Our destination: Kula, an hourish drive from the resort, up the mountains and into the mist. More food and more fun awaited us in Upcountry Maui. We got fancy at that Veuve Cliquot party, let me tell you. His catering of the Veuve Cliquot Cliff House event the night before was the stuff that dreams are made of – oysters with bright mignonette, tuna tartare with slivered radish and avocado, a strawberry/goat cheese/beet salad that had me yelping out loud with appreciative expletives. Rounding out the spread, Chef Chris had set up dozens of garnishes, including chili oil, salted ground kukui nuts, and my all-time favorite furikake. He brought his A-game to our poke class, showing up with 20 lbs of raw fish, from sustainably-harvested king salmon, a block of big eye tuna, and two giant kampachi. So don’t let his Minnesotan background fool you – you’ll be hard-pressed to find better food in Hawaii than Chef Damskey’s cooking. Chef Damskey trained underneath the man, the myth, the legend himself, Jean-Georges Vongorichten, not to mention a serious stint with Alan Wong, who himself knows a thing or two about regional Hawaiian cuisine. I’d be remiss if I weren’t to mention the poke-making class with the resort’s executive chef Chris Damskey. Veuve Cliquot Champagne Hale, Cliff House at the Montage Kapalua Bay Resort Side note, it’s the 200th anniversary of rosé champagne (!), so if you’re caught drinking too much rosé champagne this summer, just remind your captor that you’re solo-celebrating a very big event and that he/she should probably join you. Self-limiting only with the knowledge that a sunset viewing session at the resort’ famed Cliff House sipping Veuve Cliquot’s Rich Rosé champagne was in my very near future. I stopped myself at a single Mai Tai but hankered hard for another. Ensuring that you’ll wobble back to your residence, wondering if you have enough ingredients on hand to make nachos. If you’re in the Kapalua region lusting for a Mai Tai, make sure to beeline to the Hana Hou bar where their orgeat-inflected version will encourage you to have another, and another, and another. Not usually one to rave about Mai Tais (my apologies for any heretical comments made in this post), I succumbed to several on my visit, because, Aloha, Hawaii. At the Montage Resort’s Cane & Canoe restaurant, delicate head-on Kauai prawns were followed by seared local ahi tuna. Though I spent most of my time photographing the resort (as my husband will testify, the more beautiful location, the more intensely I work to capture the space, frustrated that no single image can ever quite distill the sentiment of being there in person), I did find a few quiet moments to relax on the lanei, taking in the sights and sounds and orchid-heavy/ready-to-be-bottled scent of Hawaii.Īs part of a small group of women visiting the resort, we were treated to a range of activities that centered on Maui’s vivid culture and food. From a single vantage point in my suite’s broad lanei, I could see pools and vegetation, sea and clouds, the essence of the tropics in a single blink. Relatively unpopulated, the resort’s 50 units are perched amongst a network of lagoons and palms with the scent of local flowers – hibiscus, white plumeria, orchids and protea – filling the air. And how could it? Revealed in 3-D splendor, the 24-acre resort was magnetic. I was thankful for a lane closure in the highway which doubled our commute time to Kapalua Bay, allowing me to take in Maui inch by inch, mile by mile.Īs now seems to be customary, my first glimpse of the Montage Kapalua Bay bore no resemblance to the pictures that I’d perused online.
It was late afternoon, that time of day when sun and haze comingle, encasing Maui’s verdant mountains with a golden-hued mist. After a glorious few hours with my nose stuck in a book, basking in the legitimacy of flight-induced work-free indulgence, I touched down in Kahului Airport.
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