Unlike ye olde fudge shops and the production-line cream tea experience offered at Godshill, further inland, this is a very modern British culinary experience.The restaurant is set overlooking the carp-filled village pond. Meeting for a pre-dinner drink in the cosy, panelled bar, they exude a kind of posh family contentedness. “Don’t you look pretty, girls?” says a plump woman affectionately, returning the hotel’s copy of Ladies First magazine to its rack as her daughters waft to the bar in coordinating raspberry-coloured skirts. Beside them, the woman’s husband and another family member amiably evaluate their day’s sailing, jollied along by a steady flow of gin and tonic. Gradually, the full complement of sisters, wives and boyfriends appears and, before you can say “cucumber sandwiches”, they troop off to eat in the restaurant overlooking the hotel’s velvety lawn.
The Priory Bay, on the island’s east coast, is a laid-back sort of place, as happy to have children scrambling down the lawn and splashing around on the private beach as it is to welcome glamorous honeymooners arriving by boat.

Unfortunately the crowd is a little too in-the-know when we turn up and the Boathouse is already suffering from a glut of customers. So, we drive on to the Pond Caf?in the improbably pretty village of Bonchurch nearby.Though Bonchurch’s architecture, like Ventnor’s, has its roots in genteel Victorian tourism, the Pond Caf?s an antidote to the Isle of Wight’s image as a haven for retired colonels and health-seeking poets. Fisherman’s platters, Skipper’s banquets and pints of shell-on prawns are served on the wooden balcony of an old boathouse overlooking the sea to an in-the-know crowd. The Isle of Wight is enjoying its own culinary revolution.The Boathouse caf?which clings to the bottom of the aptly-named Steephill Cove outside Ventnor, is our first fuelling stop It is the ideal place for a lazy weekend lunch. Carefully steering our super-sized car along the Isle of Wight’s skinny, liquorice-like lanes, we set a course for the south – and the start of a day’s grazing round the island.This might be the British seaside but gone are the days when that meant meal-times of fish and chips on the promenade. Bring me the manager.”Our own meal, we tell the manager when he finally appears, is wonderful.After all, what could be better on a summer’s evening than an enormous plate of dressed local crab, squeezed with almost a whole lemon’s worth of juice and served overlooking the blowsy flowerbeds of a sun-drenched English garden?We find out the next day.

“Take it away and crack it open.”The drama continues when it is returned, shelled and fully dressed. “No, no,” she snaps, as though reprimanding a lesser species “I didn’t say empty it, I said crack it And I’ll need a separate plate Not a side plate. The lobster’s plump claws are artfully arranged so that they recline decadently on a plate of zesty looking lettuce. Surely she can’t find fault with this?”Oh for heaven’s sake,” she huffs, apparently determined to make the most of the opportunity to bully a young waiter. Shall we call for the manager?” she giggles.Latching on to the pantomime, the whole room seems to suck in its breath as an enormous lobster is served to the crimson-lipped creature in the corner.

“How’s your soup, darling?” he whispers to his wife, conspiratorially “Terrible. “I know what real gazpacho should taste like.”Catching the gaze of a young French couple, our eyebrows shoot up in sympathy. “This isn’t gazpacho,” shrieks the woman, scornfully tipping a silver spoonful back into her bowl. It’s pretty hard to get gazpacho wrong (which is presumably why it’s on the Priory Bay’s bar menu), but there seems to be a problem this evening. On a neighbouring table, the room’s soft plum cushions and honey-coloured stonework aren’t soothing another guest as they did the happy family brigade “Where’s my bread?” barks a female voice.