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Time was, not so long ago, that lobsters were considered fit only for pigs and prisoners. Not so now, of course. They’re the most expensive dish on the Caribbean menu. You wouldn’t want to leave Anguilla without trying a local lobster, though. Or possibly their slightly smaller relative, the salt water crayfish. The island is famous for them.

Anguilla itself is an island worth bearing in mind. If there is a Caribbean promise - escape, luxury in a fine climate, even a little sophistication - Anguilla comes closer to it than just about anywhere else. What’s so surprising is why. The island is scrubby and flat, basically a barren lump of coral rock. And, worryingly when it comes to food, British to boot.

And yet Anguilla has a small clutch of superb hotels and, unexpectedly, a handful of seriously good restaurants. In the island’s favour are magnificent beaches and the fact that the Anguillians are utterly, utterly charming. Unlike so many West Indians, they don’t seem to have a problem with service. But Anguilla has gone quite consciously for the top of the market. They have kept away mass tourism for the moment and so there are no casinos or cruise ships (that all happens in St. Martin next door).

So I found myself doing the rounds of the restaurants, chasing lobster and crayfish. An interesting day out is at Gorgeous’ Scilly Cay, an offshore blip where Eudoxie ‘Gorgeous’ Wallace, a former tennis professional, has a bar and daytime restaurant. It’s a bit rough and ready, but that’s its charm. We arrived by motorboat, via a snorkelling dip in Little Bay, where hundreds of thousands of fish fry swirled around us like wisps of mist. Lunch was served to the sounds of an Anguillian scratch band (guitars, maracas, lead banjo and a bass played on an upturned washbucket with a broom handle and string) - lobster salad, with slightly curried, firm and strong-tasting flesh.

Of course there’s far more than just lobsters to Anguilla. Directly opposite Scilly Cay is one of my favourite spots, Hibernia, which is run by a French and Irish couple. Every other summer, when they close up for the low season, they head off to another part of the Far East for some culinary exploration. This year they have sprinkled their menu with tastes from China, so their cream of leek soup is now perfumed with green tea and the fillet of snapper is served with Szechuan spice sauce.

Back at Cap Juluca, my hotel, I was surprised to hear English vowels in the Fitness Centre. Cardigan Connor, an Anguillian by birth, spends summers away from the island for a different reason. For the last fourteen years he has played top class cricket in England. Now he spends his winters working as a masseur, turning the strength of his fast bowler’s fingers to the knots in visitors’ muscles. He’s working on island cricket, too.

Dinner that night was a tasting menu at the hotel restaurant, Pimms. We sat among slender columns at the head of the bay, looking along the curved line of the beach, where the villas stood, their curious Moorish roofs glowing white in the moonlight. Seven dishes, with a magnificent lightness of touch, and again with a French and Eastern influence, graced the table - snapper chinoise, lobster spring roll, tenderloin served with foie gras and a truffle sauce, oyster and caviar wrapped in salmon...

Some of these ingredients came as a surprise in the Caribbean, but Anguilla benefits from an accident of geography when it comes to supply. St. Maarten is supplied daily from Florida and so the Anguillian chefs can order whatever they want. It’s then expedited by Anguillian Customs so that it doesn’t spoil. (A story is told in St Lucia about a refrigerated consignment of wine that sat on the dock for three weeks without electricity until Customs got round to dealing with it. Half of it ended up corked.)

Everywhere I went in Anguilla trails led back to a British man, Leon Royden, who is a father of Anguillian tourism. When he visited in the early eighties he realised that the beaches were some of the best he had seen in the world. And so he decided to build a hotel. He set a standard of comfort -
bathrooms big enough to live in - that was unknown in the Caribbean then. Over the years I must have spent thousands of hours inspecting hotel plant around the Caribbean and I still wonder whether I actually hate it, but wandering around Malliouhana with Leon Royden is always a pleasure. As he walks and talks and rubs his hands, his beady eye is roving over every corner.

The thing he most wanted to create was a dining room that could rate with the restaurants of Europe (also pretty much unheard of in the British Caribbean at the time). It would be fair to say that he succeeded. Certainly you get a superb meal. The setting is simply magnificent, on a cliff-top looking north and west, the fare classical French with some concessions to the climate.

Presented in true French style - Les Potages, Les Foies Gras, Les Asperges - Malliouhana’s menu is long enough that there is no need to repeat a dish even in a two-week stay. Understandably though, visitors, many of them wealthy statesiders with sophisticated palates, want a change and to eat out. Over the years places have sprung up for them. Now there are now six or seven superb restaurant kitchens around the island. Anguillian chefs just keep winning awards.

Not far off is Blanchard’s, where Bob and Belinda Blanchard have an open-sided dining room within earshot of the sea and a delightful, mixed menu. Their favourite dishes remain - the lobster cakes and the filet mignon of tuna (marinated in Japanese Teriyaki sauce, sherry and fresh lemon juice) - but new for this year are the giant warm blinis and a cracked coconut dessert (a chocolate shell rolled in roasted coconut, filled with coconut ice cream). Along with Malliouhana, Blanchard’s is one of just five Caribbean wine cellars that have the Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence.

Where most restaurants sit on the coast, Koal Keel uses the charming setting of a restored local house, now a lovely fusty-smelling ‘rum-shop’, and its yard. Here Anguillian chef Leonard ‘Smoke’ Sharplis (all West Indians have a nickname) offers an Anguillian Degustation menu of five courses and a tasting menu in seven. ‘Smoke’ still uses the original ‘koal keel’, the local oven, sometimes. His summers are spent in France and he feeds that through into his dishes, but he also likes to use Anguillian ingredients too and so there are some unexpected combinations - smoked conch and caper ravioli with chive butter sauce or poppyseed baby rock snapper with rizdor butter sauce. Dinner finishes with rums from around the Caribbean in the rum shop.

But I still hadn’t tried crayfish. They are smaller and more delicate than lobsters, which can seem stringy by comparison. So Smoke cooked me some, as simply as they come - grilled and served with lemon butter. Superb. And not bad for convict food, either.

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