Az.u.r: It's good for you

az.u.r serves up a combination of healthy and hearty dishes. the result is better than any guilty dining around

You've probably been there (we all have): One desperate day, fed up with the healthy food regimen of slim slabs, skimmed milk and Diet Coke you decide to throw your granola bars to the wind and rush to your closest eatery for an overpriced binge, igniting a cycle of alternate starvation and joyless overeating.

It was only a matter of time before some genius came up with the idea of healthy binging.

At az.u.r, a supercool azure blue restaurant that The Harbour Hotel cleverly installed on the same floor as its health spa, one of the first things you are told is that their food is healthy. Meaning nutritious, feel-good content, not famine-sized portions.

Consider the following marvels that once would have sounded like health food science fiction:

At az.u.r a sommelier style waiter can talk you through an entire list of mineral waters, weighing up the relative benefits of their calcium, nitrate or sodium content, and uttering adjectival phrases like “lightly effervescent" . That phrase does not been soda bubbles; it refers to the Wattwiller, imported from France and nitrate free, which has an airy lightness almost lifting itself off your tongue.

And then there is the organic aspect – 80 per cent of the veggies are certified, and even the beef comes from an organic producer in South Africa that the executive chef himself is said to have inspected.

Or try to imagine (you probably can't) what the following delight will taste like: a cold soup consisting of almonds, dried bread, olive oil and vinegar. Every sip tastes different from what went before. About three minutes after you finish the dish, a light vinegar taste dances up the back of your palate, announcing itself for the first time.

On a recent, quiet evening, I ordered the smoked crab, expecting a crustacean whose legs, if stretched out, might reach the edges of my plate. When it arrived, I found a crab the size of a small dog, its shell hollowed out and filled up again with a crab moosh that also has the unmistakable wild taste of chives.

Another highlight was the lobster and dill starter which contained what can be described as a lobster fillet, larger, tighter and more meaty than any lobster I had binged on in any guilty meal. It is called a salad, but could have passed as a main course.

A grilled halloumi cheese and vine-ripened plum tomato salad was smoky and rich.

And as a special touch we were served a side dish of vine ripened tomato topped with a frozen, slowly melting pellet of olive oil, and shrimp that had been prepared with watermelon and poached in olive oil and fish stock.

Try to imagine a shrimp that tastes like watermelon. I would go back for it, even if it wasn't healthy.

The meal is rounded off by chocolate truffles filled with passionfruit.

With a smile

The waiters at az.u.r are faultless and perfectly knowledgeable. Case in point: the waiter who served us our tea was able to give us a talk on where the tea leaves of the different options had been picked and where the tea had been manufactured China and France in one case. And they are eager to recommend different courses. When I visited chef Bruce was keen to come over to our table and chat. And our dessert flambee was prepared next to the table, with all the drama you would expect.