One regularly asked question of us is, “Do you get free food?”. And our, oft-spoken answer is “No, not really.” All the food we review is paid for. Even the meals we write about for the Isle of Wight County Press are paid for out of our hard-earned. The... Read more
Once upon a time Italian restaurants were ubiquitous on every high street. You know the sort of thing: generic pasta and pizza, checked tablecloths, raffia-wrapped wine bottles and textured artex walls. Desperate to set themselves apart from the competition in a sea of look-alike venues, some took to oversized... Read more
Did you know Dan’s Kitchen in St Helens had closed? No? You’d been trying to get a table at that popular restaurant for ages, hadn’t you? And you didn’t, did you? Well, now you can’t. And nor can we, which is a shame, because it was good. But hold... Read more
It has to be one of the most idyllic inland locations for a restaurant on the Island. Nestled in a valley just outside Newport, the ancient stones of Staplehurst Grange warm in the evening sun. A long drive down a gravel track past fields of sheep, flowery hedgerows, beehives... Read more
Hopefully, you’ll have been enjoying locally-grown Godshill cherries this time of year – we certainly have. And it was a tweet we posted from the Southsea Food Festival that led us to an invitation to have a look around the orchard’s other enterprise – apricots. The apricot orchard is... Read more
There’s nothing we like better than a nice surprise. It’s a treat that never gets old when we wander into some venue anticipating an indifferent meal, and our unambitious expectations are blown away. Perhaps the best example of this in recent years was the tragically short-lived fried-fish wagon of... Read more
Sometime soon, if the futurologists are to be believed, we’ll be shuttled around in driverless electric cars – our every move monitored and tagged by our robot overlords. But until that particular utopia arrives, we’ll have to make do with more prosaic ways of getting about. And, in Ryde,... Read more
Like the rest of you, we drove around the Island at the tail end of May with our car windows wound down. Mostly because the air conditioning in Cat’s Citroën is broken, but also that we might breathe in the heady aroma of wild garlic. The Isle of Wight’s... Read more
The George Hotel has for decades been a reliable stalwart of Yarmouth. But this year, any metaphorical cobwebs have been blown away. A new broom has swept through the venue, boutiquifying the bedrooms, George-ing up the staircase, and with imminent plans to Italianate the garden too. Under the guiding... Read more
If you’re on the Isle of Wight, and seeking somewhere to eat, there’s a high likelihood that you are going to look favourably on somewhere with a sea view. We have remarked before on the curious fact that there are actually surprisingly few such venues. If you doubt us,... Read more
