The Lone Star

Jerome Reid, a mechanic who went by Romy and loved Hollywood Westerns, built a garage at Mount Standfast in the 1940s and styled himself the Lone Star of the West Coast, his being the only garage on that coast licensed to sell petrol. He started with one hand-operated pump. In 1996 the garage was sold to Christian Roberts, an English actor, who the following year added the house next door, once a nightclub called Pattersons, and made the pair into The Lone Star. The restaurant is an open-sided deck out over the sand, and the rooms remember the forecourt: the penthouses are Cadillac and Lincoln, and the suites and rooms are Buick, Studebaker, Shelby and Corvette. Cadillac has a marble bathroom under a crystal chandelier, and a terrace of white daybeds and curtains with nothing past the rail but turquoise sea.

Recommended for couples who would rather have a busy restaurant downstairs than a quiet hotel around them, and for a party of eight, who can take the Beach House: three floors of coral stone, four bedrooms, a kitchen of its own and a shared garden down to the beach. There is no pool, and no spa beyond treatments brought to the room, but the sea is right there, with masks and snorkels for the turtles that live off the beach. Donovan Lopez cooks European and British dishes with Caribbean and Asian in them, there are pizzas from a stone oven, and younger guests get a Little Stars menu of their own. The bar's suggestion for sunset is a rum sour. Romy's air raid shelter, cut from the coral stone during the Second World War, is still in use, and now shelters the restaurant's stores.