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Puerto Vallarta has no shortage of places to eat. From the strip of restaurants along the malecón to the taco stands that locals guard like state secrets, the food scene here is alive, layered, and genuinely good.
But until recently, it didn’t have a supper club.
For anyone unfamiliar with the format: a supper club is not a restaurant. There’s no walk-in policy, no open reservation system, no menu on a wall. A supper club is a private, ticketed dinner: one seating, one long table, a fixed multi-course menu, and a room full of people who arrived as strangers.
The concept is older than modern dining culture. Underground supper clubs started as exactly that: underground. A chef cooking in their home. A borrowed space. People who wanted something more intentional than what a restaurant could offer.
That format has been thriving in Mexico City, in New York, in London, in Buenos Aires for years. Puerto Vallarta, for all its culinary energy, didn’t have one.
Now it does.
Planet Haldi
I launched Planet Haldi as Puerto Vallarta’s first supper club: an 8-course tasting dinner built around a cuisine that doesn’t fit neatly into any single category. Pakistani spices. Mexican chiles. African technique. Korean umami. All of it moving through the same menu, one course at a time, at one long table.
I’m Pakistani-African American, based in Puerto Vallarta by way of New Jersey and Los Angeles. The food reflects exactly that — someone who has lived in many places, cooked from all of them, and found a home in a city where the table is already the center of everything.
It’s not fusion for the sake of novelty. It’s the food of someone who has always moved between worlds.
What makes a supper club different from a private dinner?
The table is communal. You don’t book for two and sit in your own bubble. Everyone sits together: the couple celebrating an anniversary next to the solo traveler next to the local couple who heard about it through a friend. The seating is intentional. The guest mix is considered the same way the menu is considered.
By the fourth course, the table is always talking. By the last course, it’s usually laughing.
This is the format I’ve brought to Puerto Vallarta: not a restaurant, not a dinner party at someone’s home, but something that sits between the two. Personal enough that you feel it. Structured enough that it holds.
The cuisine
Each Planet Haldi dinner is built around a theme (a season, an ingredient, a cultural intersection) and the 8 courses move through that theme from start to finish. Past menus have included cacao woven through every course from soup to dessert, tiger prawns glazed with cocoa chipotle and honey orange ghee, sea bass in white chocolate rosemary cream.
On paper it sounds unusual. At the table it works.
It doesn’t borrow from cuisines for aesthetics. It comes from someone who grew up eating from all of them.
How it works
The model is waitlist-only. There are no tickets available at any given moment. You sign up, you wait for an invitation, and when a new season opens, the list goes first. The table stays small enough to matter.
Planet Haldi goes dark in summer. The next season launches in fall.
If you’re in Puerto Vallarta between now and then, the private dining option is available year-round: bachelorette groups, corporate dinners, anniversaries. The full 8-course experience, the full table, just yours.
Puerto Vallarta has always been a city that knows how to gather. It has the sunsets, the beaches, the mezcal, the street food, the long dinners that run past midnight.
Now it has a supper club, too.
Q&A
Haldi is turmeric. In Pakistani culture it’s the ingredient at the center of everything: food, medicine, ceremony. The haldi ritual happens before a wedding. It’s the color of celebration, of healing, of things that matter. “Planet” came from wanting to signal that this isn’t one cuisine, one country, one table. It’s a whole world on a plate. My world specifically: Pakistan, West Africa, Mexico, Korea, the Caribbean. All of it orbiting the same golden spice.
I didn’t plan it. I came here and the city held me. There’s something in PV that still feels like real Mexico: the old town, the way people actually gather, the malecón at night, the fact that food here is taken seriously but without performance. I was looking for a city that understood the long dinner. PV does. It felt like the right place to build something slow.
Usually an ingredient. I find one thing and ask what it can do for eight courses without repeating itself. The question is always: how far can this go before it loses itself? The theme is a constraint that forces creativity. The best menus feel inevitable by the last course.
Every time. The format does something to people. By the third course people are talking across the table to strangers. By the sixth they’ve usually traded phone numbers. I’ve watched people arrive not knowing a single person at the table and leave making plans together. I didn’t engineer that. The long table does it on its own.
Summer in Puerto Vallarta is rainy season. Fewer visitors, slower pace. It’s a natural pause. The break also protects the quality. I don’t want Planet Haldi to become a machine. I want each season to feel considered. Fall comes back with a new theme, a new menu, new energy. The waitlist is where you get first access.
Waitlist and information:
Meena Ali is the founder and culinary director of Planet Haldi, Puerto Vallarta’s first supper club. She hosts 8-course tasting dinners and private events in Puerto Vallarta and the Riviera Nayarit. Visit her website and join the waitlist: planethaldisupperclub.com
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