How hotels in Asia are catering to plant-based diets
Pssst! All the carnivores are jealous. Travelling in Asia on a vegetarian/vegan diet
Text: Christian Barker
Image Credit: Ovolo Hotels
Perhaps you’re driven by a desire to minimise your environmental impact. Maybe a concern for animal welfare motivates you. You could have religious or health reasons. The inspirations for adopting a vegan, vegetarian or meat-light, plant-based diet are many and varied. Fortunately, today, so too are your culinary options.
Gone are the days when an establishment could get away with having one of two token vegetarian items on the menu (one of them being the pre-meal bread roll). Resorts, restaurants and major hotels in Asia are now recognising the growing demand for plant-based cuisine and developing menus that offer a meaningful selection of choices to meat-averse guests.
Bali and beyond
At the beginning of October, Hong Kong headquartered Ovolo hotels launched a year of exclusively vegetarian cuisine at the chain’s properties worldwide. Most hospitality operators won’t risk alienating bloodthirsty meat-eaters by going to this extreme, but there are plenty acknowledging the importance of (literally) catering properly to diners of a plan-based bent.
The chef at Jaan, the Michelin-starred flagship restaurant of Singapore’s Swissotel The Stamford, Kirk Westaway grew up vegetarian and still primarily eats a plant-based diet at home. He’ll always include a couple of meat-free, vegetable focused dishes in the lavish degustation spread at Jaan, and says diners often find these courses the meal’s most memorable. Striving to shrink the amount of animal protein served at his restaurant, Westaway is that rare superstar chef who’s delighted to serve a fully vegetarian meal.
Long a mecca for more enlightened travellers, Bali unsurprisingly boasts numerous outstanding vegetarian culinary destinations. Exhibit A: Sakti Dining Room at the Fivelements wellness resort in Ubud elevates vegan, vegetarian and raw foods to a high art. The exquisite presentation of the food here is matched by the restaurant’s gorgeous riverside setting.
Also in leafy Ubud, Glow restaurant at the luxurious Como Shambhala Estate specialises in fresh, contemporary dishes that embody the ‘living foods’ philosophy. This thinking goes that ingredients must be brought from farm to table as swiftly and with as little cooking or adulteration as possible, allowing diners to fully benefit from the food’s enzymes, phytonutrients and vitamins.
Tanaman at Katamama, the hotel attached to Bali beach party hot-spot Potato Head at Seminyak, serves refined, fully vegetarian renditions of traditional Balinese cuisine. Perfect to convert the reluctant non-veg diner or satisfy those vegetarians who miss a fleshy meal, the menu features such ‘I can’t believe it’s not meat!’ dishes as jackfruit ‘beef’ rendang and mushroom ‘chicken’ satays.
At Alila Villas Uluwatu, possibly the most Instagrammed resort on earth, organic farming on site provides produce and inspiration to Spanish chef Marc Lorés Panadés. The standard menu at the fine-dining restaurant Panadés helms, Quila, leans heavily on the plant-based, with many meat-mimicking morsels, such as a ‘beef tartare’ made of grilled watermelon. The sumptuous ten-course degustation offering can easily be tweaked to provide a fully vegetarian or vegan experience.
Farm-to-table
The increasing prevalence of hotels growing their own food is doing much to promote the cause of locally sourced, farm-to-table, plant-based cuisine. In Thailand, Phuket’s only Michelin-starred restaurant, PRU at the acclaimed Trisara resort, gets many of its ingredients from a 96-hectare organic farm its chef Jimmy Ophorst tends nearby. This helps explain the restaurant’s name — an acronym for “plant, raise, understand”. Unlike many Michelin-rated temples to culinary indulgence, a full vegetarian degustation menu is offered here.
At Belmond Napasai in Koh Samui, Thailand, an array of authentic local dishes and western favourites have been reinvented as meatless fare by Mexican chef Saul Garcia Ramos Cristiani. And though the trains are famed for fictional murder most foul, connoisseurs of cruelty-free food will find much to tickle their fancy on Belmond’s iconic Orient Express, serving fine local produce plucked from destinations along the route. You won’t get killed — but you may get kale.
Like Belmond, Six Senses is serious about its plant-based cuisine. Many of its properties, including those in the Maldives and UNESCO heritage-listed Dujiangyan in China, have organic vegetable gardens and farms attached. The resort in Ninh Van Bay, Vietnam, is worthy of highlighting. Its 20,000 square metre farm produces around 4,000 kilograms of food annually, used by the hotel’s chefs to make delicious vegetarian Vietnamese dishes, including a signature vegan phở to make any foodie purr.
The Aman resort that many devotees of the group consider its most beautiful, Amanpulo in the Philippines provides more than a feast for the eyes. Thanks to its on-site organic farm, the resort is also well equipped to satisfy the appetites of plant-based dining aficionados. Sibling property Amanpuri on Phuket offers a comprehensive wellness menu, curated by leading raw vegan chefs Ben Flowerday and Dean Gleeson. This seems fitting. Where better to ‘veg out’ than an idyllic island paradise, huh?
