Dining in Style
Picture this: A beautiful day in the tropics is drawing to a close. You and the family gather around the dining table, with your own private pool framing the tableau. As if by magic, plates filled with delectable dishes appear on the table. Everyone tucks in and savours the fresh flavours, prepared exclusively for your group. The mood is blissfully relaxed, and no one is in a hurry – and no one has to wash up after.
Is this your ideal vision of a holiday? Or maybe you’d rather see yourself dining through the best restaurants of Bali or Marrakesh, trying out different restaurants and cuisines every night of the week.
Food is a major component of any holiday, so when choosing a villa for your trip, it’s important to visualise where you’d like to enjoy the majority of your meals. Sharing your ideal scenario with our villa specialists helps us understand your vision for the holiday and we’ll then be able to find the perfect villa to match that vision.
So what should you expect when dining in a villa? Let’s dive in.
Private Chef Paradise
When looking at all the different dining options, Bali has become something of a blueprint. The island represents a very mature villa market and has mastered a whole range of different approaches to dining.
The most obvious choice is to book a villa that has a chef included and working full time at the property. In these high end villas, the chef will often meet with you early on in your stay to discuss your preferences and dietary requirements to really get an understanding of your palette and needs. They will then look after you for the duration of your stay.
Having a private chef catering to your needs is a really special experience. We’re still reminiscing about the incredible spread at Umbala the House and the fresh seafood at Samudra House.
Remember – A Villa is Not a Restaurant
While having a private chef is fabulous, there are certain things to keep in mind. When you have a chef looking after, say, 10 guests in a five-bedroom villa, the experience is still different from a restaurant.
When you visit a restaurant, everyone in your group can order what they feel like from a menu. This is all thanks to a commercial kitchen where a team of chefs, sous chefs, cooks, and waiters work in tandem. They are all powering an engine that can deliver fish and chips for the kids, pasta for mom and dad, and traditional dishes for the grandparents. That’s what a restaurant can do.
In a villa, both the kitchen and the team working in it will be smaller. This means that the chef is preparing family style meals rather than a la carte dishes for each individual guest. Sure, the kids might get their own serving of fish and chips, but when planning out a meal, you should think of it as one main meal prepared for the whole group.
In our experience, this works out perfectly. What could be better than sharing fabulous food with all of your favourite people? This is also staying true to what the villas were originally designed for: a place to enjoy and share with your friends and family.
Going for the Gold – Dining in a Mega Villa
For the ultimate culinary experience, go for the mega villas where nothing, absolutely nothing is too much trouble.
Permata Ayung has a team of professional chefs on staff and an all-day menu for guests to choose from – our whole team swooned over their rijsttafel spread. The Seed Bali boasts its own private restaurant (exclusive to guests staying in the villa) with an ambitious seasonal menu inspired by fresh, local ingredients.
A stay at the incomparable Ani Villas (with locations in Thailand, Sri Lanka, Anguilla, and the Dominican Republic) includes full-board gourmet meals, premier spirits, wines, and cooking classes. Safe to say, you will feast like royalty.
What’s Cooking?
Some villas are staffed with a cook instead of a chef. While you should expect simpler dishes and a more limited menu, you can definitely still indulge. Villa Bayad, for example, has a fabulous cook. She is so talented that most guests end up having all of their meals at the villa – including us!
In our experience, you will really appreciate having a cook on hand come breakfast time.
When you’re on holiday, you really don’t want to wake up to an empty fridge, realising that you’ve forgotten to pick up eggs or fresh milk the day before. Having to forage for meals early in the morning would be the basic holiday rental experience where you’re simply booking an empty house or an apartment.
When you’re staying in a villa with a cook on staff, there is always someone to look after you. A cook prepared breakfast will typically cover all the essentials: bacon, eggs, fresh fruit, perhaps some pastries. It’s not a chef or restaurant level presentation, but it is wonderful to wake up and have someone prepare a delicious breakfast for you; bringing you a steaming hot coffee or a lovely cup of tea as you are waking up and taking in the beautiful landscape that the villa provides.
