At the Lobster Pot the lobster comes up from a boat run by the two brothers of the woman who cooks it, which is roughly the arrangement the family has had since 1946. John and Freda Wilson turned their cottage, Glan-yr-Afon, into a café serving lobster teas that year; nearly eighty years on it's their granddaughter Julie Hill running the restaurant while her brothers Tristan and Graham fish the shellfish offshore. One description of the setup calls it "measured in metres rather than miles." The kitchen does pot-caught lobster and crab as the catch allows — Lobster Thermidor with white wine, cream and mustard, Lobster Mornay under Welsh cheddar, scallops seared in garlic butter, crab baked with a parmesan gratin — plus Welsh beef for anyone who came this far to the sea and didn't want fish. Book ahead at weekends.
Up at the lookout above the beach is the Wavecrest Café, run by Penny, who makes the food fresh each day and is known across this side of Anglesey for scones the size that require the phrase "about a mile high." They come with strawberries and cream. A North Wales Live reviewer, Christopher Davies, called it "the North Wales café with extraordinary views that's so popular it's hard to get a table," and admitted he'd worked in the area seventeen years before finding it. Specials run to cheese and onion pie, fish pie, and Granny Hudson's apple pie and custard. It opens roughly Thursday to Sunday from Easter to September; the other three days Penny's daughter Zoe runs Zoe's Cake Cabin instead.
From the lookout a very steep but good path drops to the beach, about 300 metres across, sandy in the middle and shingly under the cliffs. People swim, sunbathe, work the rock pools, light barbecues in the evening, and surf if they're brave. Walk the cliffs north early on a summer evening and, as one account has it, they're full of rabbits, with seagulls working the updraughts. Offshore to the north-west the Skerries Lighthouse sits on the horizon, and the sunsets are the reason people stand at the top of the path.
The bay's English name comes from a church you can't see from here — St Rhuddlad's, inland at Rhydwyn, was the landmark sailors steered by. The Welsh name, Porth Swtan, means Port Whiting. The pub is up the hill at Rhydwyn: the Church Bay Inn serves drink but no food, keeps up to two real ales, and has a terraced beer garden looking over Holyhead Bay, plus glamping pods.
The village's one museum is the last thatched cottage on Anglesey. Swtan was restored from a collapsed ruin — its roof beam had been an old ship's mast, and it rotted through — reopened in 2000 and run since as a charity. Inside is an earth floor, a herb garden, hens to feed and a small orchard of old Welsh apples. Gwilym Jones, the last person born in the cottage, went on to serve for years as the restoration trust's treasurer.
