Tahiti: Follow your nose for delicious fare

Tahiti's idyllic beaches provide the perfect setting for eating delicious tropical food. Photo / Thinkstock

When in Tahiti do as the locals do — grab a table, enjoy the music and savour cheap and scrumptious food at a rolling food truck, writes Suzanne McFadden

By day, they are run-of-the-mill vans parked innocuously in Tahitian backyards. By night, they transform — their sides folding out like butterfly wings — into colourful, loud and irresistible roulottes.

Les Roulottes — or "rolling food trucks" — appear around sundown every night of the week in vacated carparks on the streets of Papeete, or the roadsides of Moorea and Bora Bora. From the bellies of the vans magically spill barbecue grills, tables and plastic chairs that turn empty lots, or even residents' front yards, into rowdy al-fresco cafes.

You've heard it before, and it's true: eating out in French Polynesia — especially in resorts — is not cheap. A room service burger can set you back nearly $40.

But the roulottes offer a whole lot of food, for far less. If you don't know French, rely on the menu photos or the smells; wandering around the clutch of trucks on Papeete's waterfront, you're met by alluring wafts of grilled meat and caramelised sugar. Mahi mahi, barbecued ribs, chow mein, thin-crust pizza, crepes and galettes — buckwheat pancakes folded around ham and cheese — only confuse you for choice.

Visitors who want to stay true to the South Pacific environment head for the Tahitian specialty, poisson cru (raw fish salad), followed by a Nutella and banana crepe (Nutella is a food staple here). But it pays to follow the locals, who gather at the best food trucks each weekend with family and friends. Most swear by the steak frites — monster slabs of beef slathered in pungent Roquefort cheese or peppercorn sauce, or just butter, on top of a mountain of French fries.

My pick was a little different — a long, thin portion of grilled swordfish, which overlapped the plate, and Russian potato salad. Trust me, it was delicious and I'm a good eater, but I had to leave a third of it on the plastic plate. It cost 1600XPF ($21), a welcome relief on my wallet.

Do not expect a roulotte meal to be "takeaway" fast. It's about sitting at a table, with a red and white checked plastic tablecloth, eating a heaped bowl of French baguette hunks slathered in herbed butter, listening to the music — sometimes live — and watching your meal cook on a carpark grill.

Eat al fresco to taste the real flavours of Tahiti. Photo / Suzanne McFadden

La Place Vai'ete, the town square on Papeete's harbourfront, offers the most variety, catering for the cruise ship masses who pour into Tahiti.

It's probably not a place I could eat at every day, for my heart's sake, but it was well worth the experience.

Thankfully, French Polynesia is one of Earth's lush fruit bowls so, to counterbalance a butter overdose, you can stop at the roadside stalls that dot the main islands. On the laidback, heavily fragrant island of Taha'a, you can stuff your beach bag with fresh bananas, coconuts, lychees, pineapples, watermelon, papaya, mango and starfruit.

Houses have bread boxes beside their mailboxes, where baguettes are delivered daily. Locals reckon their loaves are superior to those in France — longer and cheaper here, they say.

But Taha'a's real claim to fame is its vanilla. The 150 farms on "Vanilla Island" produce 80 per cent of French Polynesia's vanilla, requested by the best chefs around the world for its cherry, floral, liquorice flavour.

Commanding around $400 a kilo, there's no wonder it's nicknamed black gold. It also demands a lot of attention: the orchid flowers must be hand-pollinated and, once picked, the fat cigar-shaped pods are given resort-style treatment - lying in the sun for three hours every day and hand-massaged for up to three months.

At Bora Bora Pearl Resort & Spa, I enjoyed the most sublime dish of my stay, eggplant stuffed with local parrotfish caught just beyond the reef. Most resort restaurants buy their fish direct from local fishers, who go out into the deep blue of the Pacific to reel in emperor fish, mahi mahi, tuna and swordfish.

You can go lagoon fishing and trawl for your own jacks, rainbow runner, trevally or barracuda, but it seems a lot easier to take a boat to a tiny motu (island) and enjoy it already prepared in a traditional Tahitian barbecue: grilled mahi mahi and poisson cru, accompanied by taro, banana po'e, and coconut bread; mango and papaya. As you eat at a picnic table with your feet in the crystal clear water, inquisitive little reef fish dart around your feet, hoping for crumbs.

But instead of slathering on butter, remember to lather sunscreen on yourself. In my gastronomic excitement, that's one thing I forgot.

CHECKLIST

Getting there: Air New Zealand and Air Tahiti Nui have regular flights from Auckland to Papeete.

Further information: See tahitinow.co.nz.

The writer travelled to Tahiti courtesy of Tahiti Tourisme.