Colony have ever been sent abroad for training.

Not Surprising

In these circumstances it is not surprising that the general level of cooking is as bad as it is.

In a country that is trying to make tourism its second or third industry it is absurd that there are no facilities for training hotel cooks. Dozens of Fijians and Indians are sent overseas each year to universities and technical institutions to learn economics, law, agriculture, medicine or how to be better policemen. No one yet has thought of sending budding cooks to London or Paris —or even Noumea, New Cale donia, or Papeete, Tahiti —so that they can learn how not to murder the excellent raw material with which the Good Lord has seen fit to bless Fiji.

Places like Suva are also lack ing in high class coffee-shops and tea-rooms which serve light re freshments and cool drinks in pleasant, air-conditioned and even elegant surroundings.

The snack bar in Victoria Arcade and similar places in some of the big stores these days can barely cope with office workers taking coffee and lunch breaks and these are, in any event, closed at night and over week ends.— JUDY TUDOR.