The Caribbean came to Belgravia on 30 September, when chef Diego Smith took over Wild by Tart — a former coal station tucked beneath rattling railway lines — for a single evening celebrating the food of the Cayman Islands.
Smith's path to the stove is its own story. He started out as a street food chef in the Caymans, spent a few years cooking in Manchester, then headed home to the islands, where he's become one of its best-known culinary names. For this dinner, hosted with Condé Nast Traveller, he reworked the dishes he grew up eating for a room of around a banquet-length table set with fresh papayas and fluorescent dragonfruit instead of flowers.
Canapés set the tone: Cayman-style shelled beef tarts with a Scotch bonnet kick, mahi ceviche, and pork belly served on cassava charcoal, all washed down with rum cocktails. The main event moved through papaya salad with curry grilled chicken, then Cayman snapper cooked coconut run-down style with breadfruit. Dessert was the islands' national sweet — cassava cake, paired with coconut sorbet and pineapple rum compote, and apparently worth swiping off a spouse's plate when they looked away.
Smith summed up his approach plainly: these are the family-and-friends dishes of his upbringing, reimagined so they please the eye as much as the palate. It's a neat snapshot of where Caymanian cooking is heading — rooted in local ingredients like cassava, breadfruit, snapper and rum, but plated with a fine-dining sensibility.
The dinner also doubled as a reminder of what draws people to the islands beyond the plate. Regulars at the event swapped memories of bioluminescent bays on starry nights, kayaking along powder-soft sand and the ease of wandering the streets freely. Grand Cayman's famous bioluminescence tours and Seven Mile Beach are exactly the kind of experiences that pair well with a food-forward trip.
For travellers, the takeaway is twofold. If you're passing through London, keep an eye out for similar one-night culinary events at Wild by Tart — its schedule regularly brings guest chefs and themed suppers to the space. And if the menu made you curious, the real thing is a direct flight away: Caymanian cooking built on fresh seafood, Scotch bonnet heat and cassava in its many forms is worth building a whole trip around.
