Top 5 Restaurants for Foodies in Anguilla
Anguilla packs chef-driven kitchens onto a tiny island: five serious tables, from Meads Bay dining rooms to a lantern-lit terrace in the trees above Sandy Ground.
Anguilla built its table-first reputation on one beach: Meads Bay, where Blanchards, Jacala, Straw Hat and Leon's at Malliouhana line up along a single mile of sand, and where most food-driven visitors end up within a night or two. But the sixty-odd kitchens on this small island spread wider than that — Sandy Ground has Veya in the trees above the bay, South Hill has Tasty's, Long Bay Village hides a French bistro, and The Valley, the capital, is where the island eats day to day.
Choosing comes down to three questions. Beach or not — the marquee rooms are beachfront, but two of the strongest kitchens here sit inland. Budget — dinner at the chef-driven places runs to big-city prices in US dollars, though several of the same names serve a far gentler lunch. Timing — reserve ahead between December and April when the island fills, and check before travelling in September and October, when many kitchens close for the low season.
There is no public transport to speak of, so plan on a rental car or taxis; mercifully, almost nothing on Anguilla is more than twenty minutes from anything else.
The five picks below deliberately leave Meads Bay twice, trading beach frontage for a treetop veranda, a roadside dining room and a village bistro most visitors drive straight past.
1. Veya Restaurant
Dinner is served on a lantern-lit veranda up in the treetops above Sandy Ground — the only pick with no beach at all. Chef Carrie Bogar's 'cuisine of the sun' roams the spice routes, folding Moroccan and Asian ideas into Caribbean ingredients.
2. Blanchards | Restaurant and Beach Shack
A Meads Bay fixture run by the same husband-and-wife team since 1994, with a split personality: a polished dining room on one side and the barefoot Beach Shack on the other, so one kitchen covers two entirely different budgets.
3. Jacala Beach Restaurant
Founded by two French veterans of the old Malliouhana kitchen, this is Meads Bay's quieter table — a small beachfront room where lunch stretches unhurried over hours and the cooking stays classically French rather than pan-Caribbean.
4. Tasty's
The local-chef pick: Anguillian Dale Carty trained in French kitchens before opening this South Hill roadside dining room. Creole-leaning plates and no ocean view — proof the island's serious cooking isn't confined to the sand.
5. Julian’s: A Tropical French Bistro
The sleeper of the list, tucked into Long Bay Village with a fraction of its neighbours' reviews. A chef-run bistro working tropical ingredients into French technique — worth booking before the Meads Bay crowd finds the turn-off.