Having breakfast included in your stay makes things so much easier for bigger groups. It means you won’t have to wrangle everyone out the door first thing in the morning and then wait around in a restaurant. Instead, you can all take your time and wake up at your own pace, maybe sneak in a swim, and then plan out the day gathered around a beautifully laid out table.
But Wait – Just How Much Will It Cost?
Having a private chef might sound like an extravagance, but in places like Bali, Sri Lanka and Thailand, it actually works out remarkably cheap, especially when your villa operates on a grocery system. In these villas, you’re only paying for the cost of groceries that are used to prepare your meals, with a small surcharge added on top.
The staff might ask you to set up a float to begin with, so that they are able to go to the shops and buy the ingredients. The villa might have a suggestion menu to give you ideas. You can also discuss your tastes and preferences with the staff and specify the ingredients you would like to be included in the recipes. The team is then constantly going to the shops and fetching whatever your heart desires – it really is a wonderful experience in itself.
As you’re only paying for the ingredients and a service charge (which makes it proportional to how much work and effort is put into the meals), it all works out very, very fair. Most of the time, it’s cheaper than ordering your meals from a restaurant or ordering from a fixed villa menu.
That said, there are some hidden challenges you should be aware of. Let’s say that on your first night you order seafood with soy sauce and tomato sauce for the kids. Then on the next night you feel like Mexican food with some chipotle, followed by steaks on the third night. While trying out all these different cuisines makes for a very exciting holiday, it can also add up to an eye-watering bill at the end of your stay.
To prepare a particular meal, the chef might need to purchase an entire bottle of, say, soy sauce. When you only have seafood on the one night, you will end up using only a very small amount. If the next day you want something completely different, that might call for an entirely different bottle. If your meals are very varied and eclectic, the number (and cost) of condiments can quickly add up. Also keep in mind that the more exotic the ingredients, the more expensive they will be.
The most cost effective way to travel and to stay in these beautiful villas is to really dial in and enjoy the local cuisine. That’s always been our strategy, and it has introduced us to some of the most gorgeous local dishes in Bali, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and beyond.
Tremendous Takeout
Even if your villa doesn’t have a chef or a cook, that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy gourmet grub in the privacy of your villa. In fact, in buzzy areas where villas are absolutely surrounded by restaurants and you have a gastronomic smorgasbord right on your doorstep (we’re looking at you, Canggu), having a private chef can feel somewhat superfluous.
In Bali in particular, a growing number of villas are taking advantage of their epicurean neighbours by presenting guests with a selection of menus from nearby restaurants. In other words, your butler might offer to put together a simple breakfast or ask if you’d prefer to order-in instead. This means you can order restaurant quality food off a menu and then have it efficiently delivered from outside the villa.
Appetising Apps
Taking this concept a step further, nowadays you don’t have to rely on the villa to provide the menus. Delivery services like Grab, Uber Eats, Gojek, Food Panda, and Shopee have become ubiquitous in South East Asia and are used as a daily function, particularly in major cities like Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. These apps open up a whole world of options, allowing you to order from practically any restaurant in the local area.
Even when you’re ordering the food yourself, it’s very helpful to have the villa staff on hand to assist you. After you’ve made your order through the app, you can simply notify your butler and ask them to handle the delivery for you. They can then liaise with the driver (ensuring nothing gets lost in translation), meet them at the gate, settle the bill (obviously, you should provide some petty cash), and even set the table for you.
In other words, you can use the villa team as an extension to join these services together, creating a fabulous in-villa dining experience in collaboration with the area’s best restaurants.
Good food (and lots of it!) is one of the hallmarks of a holiday done right. We have stayed and dined our way through the best villas in Asia Pacific and beyond. If you would like any help planning your next holiday, get in touch.
