What further strengthened our desire to dine at Tokyo Bay
was our successful pre-dining investigative visit to the restaurant, which is
located on the third floor of the “spa building”. (The first floor contains a gift
shop, locker rooms, hamam [steam room], and some treatment rooms.) Take the
elevator to the third floor, where you emerge into a chic and sophisticated
dining room! Although there is one hibachi table located towards the back of
the room, the middle of the room contains the spotlessly clean open kitchen and
the sushi bar area, and the front of the room contains elegant table dining.
Two outdoor terraces (one with a bar) are accessed from opposite ends of the
restaurant space. Tokyo Bay boasts that it is the only completely enclosed
(air-conditioned) restaurant on Anguilla! A DJ plays music on Friday evenings.
We chose to eat at the sushi bar so that we could watch the chefs at work.
We ordered the 9-course Chef Joe’s tasting menu, which costs
approximately $165 per person (a smaller 6-course tasting menu costs $125). Our
tasting meal at Tokyo Bay was the highlight of our entire Caribbean vacation!
The entire restaurant staff treated us like royalty! Chef Joe Richardson comes to
Anguilla by way of Las Vegas, where he worked at SushiSamba (in Las Vegas at
the Venetian) and Bar Masa (also in Las Vegas at the Aria). Chef Joe trained at
Le Cordon Bleu. The chef artfully designed and innovatively presented each dish.
Some of our courses follow. We only wish that we had requested a printed menu
so that we could exactly remember every course and ingredient.
- Tomato ceviche with yuzu,
olive oil, togarashi yuzu powder, and puffed rice (the tomatoes are grown
at Cuisinart’s hydroponic farm)
- Koal keel grilled tuna, topped
with fried Chinese noodles and served on a banana leaf (in Anguilla, charcoal is still made the
old-fashioned way, by building a "koal keel" of wood and dirt
that slowly burns the wood down to charcoal)
- Snapper with Ponzu gelée and cucumber strings
- Tuna with foie gras, sherry unagi reduction, gold
leaf
- Salmon sashimi with pickled onion, garlic
ponzu
- Tokyo Bay kamikaze roll with shrimp tempura,
spicy tuna, unagi sauce
- Miso crème brulee (This
was the only course that did not “knock our socks off”.)
Our meal at Tokyo Bay was the highlight of our stay not only
at Cuisinart, but on our entire 9-day vacation to St Barth and Anguilla. The
quality of the food, and the service that we received from every one of the
employees at Tokyo Bay is truly exemplary.
A meal at Tokyo Bay (and in particular, participating in the
9-course tasting menu) should be a must on any visitor’s list!
