Restaurants of the St. Regis

The St. Regis boasts of five restaurants on its property, or rather six, if you also count the chef's table with its bespoke menu making it a special experience at this resort. These restaurants cover a lot of ground, from the local French-inspired cuisine to Indian, Japanese, a sea-side Grill and Pan-Asian food.  This particularly useful, considering there are no other places close by the St. Regis.





The Le Manoir is the main restaurant of this resort where guests congregate during breakfast time.  You can sit outdoors in the garden, overlooking the swimming pool or indoors in the large dining room that recreates one from the colonial past.  The buffet is very comprehensive with live egg, waffle and pancake stations and a large variety of fruits, juices, breads and pastries.  They also had a lady whipping up exotic fruit smoothies and shakes every day.  During the evening, La Manoir turns into a quieter place serving a fusion of exotic Mauritian flavours and classic French cooking styles.





Simply India is easily the fanciest restaurant on this resort. This one is a modern interpretation of authentic Indian cuisine by twice Michelin star Indian celebrity chef, Atul Kochhar.  This place promises to take you on a voyage that celebrated the profound flavors and spices of India with a modern twist, reminding you of what actually brought the colonial powers to India and to Mauritius in the first place.





The Boathouse Bar & Grill was the place we ate most often, and also the one where we had our best dinner experience.  It is among the few that opens daily for lunch and also has a most enchanting sea-side setting! The mood in the early evenings here can be very elegant and romantic with incredible lighting during the sunsets showing the restaurant to its best effect. The lobster special dinner one night was absolutely terrific. They started us off on a warm lobster salad, then a rich and flavourful lobster bisque followed by a well-made lobster grill with butter-garlic sauce.



Atsuko is their Japanese restaurant, which they say is inspired by the water surrounding this island and synonymous with feelings of calm, serenity and warmth. Under the guidance of their Asian chef, Atsuko presents the modern Far East – Teriyaki, Sashimi, Tempura and Yakitori, fresh seafood, meats and accompanied by fresh hot and cold sake. While the food was quite good, our experience was marred by poor service and screw-ups in getting our order right.





Floating Market is an interesting place with serves a variety of South East Asian inspired food. Thai, Malay, Vietnamese dishes combine to infuse evocative aromas, tastes and colours at this place decorated with lanterns and various motifs of the Far East.  We dined here on a buffet that included Thai salads, soups, dimsums, and a variety of rice and noodle staples.  While the ambience here was a nice change from the other restaurants, the food was only passable and not particularly memorable for me.



There were also days when we just ordered off the in-room dining menu.  They set up our dinner on the porch rather well, with hot and cold boxes to ensure our food was delivered at the right temperatures.  In fact, this is a great option when all you want is a quiet dinner together.



There were few choices for lunch and we mostly ended up at the sea-side BoatHouse & Grill to partake on the catch of the day.  The Dorado and Sea Bass were always perfect even with the simplest of ingredients!





Overall, the St. Regis delivers on food, even if there are a few glitches that need to be sorted out.  Like I pointed out earlier, our Atsuko experience was a poor one because the waiter could not understand our order because of language skills.  Overall though, we still had a good time with enough variety to keep us going for a week.

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