Plantation Bay has the best restaurants in the Philippines, probably the best in Asia, and possibly the best in the world for Vegans, Diabetics, and Dieters.

Almost all restaurants and hotels simply ignore diabetics and dieters; you are NOBODY to them. And if you’re Vegan, they might have just one or two dishes to mollify you (but they taste terrible).

Tired of “healthy” restaurants with dishes so tasteless, they’re not worth the trouble of eating out. (And your friends won’t join you anyway?) Plantation Bay’s four restaurants all serve some Vegan, Vegetarian, almost-Vegetarian, low-calorie, and low-glycemic index dishes. But unlike “healthy” restaurants we also try hard to make the food delicious, while keeping up with the latest science on food ingredients as they relate to diabetics and dieters.

Vegans!

• Kilimanjaro Kafe has an entire section, Healthy Meals, with 7 delicious Vegan options such as Spicy Deep-Fried (in coconut oil) Tofu, Grilled Mixed Vegetables with Pesto, and Indian Dal.
• Fiji restaurant has Vegetable Masala, Samosas, Seared Broccoli with Nuts and Dates, and more.
• Palermo offers Roasted Sweet Peppers, Marcona Almonds, Pasta Puttanesca (advise server to omit the anchovy), Pasta Primavera, two Vegan salads, and Shirataki Garlic Rice. (Our pastas are made with egg yolk; if that doesn’t work for you, order your Italian pastas with Shirataki rice as substitute. With our expertly-made Vegan sauce choices, you’ll hardly taste any difference!)
• Even our American Diner, Route 66, has Chopped Spinach with Garlic, Kimchi, and Home-Made French Fries.
• Four of our home-made ice creams are not only dairy-free (made from coconut milk), but also sugar-free (sweetened with Allulose), and just as delicious as our regular home-made ice creams made with full cream. Our ice cream also has egg yolk.

Diabetic or Dieting?

• Almost all hotels in the world, even the most expensive ones, are run by chefs who don’t care about your health or even the taste of the food, because in a year or two they’ll be working somewhere else. Plantation Bay does care, because more than most hotels we rely on repeat business from all over the world. Our culinary management team has been in place for twenty years, and isn’t going anywhere.
• Where possible Plantation Bay makes its ingredients IN HOUSE, instead of packaged foods like most hotels. What’s wrong with packaged foods? Most contain chemicals and preservatives, un-natural high-glycemic substances like maltodextrin and High-Fructose Corn Syrup, and loads of other carbohydrates. Our mayonnaise, hamburger patties, all breads and pastries, breakfast sausage, hummus, salsa, ice creams – are all home-made, with no weird ingredients and as many calories saved as we can manage, while still preserving good flavor.
• All fast-food restaurants, and (we would bet) 99.9% of the hotels in the world, use SEED OILS for frying because they are cheap. Seed oils include sunflower, soy, canola, corn, etc., and they are all ULTRA-HIGH PROCESSED. Furthermore, after one or two frying uses, they start turning into TRANS-FATS, which as we all know are killers. Yet in most places the seed oils are used 20-30 times! At Plantation Bay, we use exclusively Natural Coconut Oil, which is increasingly recognized as the healthiest oil for everyday use, and we are alert to change it before it degrades.
• Cut all the carbs and 90% of the calories! Shirataki Rice is offered in all our restaurants. Prepared with flair and imagination, Shirataki makes an excellent garlic fried rice substitute (come taste ours, and we’ll share our secret), and a quite passable alternative for pasta (if your sauce is as good as ours). It’s not so good as a stand-alone replacement for steamed rice, but we can serve you that, too.
• Cut out all the sugar! We have a line of drinks and desserts sweetened with Allulose, the perfect sugar substitute since it is a naturally-occurring sugar, but with just 10% the calories and hardly any glycemic effect.
• All regular rice in Plantation Bay is twice-cooked, once frozen, to create Resistant Starch, lessening the effective calories and providing prebiotic food for your gut.
• Our Healthy Meals in Kilimanjaro Kafe (and similar dishes in the other outlets) will satisfy your hunger without spiking insulin or costing much by way of calories.
• In lieu of fries as a side, in all restaurants you can request Garlic Spinach instead. (But have a few of our fries anyway — experienced travelers rate them highly, and at 6-8 calories apiece, they’re not so bad. Just swipe some from your children.)
• To help you feel full and improve your digestion, our Fruity Fibrous Finish is available in all restaurants, and some of our drinks are spiked with chia seeds and/or inulin (a soluble fiber derived from chicory). We now also offer The Only Smoothie You’ll Ever Need, which is made with pureed banana, Kefir (a much better probiotic than yogurt), and a combination of soluble and insoluble fiber. On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s only a 7 in taste, but a great addition to any diet.
• Plantation Bay is developing an 8-day Weight Management All-Inclusive Package. Please fill out the simple form on the link below, and we’ll email you when it’s available (expected January 2026).

Plantation Bay’s Weight Management Program is now available!

Plantation Bay will never share your email, and will only use it to contact you as requested.

