Offbeat Eats

After the great laundromat kerfuffle, the next day went a lot more smoothly. We first visited the Saga du Rhum, a most excellent museum about rum, distillation, and Réunion’s history… with a most excellent tasting room allowing you to get free samples of most of the island’s many different rhums. After finishing at the Saga du Rhum, it was time for lunch. We headed back into Saint-Pierre, and settled into Kaz à Léa (Creole for “Lea’s House”) for lunch, right as noon prayer was sounding (Saint-Pierre has a sizeable Islamic population, and we were about a block away from the major mosque). And hey, how can I resist… it has “Kaz” in the name!

Our next goal before leaving Saint-Denis was to make sure we tried one of the restaurants known for local Créole cuisine, and in the case of Saint-Denis, there’s one place that has a particularly good reputation for catering to Créole tastes over those of visiting tourists, and that’s Le Reflet des Îles. Located about half a kilometer down Rue Pasteur (where about half of downtown Saint-Denis’s bars and restaurants are located) from the previously reviewed Zanzibar Café, just walking in you can see that it’s a popular place with both the tourists and the locals, with quite a few mainland French and Reunionnaise families all gathered around tables enjoying their rhum cocktails, la Dodo, and serving up large plates of food from various marmites (little cast metal pots traditionally used to cook the local carris, civets, and rougails) located all around the table.