Fiji's Seagrass Restaurant is available only to guests of private island resort Laucala. Photo / Supplied
Both in terms of setting and what’s on the plate, restaurants can offer up the extraordinary, the unexpected, and the breathtakingly beautiful. Here are some of our key destination restaurants to put on your bucket list.
On a huge private game reserve, Tswalu Kalahari, South Africa’s first Michelin-starred chef, Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen, creates an incredible journey weaving unique flavours born from the Kalahari with stories tied to South Africa’s culture and history.
The world’s first underwater restaurant is tucked 5m below the Indian Ocean on Rangali Island in the Maldives, with tropical marine life your backdrop to dinner. The restaurant, which seats just 14 at a time, is exclusively available to guests at Conrad Rangali.
It’s a rather different ocean that guests gaze out into at Norway’s Under, a semi-submerged restaurant that descends up to 5.5m from the craggy shoreline into the icy North Atlantic. Head chef Nicolai Ellitsgaard calls on “fresh ingredients and pure, naked flavours” with plenty of seafood from just outside the thick architecturally designed concrete walls – sustainability is a key focus.
Look past the name (or is it just me?) because this Ubud, Bali-based spot is synonymous with all things sophisticatedly sweet. Proprietor Will Goldfarb trained at El Bulli and originally opened Room4Dessert in his home city, New York, before relocating to Bali – a location that allows him to run his restaurant surrounded by a substantial garden from which he sources ingredients for the menu, the likes of rosella, cacao, coconut, and lemongrass. Last year Goldfarb was named the world’s best pastry chef in the 50 Best, so if you’re Bali-bound, make a pilgrimage for the restaurant’s avante-garde tasting menu that progresses from savoury snacks to a steady stream of desserts.
Dinner and a show means something quite different at Sublimation in Ibiza. A menu costing $2k upwards consists of 20 courses prepared by Spanish two Michelin-star chef Paco Roncero and team (nine more of whom are also Michelin-starred) for a maximum of 12 guests. The dining room is a high-tech theatre, providing a multi-sensory experience in which guests are sort of both audience and actors – think VR headsets, bespoke soundtracks, cutting-edge lighting and a lot, lot more. The Ibizan location is only open for the European summer but a popup branch has opened in Dubai to plug the gap.
The Japanese city of Kyoto is awash with elegant restaurants, and Kikunoi Honten, which has operated for more than 100 years having started life as a teahouse, is a giant among them. Currently, with three Michelin stars, the restaurant’s offering follows the famous approach of kyo-kaiseki, an array of exquisite dishes (up to 14 courses here) sent from the kitchen to demonstrate the four seasons. Chef Yoshihiro Murata’s cooking sees signature ingredients of Japanese cooking treated with kid gloves – from famously rare Matsusaka beef and bluefin tuna otoro (the fattiest of the belly section) along with fleetingly seasonal things like cherry petals and bamboo shoots.
It occupies a rather incongruous setting on the 8th floor of a football stadium in Copenhagen, but enjoys a view not only of the sports pitch but also over the beautiful Fælledparken gardens, and a golden reputation, having been named the world’s No 1 restaurant in 2022′s The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. Chef Rasmus Kofoed’s grit has seen the restaurant make its way steadily up the list from 49th place in 2012. Like many big-name Danish chefs, Kofoed is big on foraging and particularly from Denmark’s watery surroundings, so seafood features prominently, along with all manner of plants – but meat has been left off the menu since 2021.
Another city that punches high in the culinary world, Copenhagen is also home to Alchemist, where the dining journey lasts 50 courses – and is a very different beast from the terroir-driven Scandi cuisine we’ve become familiar with. During five “acts”, diners move around the fantastical multi million-dollar planetarium space. Each mouthful is imbued with powerful messages; chef Rasmus Munk uses cuisine as a vehicle to raise awareness around a plethora of social and environmental causes, for which, when he’s not busy making magic in the kitchen, Munk puts his money and time where his mouth is.
The eponymous Paris restaurant of the chef who trained Gordon Ramsay remains, in many pairs of discerning eyes, the GOAT – it’s the most consistently high-performing restaurant across the myriad lists out there. The home of finely honed technique, impeccable seasonal ingredients, and elegant aesthetic would be the cherry on top for any indulgent visit to the City of Lights.
Famous for his Lima restaurant Central, chef Virgilio Martínez’s Mil is another reason to put Peru on the list – and the journey to get there is an adventure in itself. Mil is 3500m above sea level in the Sacred Valley on the fringe of the Moray ruins. It’s best enjoyed having acclimated to the altitude, so give yourself a few days before tucking in to what is an immersive experience in Peruvian indigenous culture. Guests can opt to dig potatoes, collect fresh mountain water or myriad other ways of having a hand in what ends up on their plate and gaining unique insight.
It’s a little closer to home, but you do need to be a guest to dine at this clifftop restaurant on Fiji’s exclusive Laucala Island, a Como resort. The good news, though, is that the hefty nightly rate is truly all-inclusive – you can savour impeccably prepared farm and ocean-to table fare, Champagne and lush cocktails to your heart’s content with no bill to settle. The resort has its own 1400ha organic farm growing a plethora of vegetables, fruit, herbs, and livestock – anything that’s not sourced from the garden is supplied by other local Fijian growers. I stayed there several years ago and among the several restaurants, Seagrass was a highlight – a Thai focused dining room upstairs makes the delicious most of local seafood like lobster, lush herbs and tropical fruit and, perched on the rock over crashing waves is a luxurious but fun teppanyaki offering at Rock Lounge. To get there, you simply drag yourself away from your villa’s poolside, and either call a butler for a ride or like I did, hit the terracotta-paved road in your own golf cart. You time it for sunset, naturally.
A “roving restaurant without walls”, Outstanding In The Field has been popping up in all sorts of places since its debut in founder Jim Denevan’s brother’s US farm in 1999. Its carefully curated dinner parties have popped up in vineyards, city streets, beaches, and deserts across all 50 US states and more than a dozen countries around the world. The events are characterised by an elegantly laid long table and a desire to connect growers with diners by bringing the restaurant to the source.
This piece originally appeared in New Zealand Herald Travel here.
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