Matt and Cat like going to Shanklin's Old Village and smugly playing I-Spy with restaurants' doors, spotting their 'Recommended by Matt and Cat' stickers. The excellent Pendleton's, the Black Cat Thai restaurant and homely Village Inn all sport their green and black badges of recommendation.

With an appointment in the town later that evening, M and C were back in this picture-postcard village on a cold winter evening looking for somewhere new to eat. Clattering down the hill they stumbled into the historic Crab Inn. To be honest, in this thatch-tastic corner of the Island there's nothing but listed buildings steeped in history. If there was a prize for the quaintest Isle of Wight village, the Old Village, Shanklin would be a serious contender with Godshill snapping closely at its heels. A similar award could be made - to the same places - for the place where you're most likely to run over a bimbling tourist coming out of a cheesy gift-shoppe. However, M and C weren't there to admire the architecture, they were there to eat.

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Mat and Cat have often bemoaned the fact that their home town of Ryde has not a single delicatessen to its name.

Eating-out places jostle for attention, but if you want to buy artisan cheeses or gawp at the trotter of a Serrano ham you're out of luck.

Not so in Ventnor, where the little High Street boasts not one but two charmingly bourgeois delis. Having visited the Island Deli not that long ago, M&C thought it best to redress the balance, and made a foray southwards to see what Goodman's Deli had to offer.

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Visit the website: http://www.goodmansdeli.co.uk/

Update: The Wheatsheaf Hotel, Newport was one of this site's earliest reviews so Matt and Cat decided to revisit the venue. The original review, from 4 August 2006, is below the update.

During the week, Matt and Cat regularly meet for lunch in Newport. A light snack of local produce at the excellent Island Images usually suffices although sometimes they only have time to snatch a coffee at the Quay Arts Centre or Olivo. On this particular day, M&C were looking for a place to eat and duck out of the rain - along with most of the lunchtime crowd. And so it was that they ended up outside the doors of the Wheatsheaf - one of three so-named hostelries on the Island*.

Shaking off the droplets as they entered the bar, Matt and Cat were pleased to see that the place had lost none of its charm. Although the patrons were mostly men, The Wheatsheaf had a far more genteel atmosphere than a rowdy sports bar. Pleasingly, there was no sign of a TV; only the faint warble of an eclectic selection of piped music - possibly megamixed by DJ Anachronistic, as Avril Lavigne's Sk8r Boi was segued into some twaddle by The Beatles.

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Visit the website: http://www.wheatsheaf-iow.co.uk/

As regular readers will know, Matt and Cat's Isle of Wight Eating Out Guide was a finalist in the prestigious Hantweb Awards 2010.

The competition, in its seventh year, received a record number of nominations, almost 1400 in twelve categories. As well as some excellent nominated websites, the competition also attracted some impressive sponsorship meaning that the winners of each category went home with a Dell laptop... plus a big slice of glory pie!

The nominated websites were whittled down to a shortlist, then a list of finalists. M&C's site was lucky to survive this stringent filtering process, particularly as their category - 'Special Interest Website' - attracted the most nominations, over 200 sites. Also, the 2010 competition had a new category which wasn't in the hands of the judges: the award for the best public voted finalist. This meant that Matt and Cat's followers could make their voices heard through the on-line voting process.

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Visit the website: http://www3.hants.gov.uk/hantswebawards.htm

Hippies, eh, with their free love and beads. Ventnor's bloody full of them. In the 1960s they say all the beardy-weirdy sandal wearers ended up in this most southerly town because it had the perfect climate for growing cannabis. Whether or not that was the reason, it seems that some of them never left. So today their children, the second-generation Ventnorians, might not look quite so Bohemian but still carry the ideals of the Summer of Love.

The heart of this nest of peaceniks is the Community Café, open every Saturday morning in a well-used space on the corner of Albert Street and Pound Lane. Here one imagines well-intentioned comrades can eat gluten-free cakes and stroke their tufty chins earnestly whilst decrying the state of the planet. But, as is often the case with Ventnor, appearances can be deceptive. The Community Café's reality is not the tediously worthy hippy Elysium one might assume - it's actually pretty good.

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