For location, the best place to drink was Donny’s Bar. When you went through the white gate out of Jamestown to the promenade, instead of turning right to the customs house and port buildings, you turned left. Tucked under the vertical cliff this guy called Donny had set up a bar in two old shipping containers.
Over the years he had added awnings and decks but the unsophisticated and ephemeral nature of the bar was a major attraction. The other was that it was the only official waterfront social bar. It was a great place to hang out on lazy weekend afternoons and watch the sky turn purple as the sun set.
More locations did food as I went back again and again to St Helena; on the last visit, all the gossip in town was about the Chinese Restaurant. The food was not like any Chinese food, either from Chinese people or in Chinese restaurants elsewhere, but it was nice to have a selection of foods beyond what was normally served up in St Helena. I liked the fish cakes but it was good to have prawns for a change. Similar amounts of wowing were going on about the first true coffee shop on the island. One of the few high value local crops which had survived blight and disease was coffee, and a couple of enterprising islanders had established a very nice trade in selling beans and ground coffee at a premium price. The flavour was slightly vanilla-like and left a long airy after taste in the mouth. These same entrepreneurs got a licence to establish an open air cafe under a small patch of trees near the waterfront. Like Annie’s Bar, it attracted a lot of people working in the offices at the bottom end of Jamestown; grateful at last to act like their counterparts in the big cities and have lattes and cappuccinos to go!
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