Tell someone you’re heading to Fiji and they’re sure to spotlight the best site to spot marine life. I have a sneaking suspicion that in the history of holiday small talk, few people have ever started the South Pacific travel conversation with food (say, where to find falafel). However, it is this exact oversight that I personally attempted to correct on a short stopover in The Soft Coral Capital of the World.
Yes. Forget passport stamps and snaps in snorkelling gear … the real record of my recent travels to this Pacific Paradise arrived on my plate(s). Specifically those at the Radisson Blu Resort Fiji Denarau Island, where, over 40 hours, I managed to travel from Fiji to Thailand, Lebanon and beyond without once leaving the resort. And completely avoided the jetlag to boot.
Six Restaurants, One Ridiculous Appetite
The Radisson Blu Resort Fiji, on Denarau Island, has built its reputation on the things you’d expect from a five-star South Pacific resort. There’s lagoon pools framed by bamboo Tiki torches, a swim-up bar/spritz situation, and sunsets that make the Facebook-official caption practically write itself.
But, scratch beneath the postcard-prettiness and the onsite store selling floral sarongs and emergency SPF, you’ll also find a genuinely serious food program. Six restaurants, themed buffet nights, experiential dining options and (I suspect, the specific reason I eventually extended my dinner reservations past the point of reasonableness) – a Lebanese restaurant that had absolutely no business being this good this far from Beirut.
It was the kind of trip that saw me tuck into Fijian kokoda on Monday night, Thai fried ice cream on Tuesday, and, by hump day, dip my pita bread into a bowl of muhammara so good I had to text my mother and let her know. Forty hours. Three continents. And the only flight involved was the one that got me to Nadi in the first place.
The Buffet is Back
To kick things off, I arrived at Blu Bar with the usual resort-buffet scepticism … scarred by the mental trauma of pre-made desserts and lukewarm bain-maries that will haunt anyone who has ever done an all-inclusive. However, the Radisson Blu’s all-day dining room dismantled that prejudice within one sitting.
The trick is the rotating theme nights, and mine happened to land – with the kind of luck that makes you wonder what you did to make the Good Lord so happy – on a Fijian night.
Despite my previous forays into global fare through my travels (I have tried mole in Mexico, Msemmen in Morocco and Minestra in Malta) I had yet to pop my South-Pacific- palate cherry.
However, I quickly made up for my lack of culinary experience in this part of the world, as I piled my plate with fijian classics like: lovo fish – still smouldering as staff lifted banana-leaf-wrapped parcels of snapper; rourou (creamy taro leaves cooked down slowly in rich coconut milk), Indo-Fijian curries served with soft roti bread; and cassava out from under the hot stones. As well as a fried version and one mashed with coconut cream. Because I’ve never met a carb I didn’t love…
The kokoda station was doing brisk business on its own – fresh reef fish cured in coconut milk and lime right in front of you, chilli and diced tomato folded in to order, so it never sat around losing its bite.
A local band worked through a set of Fijian standards near the bar, and somewhere around the second helping of sweet lolo coconut buns, a few of the staff peeled off to dance, dragging a table of very willing guests in with them.
Thai-m to Dine at Chantara
If Blu Bar & Grill is the resort’s sparkling socialite, then Chantara is its quietly cooler cousin – perched on the lobby level with a deck that looks straight out over the waterfall and gardens, with the kind of setting that makes you order a second Thai basil something (anything) just to sit in it a little longer.
What I appreciated here most was the restraint: no attempt to “resort-ify” the flavours down to a lowest common denominator of sweet and mild. The heat was real, the fish sauce funk was allowed to be funky, and the plating had a precision that suggested someone in that kitchen actually cares about the difference between good Thai food and Thai-adjacent food.
Standouts included the fried ice cream – a scoop encased in a shatteringly crisp, barely-there batter shell, still cold and soft the second you break through it, no soggy patch in sight. It’s a dish that lives or dies on timing, and Chantara’s kitchen had clearly nailed the window between fryer and table.
Byblos: A Lebanese-Australian Sits in Judgement
I need to declare a disclaimer here, because there’s no pretending otherwise. I’m Lebanese-Australian, which means the food of the Levant was never something I “discovered” in a cool inner-city restaurant circa 2026, when Anglo Australia finally cottoned onto the magic of tahini.
Rather, it’s the smell that greeted me at every family birthday, the 15-minute argument over whether the fattoush needs sumac or just more lemon, and a set of standards I inherited before I could pronounce half the dishes properly.
So when the resort mentioned Byblos – reportedly the only Lebanese restaurant in Fiji – I did not approach it the way I’d approached Chantara or the buffet, with open-minded curiosity. I approached it the way you approach anyone claiming to cook your mother’s food: arms crossed, eyebrows already raised, fully prepared to be personally offended.
The room does nothing to talk you out of staying a while – low lighting, rattan and timber give it a beach-club rather than fine-dining feel, and the Byblos Bar tucked along one side with a view straight out over the water, sees Lebanese wine doing steady trade.
Somewhere behind the pass, a charcoal grill was working through skewers of chicken and lamb, sending that particular smoky-fat smell drifting through the room. Not unlike the smell that used to greet me walking into my own parents’ kitchen on a Sunday, minus the ocean view and the mandatory second serving fight.
The mezze arrived first, and this is where a Lebanese diner’s guard either goes up or comes down. The hummus passed the test straight away – properly whipped, not stiff, with enough tahini to taste like tahini rather than chickpea paste with a rumour of it, a glug of good olive oil and a scatter of paprika on top rather than through it.
