The best meal you eat at Simala may well be the simplest one. A fresh bake at Kinara in the morning. A wood fired pizza on a Saturday evening. Something warm and unhurried at the poolside while the rain moves across the valley.
Good food in a beautiful place, served without rush — at Simala, that is not a tagline. It is simply how things work here. And Kinara Poolside Cafe is where it shows most clearly.
Kinara Poolside Cafe sits beside Simala’s pool, open to the sky and the hills. It is the kind of space that reveals itself gradually rather than announcing itself.
You pass it on the first morning and note it. By the second afternoon you are there without quite deciding to be. By the third day you have a preferred seat and a preferred order.
The menu is built for the in-between moments that a good stay is full of — the late morning after a forest trail when breakfast feels too recent and lunch too far, the afternoon pause between the pool and the evening. Fresh bakes straight from the oven. Good coffee. Light plates that suit the hour without overcomplicating it.
In July, Kinara earns its best quality. Rain on the pool surface. Steam rising from a cup in the cool afternoon air. The hills across the valley wrapped in moving cloud, green in a way that only the monsoon produces. The weather comes in most afternoons and clears by evening — and Kinara, it turns out, is the finest seat on the property for watching it do both.
The Wood Fired Pizza — Every Weekend
Every Saturday and Sunday at Simala, the wood fired oven comes into operation.
A wood fired pizza is a different thing from a pizza. The base — thin, charred at the edges, with a chew that a conventional oven cannot replicate — is a product of direct fire in a way that is immediate and irreversible. The heat does something to the crust and the toppings that no other method produces. Once you understand this, the distinction between the two stops feeling minor.
How Simala Thinks About Food
Across Bariko and Kinara both, the approach is consistent — good ingredients, honest preparation, and enough time to enjoy both properly.
What guests most often say about eating at Simala is not about a specific dish. It is about the quality of the experience around the food — being fed well, in a place worth sitting in, at a pace that allows the meal to actually register. The difference between eating and dining, reduced to its simplest terms.
The mountains are outside. The river is audible. Something is always warm in the kitchen.
At Simala, that is exactly enough.
