Barbecue, Mountain Air

An outdoor barbecue in the hills behaves differently from one in the city. The air does most of the work — there's no need for the fire to fight against heat that's already there, just to hold its own against the evening chill moving in.

That chill is also why it works at almost any time of year the resort is open: a barbecue dinner at Bhurban reads as a seasonal event everywhere it's held lower in the plains, but here it's closer to the resort's default evening.

The barbecue sits inside Chinar's wider outdoor offering — gardens, woodland paths and picnic space that make the grounds as much a part of a stay as the rooms themselves.

It's not an amenity bolted onto a hotel built for indoor comfort; Chinar's own vocabulary for itself leans on grounds and gardens well before it leans on any indoor facility, and the barbecue is the clearest expression of that.

Chinar Restaurant covers breakfast, lunch and dinner with international favourites and familiar flavours, indoors and at a steady pace. The outdoor barbecue is its counterpart — al fresco, built for a group, and built for the evening specifically rather than any hour of the day.

Most stays end up using both across a few nights: the restaurant for the mornings, the barbecue for at least one evening the weather cooperates with.

An outdoor dinner is also, almost by accident, one of the easier formats for a family with a wide age range to manage — no fixed seating, no formal pace, children free to wander the grounds between courses.

It's one of the details that made it into a weekend for the whole family as one of the trip's better-remembered evenings, rather than just a meal in between activities.

The outdoor barbecue is weather-dependent by nature, so a stay built around it is best planned with a flexible evening or two rather than a single fixed night. Chinar Restaurant remains the reliable indoor alternative on any evening the outdoors doesn't cooperate.