Island restaurants are absurd. There’s no other way to put it. You land in paradise, surrounded by shimmering water teeming with life, and what do they serve you? Alaskan king crab, farmed salmon that tastes like wet cardboard, and shrimp from Thailand—a globalized culinary catastrophe brought to you by frozen cargo. Somehow, they think that because you’re an idiot tourist, drunk on the view of palm trees and waves, you won’t notice that your “seafood platter” has traveled more miles than you did to get here. Spoiler alert: you’re eating yesterday’s fish. Or last month’s.

These places thrive on pretense. They slap together a menu of the familiar, the expected, and the grotesquely imported—lobster from New England, lamb from Australia, beef from God-knows-where—all on an island that doesn’t even have a proper farm. Lettuce? Flown in. Steak? Flown in. Want avocado? Enjoy its 5,000-mile journey from Peru. They don’t even try to hide the absurdity; they revel in it. The irony? All of this logistical gymnastics to re-create a cuisine that isn’t better than what you’d get back home at some mediocre chain restaurant near the airport.

And the fish? Don’t get me started. These islands are surrounded by oceans brimming with tuna, mahi-mahi, snapper, grouper—all just waiting to be hauled in, cooked, and savored. But no, they’ll serve you a sad fillet of frozen salmon dyed orange and doused in a saccharine glaze, like they think you won’t notice the lie if they coat it in enough sugar. Octopus shows up too, likely frozen, probably smarter than the chef who’s overcooking it into something you could use to re-sole your flip-flops.

It’s not just insulting—it’s wasteful. The culinary theater of flying in ingredients from thousands of miles away, just to approximate some bland, homogenized menu of surf and turf, is a tragedy of missed opportunity. You’re on an island! The ocean is right there! What’s needed is not imported lettuce or a sous-vide lamb rack but a bit of humility and a willingness to work with what’s local, what’s fresh, what’s alive and honest. A fisherman’s catch grilled with a squeeze of lime. Local greens, maybe foraged. Fruit plucked from the land you’re standing on.

The best food in the world isn’t about excess or flying ingredients halfway across the globe. It’s about proximity, immediacy, and respect for where you are. Island restaurants that ignore this are the culinary equivalent of bottled water in Venice—they’re a con job, wrapped up in the illusion of convenience and a veneer of sophistication.

You experience the culinary equivalent of modern democracy: an endless parade of choices, each more senseless than the last, leaving you backed into a corner of dread where your only goal is to figure out which is the least catastrophic. Like democracy, they are overpriced and frustratingly inferior to what could so easily be better, forcing you to lower your expectations and pray for a scrap of decency. And so, you sit down, scanning the menu with the cautious optimism of someone searching for a locally caught fish—or at least one that’s only traveled a thousand miles instead of ten thousand.

But hope fades quickly. The fish is never fresh. It’s flown in from halfway around the world, frozen solid and thawed just in time to masquerade as “local” in the most offensive of lies. Alaskan king crab? Because nothing says “tropical island” like a crustacean that once crawled across the icy floor of the Bering Sea. And the vegetables? Oh, the vegetables. Whatever limp, tasteless greens managed to survive their transcontinental flight are drowned in sauces and spices designed to obscure their mediocrity.

Then there’s the cheese—probably not local because God forbid the island produce anything other than coconuts. If you’re lucky, the staff hasn’t left it out long enough to start a bacteria colony. But eat early, because by the time dinner service is in full swing, the cheese tray is less “culinary offering” and more “game of intestinal roulette.”

The absurdity of this logistical feat is almost impressive. A display of what humans can accomplish when they combine overreach with stupidity, creating a fragile supply chain stretching across oceans just to deliver you a dish that tastes like sadness.

What’s maddening is how easy the solution is. A locally caught fish, grilled simply with lime or herbs. Fresh, in-season fruit, unadulterated by syrups or sugar. Vegetables grown a few miles away, seasoned with restraint. That’s all you need. But no, you’re stuck with a $50 plate of thawed-out Atlantic salmon and wilted lettuce that traveled farther than you did to get here.

Island restaurants don’t just miss the point; they actively reject it. They chase a fantasy of globalized cuisine at the expense of authenticity, freshness, and common sense. So here you are, paying top dollar for a meal that could have been extraordinary, but instead feels like a cruel joke played on anyone naive enough to expect better. Just as with democracy, you grit your teeth and make the least terrible choice, salvaging what little dignity you can. Maybe they’ll have one local fish, if you’re lucky. Maybe the lettuce won’t taste like cardboard. But one thing’s for sure—you’ll leave wondering why paradise has to feel like such a scam.