St. Martin: La Villa

After a fun afternoon at the hotel’s beach, we got dressed up and decided to spend the evening on the French side of the island. Our hotel was straddling both the Dutch and French sides but the first day and a half we stayed closer to the Dutch side. On Friday night, we decided to drive a little further to the French side and went to eat at La Villa, which is located near Grand Case:

The restaurant is located on a street filled with restaurants and feels very similar to the French quarter in New Orleans. We were excited to dine on the French side (which is much nicer than the Dutch side and their roads are actually paved) and the restaurant owner helped us park our rental car since it was difficult to find parking.

La Villa has a three-course tasting which I decided to order since I enjoy eating in multiple courses; I started with the escargot:

And Ken started with the French onion soup:

I also went through two baskets of bread while eating the escargot so I sop up as much butter and garlic as possible:

Ken and I before our first course:

I loved the escargot, which were bathed in butter, garlic, wine and parsley. Ken tried them for the first time and also enjoyed them, but was more into his French onion soup, which I thought was a little light on the flavor.

For my main course, I ordered the lobster with risotto:

The tomato sauce was actually very similar to an Indian tikka masala sauce, which was an interesting complement to the freshly caught lobster. The scallops and seafood were also good with the creamy tomato sauce, but the other parts of the dish were slightly bland (the vegetables and pancakes on the side). Originally, Ken was going to order the risotto because he was still recovering from food poisoning, but since my dish came with risotto, he decided to order fish instead.

Ken ordered the mahi mahi with a side of clams:

The sauce was indistinguishable but was light enough that it didn’t bother the mahi mahi, however, neither of us were a fan of the clams or any other part of the dish.

For dessert, I ordered the trio of sorbet:

The passion fruit was our favorite, next came raspberry, and our least favorite was mango because it was too sweet and not mango-like enough. At the end of our meal, the owners gave us truffles:

And banana rum:

We enjoyed the atmosphere and it was probably our favorite meal from the entire trip. Since we were on the French side, they charged Euros instead of USD but a lot of the restaurants in the area did a 1 USD for 1 Euro exchange rate if you paid in cash. If we ever return to St. Martin, we’d love to explore Grand Case and the French side of the island more; it seemed very lively and fun!