I’d like to learn more about Plantation Bay’s food:

• Mediterranean
• Steaks and Roasts
• Globe-Spanning Cuisine in One Resort
• The Best Restaurant in the Country?
• The Best Ice Cream in the Philippines?
• Filipino Food
• Food Selection and Preparation
• Farm-to-Table? No and Yes.
• Exporting Plantation Bay Delight

In substance and in spirit, Plantation Bay has the healthiest, most Farm-to-Table Restaurants in the World, if you take into account what people actually are willing to eat.

“Farm-to-table” has become the restaurant world’s favorite Barefaced Lie. You heard us. Bare. Faced. Lie. A restaurant can throw around the term with no accountability, based on a few items sourced from a “claimed-to-be-nearby” farm, which is unlikely to be true in, for example, Metro Manila. Unlike many others in the restaurant industry, we’re not going to lie to you.

Study this photo, a typical “Farm-to-Table” spread intended to evoke wholesome goodness. The wheat for that bread probably came from the Ukraine. The salmon is from Norway (grown in open-sea pens). The hazelnuts are probably from Turkey, the cashews from India or Vietnam. The garlic is almost certainly from China. The cattle for the low-quality (unmarbled) beef might have been grown in the Philippines, but not near any restaurant. So what’s “Farm-to-Table” about it?

No genius is needed to buy a cabbage and boil it, which is about what most “Farm-to-Table” restaurants anywhere in the world do. J. Manuel once ate in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Europe, which had exactly eight items on its menu, all claimed to be “farm-to-table” — as a result, it was all inedible, including the undeniably non-local seafood and a fancy dish allegedly made with local eggs.

An establishment like Plantation Bay needs to serve widely-varied Filipino and international cuisine in four restaurants for knowledgable visitors from around the world. Daily. Such an operation cannot possibly obtain even a minor part of its raw food ingredients from nearby local sources. If it could, most of that “locally-sourced” produce (as with the above-cited restaurant in Europe) would be inferior in quality to what’s produced somewhere else, and would cost a lot more.

All that said, Plantation Bay in fact is more “farm-to-table” in substance and spirit than most restaurants around the world, and specifically the Philippines, that glorify themselves with this claim.

We grow our own mushrooms and many kitchen herbs. The cacao for our Cebu artisanal chocolate drink comes from a shareholder’s farm an hour away. We buy local coconuts, bananas, and mangoes, also papaya, guavas, moringa, mung beans. We grow the fresh flowers widely used around the resort, but also choose lovely artificial flowers for Palermo’s tables rather than fresh-cut flowers which cost 3 pounds of greenhouse emissions for every single long-stemmed rose that will last just a few days in a “classy” hotel lobby.

But we don’t claim to be “Farm-to-Table”. It would be dishonest. The butter for our croissants is a very specific brand from Belgium. Our red meats include Japanese A5, USDA Prime Ribeye, and New Zealand lamb. We used to import fattened-duck livers from France, with which to make our own foie gras, but some years back desisted, agreeing the force-feeding was inhumane.

Where we excel is in cutting out intermediate processors, making much of our food as close to “natural” or “basic ingredients” as it can reasonably be, and as good (meaning wholesome and good-tasting) as we can make it.

Our mayonnaise is made by us with local eggs but imported olive oil. Our ice cream is home-made with no preservatives or cellulose extenders. Our range of Ube desserts starts from scratch with raw tuber. We grind and make the beef patties for our famous hamburgers ourselves, as well as our own Filipino breakfast sausage — no nitrates or preservatives. We also make our own kimchi and achara (another probiotic) as well as our own Kefir.

Every kind of bread and pastry offered in Plantation Bay is made by us without preservatives, never bought from an outside factory. This is true for the croissants which are as good as any in Paris to the Danishes which are better than any we ever found in New York, to the ensaymadas which delight Filipino children.

We don’t buy Mexican salsa, we make it. We also make our own tahine and hummus. Our cooking oil is healthy coconut from the Philippines (we’re not sure where it was grown, but it didn’t come far) rather than the cheaper canola from Canada or soybean from Iowa (both Genetically-Modified and Ultra-Processed).

So don’t be fooled by “Farm-to-Table” claims anywhere in the world. The transport costs supposedly avoided are outweighed by less-efficient small-scale agriculture or wrong climate, and the “taste and freshness” difference is simply non-existent for most vegetables. A lettuce that was carefully picked, washed, and packed 300 miles away in the right climate, will taste as good or better than one grown in heat and transported on the back of a water buffalo.

Meanwhile, the true difference in “healthiness” lies in avoiding emulsifying, shelf-stabilizing, bleaching, purifying, de-odorizing chemicals in almost every packaged food that are slow poisons and (we maintain) the reason for widespread obesity and rising rates of young-adult kidney failure and colon cancer in certain countries, such as the Philippines.

I’d like to learn more about Plantation Bay’s food:

• Mediterranean
• Steaks and Roasts
• Globe-Spanning Cuisine in One Resort
• The Best Restaurant in the Country?
• The Best Ice Cream in the Philippines?
• Filipino Food
• Food Selection and Preparation
• Vegans, Diabetics, and Dieters
• Exporting Plantation Bay Delight