Alba is our restaurant, and it's farm-to-table in the plain sense: the menu changes with the season and is built from what we harvest on our own land at Playa Blanca and what comes out of the Pacific in front of it. It comes from the land, mostly ours.
We're on Guerrero's Costa Grande, 25 minutes from Zihuatanejo Airport, on 250 acres where the ocean, a saltwater lagoon and the mountains meet. Alba is where all of that ends up on a plate.
What farm-to-table means at Alba
It means the kitchen cooks from our ground first. Alba's menu is seasonal, so what you eat in one month won't be exactly what you eat in another. When something is ready in the gardens, it goes on the menu. When it's done, it comes off.
The other half is the sea. The Pacific is right there, and Alba's menu draws on it as much as on the land. We'd rather tell you what's on the table the night you come than print a dish here that's out of season by the time you read this.
Where you sit
You eat under a palapa roof, on a terrace beside the water, with palms overhead and the Pacific behind the tables. It's an open-air room. The breeze comes through, and the light changes the whole way through dinner.
After dinner, Murciélago is our bar for botanical cocktails and artisanal spirits, outside under the stars. Most people drift from one to the other without much of a plan.
How to eat at Alba if you're not staying with us
Book a Day Pass. Alba is for guests staying with us, so it isn't open to walk-ins, but the Day Pass gives you the run of the place for the day: Alba, Club de Playa and our daily food and drink. It costs $100 USD or $2,000 MXN and part of that comes back to you as credit to spend while you're here.
If you're staying with us, Alba is part of your stay and you don't need to book a table.
See where it grows before you eat it
The best way to understand Alba is to walk the land first. The Harvest & Harmony Tour is a guided walk through our gardens, the salt lagoon and the art collection, and it's included with every stay.
A few places on that walk feed straight into the kitchen's story:
- The Mandala Garden: a living landscape we use for meditation, soil regeneration and permaculture education. It's where you see how we look after the ground the food comes from.
- The Apiary: our bees. They're here for biodiversity, and for pollinating everything else that grows.
- The salt lagoon: the saltwater lagoon that sits between the beach and the land. Go in the morning when it's still.
Take the tour in the morning, swim in the biopool in the afternoon, and come to Alba hungry. That order works.
Why the food tastes like this place
Because it is this place. Most restaurants in a beach town buy from the same suppliers. Alba starts from soil we tend ourselves and water we can see from the table. The menu is shorter for it, and it moves with the year. We think that's the point of eating somewhere like the Costa Grande at all.
Getting here
We're at Playa Blanca, Zihuatanejo, 25 minutes from Zihuatanejo Airport (ZIH). Our coordinates are 17°25'21"N, 101°11'48"W, and the contact page opens the route in maps. Day Pass visitors and staying guests come in the same way.
Know before you go
We sit inside a wildlife reserve, so we ask everyone, day visitors included, to follow our lighting, noise and waste guidelines. It's part of why the place still looks the way it does.