‘Roydon was a visionary,’ says Albert Lake, Malliouhana’s sommelier, who was 22 years old when the hotel opened. ‘He built a five-star property when there was nothing here. No paved roads, a few gas lamps and an airfield where beaten-up planes flew in from time to time.’
In the hotel’s kitchen the training was rigorous, and staff were dispatched to Antiles to hone their cooking and service skills. ‘They said to me, “Albert, you’re going to work with the sommelier.” “What’s that?” I asked. “It’s the man who pours the wine.” And then they sent me to vineyards in France and Italy to learn all about it.’
Malliouhana helped raise the bar for cooking island-wide, from down-home restaurants such as Tastys, owned by one of the hotel’s former cooks Dale Carty, to incredibly smart hotels such as Cap Juluca and the new Four Seasons, formerly the Viceroy. Tokyo Bay, the Japanese restaurant at CuisinArt Resort, may be nothing to look at, but Joe Richardson’s food is a blast. He picks his own ingredients from the hotel’s half-acre hydroponic farm, which grows edible flowers, oversized aubergines and microgreens, and his seafood is caught in the Atlantic fishing grounds off the island’s north shore. Richardson charges New York prices for his 10-course omakase menu, but then it is also of a New York standard: tomato ceviche with olive oil, spicy-citrusy togarashi yuzu powder and puffed rice; tuna, foie gras, sherry-unagi reduction and gold leaf; toro with chimichurri and ponzu; lobster roll with shiso-garlic butter and crispy carrot. I can recount the courses like my 12-times table. I’ll remember that meal forever.
At Veya restaurant chef Carrie Bogar tells me how she and her family upped sticks and moved here from Pennsylvania. ‘We wanted somewhere small but with a big-city clientele, and this was it.’ Sure, she admits, there are challenges running a restaurant on a remote island. Bogar tries to source produce locally, which can mean supplies are unreliable and small-batch: tomatoes from a taxi driver, baby rocket from a bank clerk and salad leaves from the guy who peddles solar-powered panels. But she says diners don’t blink when the menu reads, ‘carpaccio of conch with Asian cucumber chayote-squash slaw, and Moroccan-spiced shrimp cigars, roasted-tomato chermoula and sweet but piquant apricot sauce’.
When the feast is over the music starts. There is nowhere in the Caribbean, other than Jamaica, with so many good live bands. Anguilla’s coolest star has long been Bankie Banx (Omari Banks’ father), a folk-reggae singer who’s more Bob Dylan than Bob Marley with a musical career dating back to the 1960s when he made his first guitar. After world tours, he’s back hollering at his own haunt, Dune Preserve, a beach shack of split-level decks and makeshift stages with leads underfoot connecting keyboards to speakers and a strong whiff of marijuana in the air. The bucket for tips is weighed down by seashells. The first time I heard Banx play a decade ago he told me off for dancing on the tables. ‘You should be listening to the music,’ he said. He was right. Now I know better.
One afternoon at his ironically named Sunday School gig (let’s face it, there’s not a lot of religious instruction going on here) Banx played with Konstantin Merezhnikov, a Russian violinist. I’d fly half-way around the world to hear such beautiful, ad-hoc harmonies again.
