Celebrating Local Cuisine

Savor the flavor

Our guiding food philosophy, Eat With Six Senses, is a delicious concept fusing fresh natural ingredients, local sustainable foods, community, human health, and eco-protection. In practice, it translates to talented chefs working at the very top of their creative game to ensure you leave a Six Senses table feeling better than when you arrived. Our mantra Natural Ingredients, Less is More, and Local & Sustainable means we celebrate the bounty and flavor of the seasons, add nourishment and nutrition to every bite, and remain deeply rooted in local culture and history.

Nowhere is seasonal sustainability more in evidence than at Six Senses Kyoto. It is customary in Japan to divide the calendar into 24 distinct solar seasons, known as sekki. Mapped around the four solstices and lasting approximately 15 days, each sekki serves as a guiding principle for our chefs to craft mindful menus that make natural, local, and sustainable ingredients the hero of each dish. Menu highlights include fermented foods that are known to support digestive health such as local amazake cream, crafted from rice and koji (malted rice), which replaces traditional clotted cream to leave you feeling lighter and fresher. Here, dishes not only nurture your microbiome, they also taste divine.

At Six Senses Bhutan, where five lodges fan out across the world’s only carbon-negative country, our commitment to working in symbiotic harmony with the land is brought to life by using grown-in, not flown-in produce. Our chefs shun what’s fashionable to bring you the real taste of Bhutan. If this means recreating the sweet, rich hit of balsamic vinegar by aging pomegranate and blackberries in bamboo barrels or concocting a zingy plant-based umami mushroom powder, they willingly accept the challenge. The result? You get to experience real produce and wholesome flavors grown in rich soil under gentle Himalayan sunlight.

They say variety is the spice of life, and our chefs prove this time and again, devising delectable dishes for Blue Zone menus at Leaf in Six Senses Laamu and exciting plant-based platters at Notos Rooftop in Six Senses Rome. By avoiding refined sugar, choosing ancient grains, pickling, fermenting, salting, dehydrating, smoking, and nurturing ‘the mother’, our chefs effortlessly combine nutritious and delicious. 

If you’re wondering whose mother we’re talking about, we actually mean the live apple cider vinegar scoby, or life-giving ingredient in fire cider, available across many of our resorts, including Six Senses Douro Valley and Six Senses Kaplankaya. Did you know that a daily shot can boost your gut health, power up your immune system, and elevate your powers of positivity? From kefir, kimchi, and kombucha to sauerkraut and miso: all fermented foods are in full flow across our menus. 

Your plate and palate

Not only do we cultivate healthy relationships with the farmers and fishers that supply our restaurants, we like to stick our spades in the ground and our hands in the soil to grow our own organic farm-to-fork produce. If you’re inspired by local cuisine, you’ll get the opportunity to learn a few cooking secrets first hand. Visit Farm on the Hill at Six Senses Samui to pick aromatic herbs and invent your own cocktail or mocktail, spend the morning at Can Tanca at Six Senses Ibiza and tuck into a homegrown and homecooked brunch, and learn how to make cheese the traditional way at Dibba at Six Senses Zighy Bay in Oman.

Our sizeable organic garden at Six Senses Krabey Island in Cambodia, all 40,000 square feet (3,700 square meters) of it, produces much of the mouth-watering garden-to-table meals that blend both traditional Khmer cooking and flavorful seasonal-driven Cambodian dishes, inspired by Grandma’s recipes handed down through the generations. And special mention goes to Solar Fresh Cuts – our organic farm growing under an 800-panel solar farm – at Six Senses Ninh Van Bay, which promotes human health and the health of our planet and feeds our kitchen with green power and fresh-as-can-be produce.

Indulgent foodie experiences continue at Six Senses La Sagesse on the spice island of Grenada. Take rich volcanic soil, add sun-soaked days, gentle island breezes, and a sprinkling of warm rain, and you have the perfect conditions for aromatic spices and bountiful cacao harvests. Discover all about the island’s fascinating chocolate heritage and craft your very own Caribbean-style cocoa tea balls. 

Beyond the kitchen, take the road less traveled and an invitation to Grandma’s Lunch at Six Senses Qing Cheng Mountain. Follow the path through fields of fruit trees and blooming Sichuan peppercorn trees, passing ancient ruins and watchtowers. Grandma, a member of the mountain community that belongs to the Da Qin minority in China, is waiting, a smile on her face and a bubbling pot on the stove, the fragrant spices filling the room. This is a unique chance to taste a recipe that follows its own journey back in time, accompanied by seasonal produce that has been picked fresh for the occasion. With each mouthful comes a discovery, about the family's indigenous farming methods and health benefits of each ingredient.

With food comes romance. For some, that might mean a candlelit dinner for two seated at our iconic Table 99 at Dining by the Edge with the sun bathing the sea in a hypnotic golden glow as you indulge on a "Royal Taste of Thailand" set menu at Six Senses Samui. For others, it might mean a traditional Swiss raclette dinner in an authentic 16th-century castle beneath snow-dusted mountains at Six Senses Crans-Montana. There’s no pressure to even go out. Sometimes the most memorable evening starts with the least drama: a cozy in-villa barbecue with just each other.

If you fancy eating in a special location, our chefs will create unique dining experiences, be it a tasting menu with your feet in the sand, a picnic on a mountain hike, mezze served under Bedouin tents in the desert, or a fish (ethically) lured from the Laamu Atoll, wrapped in a banana leaf with a little lemongrass and ginger, and barbecued for lunch as the waves lap the shore. All family-oriented and romantics at heart, our Six Senses Executive Chefs love designing menus to create and reflect a moment you’ll remember forever.

Eat, drink, and be healthy

For moments of foodie fellowship, join a Communal Thai Cooking Class at Six Senses Yao Noi to tantalize your taste buds and learn more about the region's vibrant food culture in a social setting. Snag a secret recipe or two, topped up with herbs, ginger, and fragrant lemongrass handpicked from our organic garden. 

As the Hindi word for plate, thali is an integral part of Indian festivals, group celebrations, and everyday eating, steeped in tradition. At Six Senses Fort Barwara, you come together over multiple small bowls for a highly social experience, sharing the joy in vibrant flavors and local ingredients. At our Indian Himalayan resort, Six Senses Vana, you might arrive alone but you’ll never be lonely, forming new friendships thanks to shared meals and shared stories told around communal tables at Salana, our world cuisine restaurant. 

Across Six Senses properties, eating is a social occasion. From cooking classes to wine evenings, and Chef’s Tables to degustation dinners, abiding memories and deeper connections are forged with the simple act of eating together.