Ruin Beach Café

At the heart of the restaurant is the wood-fired oven that produces delicious pizzas and roasts the succulent beef and fresh fish, as well as baking the bread. It is fuelled with island wood, and brings a real flavour of the Mediterranean to the cooking. The café takes its name from the ruined smuggler’s cottage that forms part of its terrace. Uninhabited since the late-nineteenth century, there was a family of 12 living there in abject poverty when Augustus Smith arrived in the early 1830s. Their shared sleeping quarters consisted of a low loft in the roof space. Given that the neighbouring Watch House was the Coastguard boathouse from the 1820s, smuggling must have been a very tricky business for the old cottage’s residents...