Culture of Sweetness
In Western cultures, we are used to a standard of food ingredients that values reassuring sameness every time and is adapted to ease manufacture, production and delivery. We’ve come to expect the same tastes every time we eat, and have reached the point where it is a luxury – and one of the most sensual pleasures of travel – to simply enjoy unique local flavours created through traditional means, in small batches, made with the time it takes for the flavours to truly reach fruition.
This brings us to the honey that flavours your breakfast at Sala Mae Rim, the centrepiece restaurant of Four Seasons Resort Chaing Mai. While this deceptively simple-looking amber ambrosia may not look like a historical relic, the sweet nectar you’re eating is steeped in hundreds of years of Chiang Mai tradition.
Just one of the dozens of locally sourced ingredients employed by the Resort, our honey is not bought in bulk from industrial distributors but hand-created by local beekeeping tribes in the surrounding forests, using a distinct species of regional bees. That’s why it tastes unlike any honey you’ve had elsewhere – or even at different times at Chiang Mai. According to seasonally available ingredients, the honey might be flavoured with rambutan, sunflower, sesame, longan, lychee or sabsua. Or you can opt to savour the purest, unflavoured variety – a delicacy so prized that hill tribes insisted on testing it by dipping a match in the honey before striking it. If the match flared, the honey was pure.
Today we invite you to test it yourself, and experience flavours and subtle aromatic notes truly unlike any other on earth. We’re sure you’ll appreciate the same unrivalled purity. The product of traditions kept alive for centuries by local beekeeping tribes, the honey you taste helps keep their traditions vibrant for yourself and future generations, as well as helping these tribes continue their trade. Sample, and become a part of it.
