THE WINKING PRAWN
The Winking Prawn is a sort of fantasy beach café. Think Home and Away’s Bayside Diner meets Santa Monica cool, meets classic English seaside cream teas. It’s a place where the sun always shines, the ice cream is always on standby and it would be inconceivable to me when I’m there to order anything other than crab or lobster.
I absolutely love the Winking Prawn. I love the people who run it, its unrivalled location, its iconic heritage and its just all round sense of fun. Oh yeah, and the food is superb.
Located at North Sands in the Salcombe Estuary, the Winking Prawn is owned and run by the Goodey family. And it’s a multigenerational thing. Mark & Jane bought the café at almost exactly the same time as Rob and I were starting Jack Wills nearly thirty years ago to add on to their small Dorset based restaurant chain. However, it rapidly became the apple of their restaurant eye, so they sold their other restaurants and moved to Salcombe full time.
Back in the day, whenever we had Company wide meet ups down in Salcombe, we’d always head over to the Winking Prawn for team dinners and parties. Many tales of folklore and bad behaviour started in those fun nights at the Winking Prawn. Ahem, it’s a highly respectable and family friendly restaurant may I add however….
The café today is run by their daughter Lucy, with occasional help from her daughter Bellatrix. Bellatrix learnt the trade literally on her grandfather’s knee behind the coffee counter, so you can rest assured this is a place which is run with a deep rooted passion and seriously high levels of expertise. The family business spreads even further and even wider though with brother Luke running the Cracking Crab in Polzeath. What these guys don’t know about running a beach café is not worth knowing.
It’s not just me that loves the Winking Prawn though. And I clearly have great taste. Because it also caught the eye of the Hollywood glitterati a couple of years ago. Last summer, cream tea production was put on pause for the month of June while Disney descended on the Winking Prawn to shoot The Roses starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Coleman. Renaming the café for the movie to “We’ve got Crabs”, The Roses is a remake of the hilarious 1980s divorce comedy (how is that even a thing?) The War of the Roses.
Trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkgMaS5gbaA and I have to say, it looks superb. Due to be released at the end of August this year, so I’d book your table at the WP quick if I were you. I have a sneaky suspicion the already booming café will be busier than ever.
