The first marker of a great restaurant is that it manages to cultivate a meaningful sense of arrival. Rubra, a culinary hotspot on Mexico’s Pacific coast designed by frequent collaborators Ignacio Urquiza Arquitectos (IUA) and Ana Paula de Alba (apda), passes the test with flying colours. While star chef Daniela Soto-Innes’s restaurant is located on the grounds of the W Punta de Mita hotel, it is set a ways apart from the property’s main action, reached by its own lushly landscaped access route that weaves past the restaurant’s expansive gardens to build a feeling of anticipation.

This intrigue only grows once diners reach their eventual destination, where a blank concrete façade offers few hints about what’s taking place inside. To find out, guests must first pass through a short entrance tunnel — yet another way to heighten the sensation of having been granted admission to somewhere special.

Call it the newest chapter of the Pink Concrete Club. Following in the footsteps of numerous other rosy Mexico projects, Rubra makes spectacular use of pigmented precast. In this case, Rubra’s design team (which also included Mexico City designer Pablo Kobayashi, who oversaw the project’s concrete work) leverage salmon-hued cement to evoke both traditional Mexican vernacular and the country’s more recent history of modernist architecture. On the one hand, the restaurant’s round-edged banquettes strike an earthy note reminiscent of an adobe house, but on the other, it is easy to interpret the rich tone that dominates the indoor-outdoor environment as a muted homage to Luis Barragán.

Adding to Rubra’s modern identity, the restaurant’s walls and ceiling are divided into clean, orderly grids. In another embrace of disciplined geometry, elements are positioned at one of several different datum lines that give the interior a clear spatial logic. As the only elements that ascend the full height of the space, the restaurant’s bars, kitchen and wine cellar become especially prominent focal points. Cleverly, they also conceal the main dining room’s key structural supports, allowing the building’s roof to otherwise span a large, 10-by-15-metre area otherwise entirely uninterrupted by columns.

Apart from all the pink, there is one other colour that asserts a strong presence throughout the space: green. Bountiful vegetation spills out of the curved planters that structure the layout — and in a few cases, double as seating. For her part, landscape designer Thalia Davidoff focused her plant selections on species found in the local Nayarit jungle, tying into the project’s celebration of Mexican identity — and its blurring of indoors and out.

Natural materials like stone (for the bar counters) and wood — which pops up in the sculptural furniture, a collaboration with designer Ana Paula, as well as in the slatted ceilings overhead — heighten the connection between the project and its surrounding landscape. Those ceilings, for their part, are also modeled after nature’s teachings, designed to filter light and heat in the same way as thatched palms. Other strategically placed openings facilitate comfortable cross breezes.

On a sunny day, the interior spills right out onto the wide-open terrace, where tables offer a view outwards to the forest and ocean beyond. But when clouds roll in, sliding glass doors allow for the building to be completely sealed off, becoming a cave-like pink refuge from the elements. And while our hunch is that Rubra is already fully booked for February 14, a pink restaurant like this keeps the Valentine’s romance going all year long.