Cap Juluca, the Belmond hotel on Anguilla's Maundays Bay, has relaunched its beachfront Cap Shack with a Caribbean-inflected redesign and a menu built around the island's seafood. The bar and grill keeps its prime spot directly on the sand, making it the resort's casual option for lunch and sunset drinks.
The kitchen is now led by Chef de Cuisine Primrose Ritchie-Gumbs, and the menu leans hard on local catch. Highlights include grilled Caribbean spiny lobster with Creole butter, a Sandy Ground lobster roll dressed with curried brown-butter mayo and mango chow, and Island Harbour crayfish — plus whatever the boats bring in, cooked over an open flame. The dish names double as a mini map of the island: Sandy Ground is Anguilla's harbour village, and Island Harbour sits on the leeward coast where the fishing fleet works.
The other new addition for the season is CAP RUM, a small-batch, barrel-aged rum produced in Anguilla in partnership with Topper's Rhum, a local distillery, and made exclusively for Cap Juluca. Guests can order it at the bar or take a bottle home as a souvenir that isn't another branded T-shirt.
It all adds up to a familiar Anguilla formula done properly: a genuinely beautiful beach, serious local seafood, house rum and no dress code in sight. Maundays Bay is one of the island's signature stretches of white sand and calm, swimmable water, so a barefoot lunch here is as much the point as the food.
For travellers weighing up Anguilla's high-end resorts, this is a useful signal. Cap Juluca has been repositioning itself under Belmond, and additions like Cap Shack and CAP RUM show the resort putting more weight behind local producers and relaxed, on-the-sand dining rather than formal fine dining alone. Even if you're not staying at the hotel, it's worth knowing that some of the island's best beach-bar eating is on a resort's doorstep — and that Topper's Rhum, the distillery behind the house rum, is an Anguilla institution worth visiting in its own right on Sandy Ground.
Bottom line: if a beach bar that takes its lobster and its rum this seriously sounds like your kind of lunch, Cap Shack belongs on your Anguilla shortlist.