The most romantic dinner I've had on water — and how to recreate it
A private sandbank, candles in the sand, and a chef who reads the room. Cheval Blanc Randheli at its most cinematic.
"Sandbank dinner under candlelight, then the lagoon all to yourselves. This is what 'just the two of you' should feel like."
Sandbank dinners are everywhere in the Maldives now and most of them are awful. Plastic chairs, a fixed menu, a photographer who won't leave. This was not that.
Cheval Blanc takes you out at the back end of golden hour, twenty minutes by dhoni, to a sandbank that disappears at high tide. Five tables of candles in the sand. A chef who'd already asked, three nights earlier, what we were avoiding and what we wished restaurants would do more often.
We ate yellowfin three ways and a citrus dessert I'm still trying to reverse-engineer. The dhoni came back at 11:30. We swam in the lagoon, alone, for an hour.
Book it on your second-to-last night. The last night you'll want to be in the villa.