The Caribbean’s Best Sandwich Is Made on This Island — Here’s Where to Find It 

I remember the first time I visited Sainte Anne. The little beach town on the southern coast of Guadeloupe’s island of Grande Terre has some beautiful sand, but it’s really most famous for one thing: it’s food trucks. Head to the coastline on just about any day of the week and you’ll be met with a full-fledged parade of trucks, colorful and eclectic. And most of them specialize in one thing: the bokit. 

I’ve traveled more around the Caribbean than just about anyone else, and I can tell you with confidence that this is the greatest sandwich in the entire Caribbean. The bokit (a bit like a French Caribbean cousin of the famous “bake” from Trinidad) is simple in concept: deep fried dough filled with any number of ingredients, from tuna to morue (sailfish) to ham to merguez sausage, usually with some lettuce or sauce. 

It’s hard to describe the feeling of your first bokit. I remember thinking, “where has this been in my life?” 

There’s something visceral about the flavor of the bread, that marvelous mix of crisp and crunch, the way the protein and the sauce and the juice meld with the bread. It’s almost absurdly good; and in Sainte Anne, it’s a bokit metropolis, with every truck and tent vying for the crown, with names like La Casa del Bokit, Food Story and Chantou La Doudou. I love the name Bokit Love Grill. Have a bokit, and you’ll get it. You’ll fall in love, too.

When you come here, you feel like you’ve stumbled into a corner of food heaven.  

The bokit itself is a staple of everyday life in Guadeloupe; it has a long history dating back more than a century; as with many of the world’s most delicious discoveries, it was born out of necessity — a way to make bread without an oven, requiring only flour, oil and water. 

The gospel of bokit spreads across Guadeloupe (Gosier, the town about 20 minutes away from Sainte Anne that’s very popular with tourists, has some great spots, too). 

And if you look deeply enough you can sometimes find bokit outposts in other Francophone regions of the Caribbean. 

There is, for example, a bokit food truck that sometimes operates in Marigot, Saint Martin. 

But if you want the source, you need to go to right to the islands of Guadeloupe, a place where the crafting of bokit is a full-fledged art form. 

And then you’ll try it, and your culinary life will never be the same. I always go for the morue — and it hasn’t let me down yet. Now, you may, rightly, say that this just the equivalent of a bake you might find in Trinidad or Barbados. But I’ve had them all. This is different. Maybe it’s the culinary artistry of the French Caribbean, maybe it’s the ingredients (you won’t find a bake with merguez, after all, in Trinidad). It’s just got that x-factor. It’s got something more. It’s the power of the bokit.

This is, I can say with confidence, the best sandwich in the Caribbean. 

How you get to Guadeloupe? Two main ways, both from Miami: Air France and American Airlines, both of which run multiple roundtrip flights per week depending on the season. 

The island of Grande Terre has several good hotels nearby, led by the luxe La Toubana (rooms at $487) and charming, three-star retreats like the Auberge de la Vieille Tour in Gosier, ($270 per night). I loved the rum bar at the Auberge, for what it’s worth.