The moutabal had that smoky depth that only comes from actually charring the eggplant rather than roasting it politely in an oven.
And the toum was genuinely emulsified – thick, glossy, aggressively garlicky in the way it’s supposed to be rather than the gritty, separated version that too many kitchens outside Lebanon pass off as the real thing. The cheese pastries, fried to order, had a shell with real crunch rather than the greasy give of something reheated, and the bread came off the grill blistered and fragrant, za’atar and oil pooling in the dips the way it should.
Another thing I clocked straight away was the tabbouli. It was the real deal. Not some quinoaed-masquerading-as-bulgur gluten free version.
I put it to Chef Abbass Fawaz, the resort’s Executive Chef and – it turns out – a fellow stickler for the details. “There is bulgur in there,” he laughs, “We have it in the finer version,” he told me … “[I know other chefs abroad] they do it more as a fusion, healthier way,” he said of the couscous and quinoa versions that have crept onto other menus, with Chef Abbass revealing he has even tried his own quinoa tabbouleh at Byblos. “It wasn’t a big seller,” he admitted.
Byblos, it turns out, isn’t a box-ticking exercise for the resort – it’s personal. Chef Abbass is Lebanese, from the country’s southern Nabbattieh area, and left the motherland in 2012 before eventually landing in Fiji, where he has now spent almost nine years at the Radisson Blu.
That will happen when you marry a beautiful local woman and start a family.
“It’s actually the one and only Lebanese restaurant in all of Fiji, and I think in the whole Pacific,” he said. “It opened during COVID, when we were catering mainly to the local market. When the borders reopened after COVID, it became a big hit with the Australian and New Zealand markets. We also have a lot of Lebanese people coming from Sydney and Melbourne, and they really love it.”
Ask him where he learned to cook and the answer isn’t culinary school – not at first, anyway. “I learned from my mother. When my mum would go somewhere, I used to cook for my brothers. We are five – I have four brothers. When you don’t have a sister at home, it’s a challenge. Someone has to step up!” he said, laughing. “I started cooking and getting more creative. At the beginning, you get some bad reviews from your brothers! But after that, I went to culinary school in Lebanon.”
The dining room’s entire kitchen brigade is Fijian, trained from scratch by Chef Abbass to fold vine leaves and pull off dishes that, by rights, shouldn’t travel this well this far from the Mediterranean. “The food you eat is prepared by Fijian staff. I train them and they handle everything,” he said. His sous chef has been with him for close to four years, and the standard he holds her to is exacting, and entirely un-corporate: “I always tell her, ‘You have to cook like my grandmother.’ That’s how you’re going to win.”
Sourcing isn’t effortless in a country this far from Beirut. “We use local, fresh ingredients, and some of the really authentic ingredients we get from overseas. We get shipments every three months, so we’re able to keep those ingredients coming,” Chef Abbass explained – spices chief among them. There are still gaps he’s working to close: he’s currently chasing down a reliable supply of pickled makdous for the menu. And some dishes simply don’t clear the food-safety bar in Fiji at all. Kibbeh nayyeh, the raw-meat classic, is off the table. For now.
“It’s challenging. I tried it, but it’s difficult because we don’t get fresh meat readily here. We get chilled meat from New Zealand, and handling it for something like kibbeh nayyeh would be very risky.”
By the time I’d waved the white flag on dessert, Chef Abbass had already decided my surrender wasn’t valid. A round of arak appeared unbidden, along with a plate of knafeh “just to try,” in that classic Lebanese refusal to let “I’m full” stand as anyone’s final answer. I lost the argument, as anyone who has ever sat at a Lebanese table could have told me I would.
My verdict – and Lebanese-Australians do not hand this out for free – is that Byblos clears the bar, and clears it by more room than I expected walking in. It’s not an exact replica of a home kitchen in South Lebanon, and it doesn’t need to be; the tabbouli’s lighter hand and the absence of kibbeh nayyeh are the honest compromises of geography, not corners cut for convenience.
But the things that actually matter – the toum that’s properly emulsified, the hummus that tastes of tahini, the char on the moutabal, the grill going in the background – are all there, done with real technique rather than approximation.
If I were bringing another diaspora diner in with the same arms-crossed scepticism I walked in with, I’d tell them to order the mezze spread, trust the toum, and expect to be talked into dessert whether they want it or not. Whatever the final word, meeting a kitchen doing honest work on a cuisine this personal, this far from the Mediterranean, felt less like a resort dinner and more like being let in on a small, unlikely secret.
The Journey Continues
Byblos and Chantara are the headline acts, but they’re not travelling alone. Basilico does family-style Italian with the kind of unpretentious confidence that makes it the easy answer on a night when nobody can agree on what they want. Teppanyaki brings a sizzling, theatre-style Japanese dinner where chefs turn the meal into a show – a good call for anyone travelling with kids who enjoy a knife trick. And for the nights that call for something more staged, there’s Lomani Wai, Fiji’s first in-the-water dining experience – a three-course dinner served with your feet in a lagoon pool, kava tasting included.
Coming Back for Seconds
Forty hours, give or take, is roughly what it takes to move through the full circuit – Fiji, Thailand, Lebanon, Italy, Japan – without a single passport stamp. What makes the Radisson Blu Denarau worth the anchoring of an entire review around its food isn’t novelty for novelty’s sake; plenty of resorts bolt on a “specialty restaurant” or two to tick a box. It’s that the kitchens here, Byblos most of all, seem to understand that doing someone else’s cuisine well is an act of respect, not decoration.
I came for the lagoon pools. I’m already planning the return trip around the dinner reservations.
