With over four hundred reviews on this website it's inevitable that they won't all be up to date.

If Matt and Cat were to refresh reviews of places they'd already written about, it would take them over seven years if they ate out once a week - and that wouldn't include any new eateries! However sometimes they do feel compelled to provide an update and, with a pub as popular as Shalfleet's the New Inn, a few (albeit favourable) paragraphs, and no pictures, written way back in 2006 clearly needed updating. Didn't it?

Matt and Cat popped into the pub one April evening and, having taken the necessary step of booking a table, they wandered to the church and then along the pretty creek to work up a suitable appetite by looking at local sarcophagi and sarcophagidae. There were plenty of historical artefacts in the church, including a memorial carved by a protegé of typographer Eric Gill. At the creek Cat saw her first lesser-spotted woodpecker and, in the gloaming, she and Matt squinted into a field trying to spy elusive spring hares. Having got a hour's worth of fun out of Shalfleet, they turned back to the pub for their dinners.

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How many times has Lady Gaga reinvented herself?

First it's an encrusted lobster on her head, then she's teetering about in a meat dress with matching flesh heels - easy when you've got a reputation for outrageousness and clearly no shame. These grotesque makeovers may keep Lady G's downloads at the top of the hit parade, but is probably an inappropriate model when applied to a pub.

Over the years that Matt and Cat have been reviewing the Island's eateries they have seen many places change hands and change styles. From the understated improvements at the old St Helen's Restaurant - now Dan's Kitchen, to the more GaGa-esque gaudiness that transformed characterless town-centre carvery Mill Bay II into rock café aspirant House of Legends. Two sides of the same coin perhaps, but how do you change a village pub without upsetting the locals but encouraging new customers? Perhaps the re-christened The Fishbourne (formerly The Fishbourne Inn) has the answer?

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Back in 2007, Matt and Cat had an unforgettable meal at The Windmill Inn in Bembridge.

It was memorable for all the wrong reasons, and it has taken them five years to venture back into the wide doors of the Windmill to see if things have improved. Thankfully, they have; although in all honesty it might have been hard not to.

It would be a cliché to suggest that Bembridge is populated by the legions of the grey. Certainly on the weekday lunchtime that Matt and Cat visited, they did see a disproportionate number of oldies, but the children would have been at school and anyone of working age would have been - well, at work. However, there are still a conspicuous few who mount their mobility scooters or fire up the 1992 Nissan Micra (5,000 miles since new, one careful owner with backless gloves and a Motability grant) and journeying down Bembridge’s gentle decline, end up at the Windmill Inn.

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A while ago, Brading's former Red Lion Inn looked as though it was going to follow so many small rural pubs, and turn into housing. But it didn't - quite the contrary.

After a sojourn as the Smart Fox, the place now seems to be running on an even keel as the Dark Horse; offering good pub grub in a very comfortable atmosphere. After first rolling up just a few weeks after the place reopened back in 2009, Matt and Cat returned with junior reviewer Bill in tow to see what the Dark Horse was up to these days.

One thing's for sure, the Dark Horse is a nice venue. The Island's not over-blessed with really olde worlde pubs of the traditional English type: the pub-building boom here was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the Dark Horse has plenty of authentic charm to go round. Real old wooden beams, low ceilings, flagstoned floors and stone walls give out a warmth and welcome that has been well-used. The tables are scrubbed pine, the chairs are upholstered with traditional patterns, and there seem to be more real fires than are strictly necessary for heating purposes.

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For generations, rooks have cawed and squabbled over twigs in the high trees at the crossroads at the top of Wootton's High Street.

It's hard not to imagine this spot as it must have been 150 years ago; a busy thoroughfare in a pretty rural village, with the graceful villas of the well-heeled scattered amongst the leafy hedges. Today, the rumble of lorries has dispelled the peace, but the rooks are still there, as are their trees, and at least one of those attractive villas survives as The Cedars, a characterful and unpretentious suburban pub.

Matt and Cat, who've driven past The Cedars many times but rarely ventured in, decided to give it a try one evening after work. Outside, the building looks pretty much as it might have done in its days as a house, having survived some of the more dramatic pub transformations. Inside it is divided up into a public bar and lounge bar in a satisfyingly traditional manner, having missed out on the fashion to knock all of the rooms through to create a pub juggernaut. Also having passed the pub by is the less permanent but equally destructive fun pub makeover trend of the 1980s, where your local hostelry became a cocktail bar, funked up with post-modern pastels and jazzy laminates. (At the time, Cat's local The Wheelbarrow, was transformed with a lick of paint and a wet-look awning into 'Wheelies').

Having winkled their way through from the public bar with its pool table, to the lounge, Matt and Cat were warmly greeted by a very chatty lady, who pointed out the menu and pulled Matt a very welcome pint of HSB.

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