EATING ON THE Move

NOTHING COMPARES TO A GOOD PICNIC IN THE WILD. COMO HOTELS AND RESORTS HAS REFINED ITS PICNICS FOR 2018 – WITH AN EMPHASIS ON TASTE, AND HEALTHY, FUEL-RICH NUTRITION. SERENA STRANG REPORTS

Exploring on foot is one of the best ways to experience a destination. You notice things you’d pass too quickly in a car. But while you might be slowing down, out there in the wilds you build up an appetite. Hence the hours COMO Hotels and Resorts Culinary Group Vice President, Daniel Moran, has put into designing picnic menus – light to carry, low on plastic, full of fresh, nutritious local ingredients. Energy-packed snacks include seed bars wrapped in paper, trail mixes and cut fruits. Lunchtime picnics feature salads in elegant Indian tiffin tins, sandwiches, delicate savoury tarts, and COMO Shambhala Cuisine favourites, like lightly-spiced Bhutanese red rice for a healthy punch of carbohydrates. Wines, Champagnes and fizzy drinks can be added to picnics, but at COMO, that’s where the trend has shifted: more and more guests are leaving the fizz to the sundowner hour, preferring flasks of warming COMO Shambhala ginger tea, or coconut water to replenish electrolytes. Each guest is now given their own bottle. It’s a shift in approach to try and keep the environment that little bit more pristine. In the end, it’s not just the cuisine that makes a perfect picnic: it’s those hidden spots COMO guides search high and low for, to give guests a clear view of Tiger’s Nest in Bhutan, or a chain of waterfalls in Bali.