I had been wanting check out Scrub Island in the British Virgin Islands for awhile because Marriott often has some really good travel agent discounts - so when I saw some openings in mid-May for $125/night I snapped up the opportunity.
Scrub Island is a private island that's a 10 minute ferry ride from Tortola and there is literally nothing on this island besides the hotel. So it can be a bit boring and limiting but once you get of get used to taking the ferry to the bigger islands, it's not that big of a deal and the views there are stunning. I have to chuckle a bit at the title of this entry as the only places to eat on Scrub Island are the two restaurants they have on property: the fine dining establishment Caravela and the more casual Tierra Tierra!
After enduring a 6AM flight out of JFK, Aarti and I landed at Scrub Island around 1pm exhausted and starving. The only real lunch option here is Tierra Tierra (although you can order pizza from the deli which we did one day and I would highly recommend it if you are being lazy AF), which over looks the pool and marina. It's your typical resort beach bar and restaurant that you'd find in the Caribbean - the menu consists of salads, sandwiches and a variety of burgers, sandwiches and wraps. ince we were in the Caribbean, I opted for the Scrub Island Fish Sandwich ($18) and Aarti got the veggie burger ($16). The fish sandwich was blacked grouper on fluffy Jamaican coco bread with sofrito sauce, slaw and a side of fries. The sandwich was as expected from a resort restaurant - the fish was grilled fine but the bread was a bit too much and I had to tear pieces off of it otherwise I felt like I would be eating a week's worth of carbs. The fries were overcooked and very bland but I was so hungry that it got the job done when I covered it with enough ketchup. I didn't try Aarti's veggie burger, but it also looked like standard fare.
As with most places in the Caribbean (except for Barbados and maybe Jamaica), food is not the star attraction on this vacation. I knew the food would be standard, at best, and expensive. I will say that our lunch wasn't nearly as expensive as I expected it to be and we did eat there again on our spa day where we both got salads. Obviously there isn't a whole lot of vegetation on these islands so the types of greens and vegetables used in any salad here is super limiting - the garden fresh salad I got that day was just a bed of mixed greens, cucumbers, tomatoes, and red onion with balsamic vinaigrette ($14) - so it was definitely no Sweet Green type of bougie salad. Overall, it's what you'd expect at a casual resort restaurant, so I don't have any real complaints, I just wished that maybe they could change the menu up every now and then to give it some variety, especially when there are no other options on the island.
Caravela 2 Forks
Caravela is the resort's "fine dining" establishment and they insist that you make a reservation even though the resort was practically empty. The woman who checked us in at the front desk said that there was no dress code and even the concierge was saying how the BVI in general is super causal. We didn't wear beach wear but I rolled in with white jeans and a grey top and Aarti was wearing flow-y pants and a regular t-shirt.
When we got to the front the hostess looked us and up and down and refused to seat us because we weren't dressed appropriately. WTF?! We looked around at the half empty restaurant and there were people there literally wearing shorts and a t-shirt. But since there was no where else to go unless we went back to Tierra Tierra, we begrudgingly obliged and changed into "nicer" clothes. It was totally ridiculous.
The menu here is pretty much seafood focused except for a few small salad appetizers. I felt bad for Aarti but she's usually good about rolling with the punches and when we had asked the hostess if they could make something vegetarian, she said it wouldn't be an issue. What we didn't know was that the veggie plate they said they would make was literally a plate of steamed carrots, broccoli and zucchini with nothing else. It was right out of a movie or something where you just had to laugh. Some of the other meat or seafood dishes had other more appealing veggie friendly side dishes like roasted potatoes, broccoli with garlic herb butter, mashed potatoes or jasmine rice - so they clearly would have jazzed up her plate instead of sending out a sad looking steam veggie plate. I guess the only good news was that they were steamed well and were crispy? Aarti ended up asking for a side of mashed potatoes but it was just crazy to think that they wouldn't have at least offered that up as a vegetarian option when we asked. The most offensive part of all of this was that they charged us $28 for that plate of vegetables.
As for me, I wanted to get the crab stuffed salmon but apparently at 8pm they had already run out. Seriously?! So I went with the blackened mahi mahi ($33) which came with a mango and black bean salsa, jasmine rice and my own medley of steamed vegetables. It was a totally fine fish dish - very typical of the islands and nothing to write home about at all.
Obviously, we were both still hungry so we got the chocolate lava cake with vanilla ice cream ($12) - this was clearly the best part of dinner. It hit the spot and we joked that if we had to come back here for dinner (which we wouldn't), we would just get dessert and wine and call it a day.
Mediocre food aside, the whole experience was tainted by the uppity rude hostess and then our server was also painfully slow. We had ordered a glass of wine each to start and it didn't come out until after our entrees were served. I know it's the island and everything is slower but this was just ridiculous. Since we were staying at the resort, we had to try this place at least once but thank god there were other more fun and better restaurants a 10 min ferry ride away, otherwise this experience would have most definitely ruined my vacation.
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