Celebrate healthy eating with the Pink Table Project

The Pink Table Project celebrates the healthier meal options on restaurants’ menus and encourages healthier options where there aren’t enough.

Most restaurants have healthier eating options, but we don’t know it, or they are simply not labelled as such.

The Pink Table Project aims to create a mass movement highlighting these healthier choices and urging restaurants to take advantage of this initiative and be the industry leaders.

This is different – the project wants to show people how exciting healthy eating really is and prove that it doesn’t mean boring.

In South Africa, in fact, it’s exciting. The menu celebrates amazing, exciting, decadent and delicious food that just happens to be healthy in varying degrees.

Picture: Pexels

The Pink Table Project is building a global Pink Table Collection of Restaurants to prove most restaurants have healthy and decadent food on the menu.

The #PinkMenuChallenge is as an online challenge for chefs to do great things by creating a healthier pink menu that is exciting and inspires healthier food choices as a means to fight and prevent cancer and other noncommunicable diseases. It will also serve as a fundraising event for cancer.

For the event, chefs all over the world create a healthier pink menu (either a three-course meal, with a starter, main and dessert, or a full sampling menu), and then make a one-minute challenge video to introduce themselves and their Pink Menu, tell us what’s healthier about it, and nominate other great chefs to take up the challenge.

Chefs then host Pink Menu Tables in their restaurants. The last serving day is 29 February.

Picture: Unsplash

All Pink Menus are set menus, featuring their beneficiaries fundraising platforms on the menu card at each restaurant.

Platforms are country, restaurant and beneficiary dependent, and will include one or all of these options, as well as direct donation via QR-code, online payment or EFT.

Up to 50% of cancers can be prevented with wellness management, according to the World Health Organisation. This includes not smoking, regular exercise, less alcohol and a healthier diet.

With the Pink Table Project, you can have a treat while being totally healthy.

Picture: Unsplash

Some Pink Menu restaurants in SA:

Durban

Parc Cafe

Seasonally focused using locally sourced artisanal produce and homemade products. Only the very best produce is personally hand-selected and sourced by the chef every morning. Familiar favourites are expertly combined with new flavours.

Cafe 1999

Cafe 1999 offers a dining experience to excite the senses with a vibrant ambience and a delectable menu in the heart of Durban’s trendy Berea. Chef Marcelle Roberts’ award-winning contemporary Mediterranean cuisine is designed around sharing.

Cafe 1999.

Gauteng

Black Bamboo

All food products at The Black Bamboo are sourced through specialist suppliers. A large focus is placed on responsible sourcing of goods, as well as supporting local business as much as possible.

The Giglio Boutique Hotel

The Giglio dining room was designed around a culture of wine appreciation, featuring a cellar behind glass, timber floors, chairs fashioned from repurposed wine barrels and mood-enhancing chandeliers.

Restaurant Mosiac

Renowned South African Impressionist artists and interior decorators were commissioned to step back in time to the romantic early 1900s to create a restaurant which paid homage to the love of Parisian Belle Époque restaurants.

Restaurant Mosaic has an intimate feel with booth-type seats and two private dining rooms.

Restaurant Mosaic.

Western Cape

Ellerman House

Enjoy the spa, contemporary art gallery, wine gallery, wine and champagne cellar, brandy lounge, Bar Roc, library, dining rooms, lounges, guest pantry, solar-heated swimming pool and fitness centre during your stay.

Bones Kitchen and Bar

It’s a restaurant, deli, bar, lounge and put-your-feet-up spot in Woodstock.

Ellerman House.

(Compiled by Adriaan Roets)

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