The first restaurant bill on St. Thomas is where a lot of people recalculate their trip. It isn't a rip-off. Nearly everything on a menu here — the produce, the beef, the dairy, the wine, the packaging it came in — arrived on a boat, and that shows up in the price of a burger. Add that most of the good restaurants are unhurried, sit-down affairs, and eating out three times a day for a week becomes both a budget item and a schedule.
The alternative isn't skipping the restaurants. It's picking two or three of them and cooking the rest.
What the math looks like
A week of dining out entirely versus cooking most meals is, for a family of four, usually the difference of a plane ticket or two. That's not a marketing line, it's just what happens when breakfast and lunch stop being transactions.
The bigger change is the pace. Breakfast at your own kitchen means the day starts when you want it to, not when a restaurant opens. Sandwiches in a cooler mean the beach day doesn't get interrupted by a drive to find food. Then you go out for dinner two or three times, at places you actually chose, and those meals are better because they're not routine.
Both our places have full kitchens — real stove, real fridge, real counter space, not a kitchenette. The Mahogany Seaview villa kitchen is pictured above, and it's the one guests cook in most, partly because it's up the hill and going out is a drive. The Sapphire Beach condo kitchen gets used differently: more coffee and lunch, fewer dinners, because there's a beach bar downstairs and SeaSalt is close.
What a kitchen actually needs
This is worth asking about before you book anywhere, because "kitchen" in a listing covers a wide range.
- A full-size fridge. A bar fridge doesn't hold a week of groceries for four people.
- A real stove and oven, not two induction rings.
- Sharp knives and a cutting board. Sounds trivial. It is the single most common thing missing from rental kitchens, and it makes cooking miserable.
- Enough pans to cook two things at once.
- A coffee setup you understand. Ask what kind. Arriving to a machine that needs pods you don't have is a bad first morning.
- A cooler. Not technically kitchen, but it's what makes beach lunches happen.
If an owner can answer those four or five questions straight, they've probably thought about the rest of the place too. That's roughly the same test we suggested for reading beachfront claims.
Shopping, briefly
There are full-size grocery stores on the island and a warehouse club, and prices are higher than the mainland but not shocking on staples. Produce is the category that varies most — some weeks it's excellent, some weeks the boat was late. Buy what looks good rather than working from a list.
Provisioning services exist and will stock the place before you arrive, which is worth it on a short trip or a late-night flight. We cover the practical side in the grocery run guide.
And then go out anyway
None of this is an argument against the restaurants, which are one of the genuine pleasures of this island. SeaSalt near Sapphire is our standing east-end recommendation, and there's a longer list in the east end dining guide.
The point is just that cooking a few meals buys you the ability to eat well at the places worth it, without watching the total. Which is most of what a kitchen is for anywhere.
Open weeks and discounted dates for both places are on the deals page.