Dune Preserve
"Bankie Banx built his bar from salvage and plays his own music on his own stage — the whole place feels like a proof of concept for something."
The road to Dune Preserve goes through a gate and across a stretch of sand that is technically not a road but that everyone treats as one, and you arrive at a structure that defies the usual categories. It is not a bar exactly, though drinks are served. Not a music venue exactly, though there is a stage and on weekends someone will be playing. Not a restaurant, though I ate some of the best lobster of my life there. Dune Preserve is the life’s work of Bankie Banx, an Anguillian musician who has been recording and performing since the 1970s, and the building he has constructed on this end of Shoal Bay West from driftwood and salvage and materials that seemed to have washed ashore at exactly the right moment is, I think, a work of vernacular architecture that nobody is calling that but should.
I arrived on a Thursday afternoon, no performance that night. The bar was tended by a young woman who moved between tables with complete unhurry. I ordered a rum punch — the Anguilla standard, served in a plastic cup with a straw — and sat on a stool made from a section of tree trunk and looked out at Shoal Bay West, which is longer and wilder than Shoal Bay East and receives more surf because it faces a more exposed direction. The waves breaking on the outer bar made a sound that came and went in sets.
The lobster came forty minutes after I ordered it — the wait time was explained to me simply as “we just got them” — split down the middle, the flesh scored and painted with garlic butter, cooked over what appeared to be the same charcoal grill that has done this thousands of times before. The grill sits in a half-open cooking area that is visible from the bar, which means you can watch your food being made and feel the heat coming off the coals from twenty feet away. I ate it at the same tree-trunk stool, shell pieces piling up on a piece of newspaper, and did not speak to anyone for thirty minutes except to ask for another rum punch. This was acceptable behavior.
Bankie Banx has been here long enough and present enough on Anguilla that the Dune Preserve functions as something like an institution — a place where the music scene and the beach culture and the local fishing community and the visitors all overlap in a way that feels organic rather than arranged. When he plays, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons through the season, there are people dancing in the sand and people sitting very still with their eyes closed and people at the bar who are ostensibly talking but are actually listening. His music is reggae-influenced, Caribbean, built around a voice that has spent decades outdoors.
The structure itself rewards attention. The walls are made from planks of wood in twenty different colors and states of weathering, held together in ways that suggest improvisation but have clearly survived hurricane seasons. Bottles hang from the ceiling. A ship’s wheel is mounted somewhere. A painted mural on the back wall. The whole thing looks like it could be dismantled in an afternoon and rebuilt slightly differently somewhere else, and this feeling — of impermanence that is also completely fixed in place — is part of what makes it unlike any bar I have been to before or since.
When to go: Dune Preserve is worth visiting any afternoon for the beach and the lobster, but the full experience requires a weekend when Bankie Banx is playing. His season runs roughly December through May; check locally for schedule. Arrive before sunset for a table near the bar and stay through the first set at least.