CONTRIBUTORS
Wrote “Bali’s New Bounty”
A Bali-based food and travel writer, Sutcliffe was excited to combine two of her favorite topics while researching her latest story—Bali and Indonesian food. “I really believe that Indonesian food is the last great undiscovered cuisine of Asia, and it’s wonderful that so many chefs, both local and international, are starting to take that to the next level,” she says. “It’s such a fascinating, complex, and multilayered cuisine—you could spend decades researching it and barely scratch the service.” A native Londoner who returns to her home city regularly, Sutcliffe also contributes to The Guardian, BBC, and National Geographic Traveler, and loves to explore her adopted home, Indonesia. “Travel, food, and drink are three of the most fun subjects to write about,” she adds. “And working with such a talented photographer as Martin Westlake was an added bonus.”
Whether tasting satay on Madura,
hunting for kulat pelawan mushrooms on Bangka, or learning spearfishing from Bajo sea gypsies in Sulawesi, Lisa Virgiano leads an enviable existence. But she’s dead serious when it comes to what she calls her life’s mission: promoting the richness and diversity of her home country’s cuisine. In 2009, the Jakarta-born culinary expert was behind a clandestine foodie event called Underground Secret Dining; since then, she has worked with the World Wildlife Fund on food sustainability and has twice represented Indonesia at the Salone del Gusto food festival in Turin. Now, as the brand director at Kaum, a progressive Indonesian restaurant with branches in Hong Kong, Bali, and (come May) Jakarta, the 37-year-old is busier than ever. When she isn’t trawling Indonesian islands in search of recipes for Kaum, she’s following the Slow Food mantra by tracking down sustainable, small-scale suppliers of native ingredients, some of which have become increasingly hard to find.
The Kaum outlet in Bali, which opened at the Potato Head Beach Club in Seminyak last October, is striking enough with its concrete Toraja-style wall panels, 40-seat communal table, and Indian Ocean views. But it’s the food that makes this one of the most exciting new dining rooms in town. Virgiano, who describes the menu as “nostalgia food our grandmothers used to cook,” says the focus is on authentic village fare made with only a few adjustments, and the big, bold flavors that Kaum serves up “family style” remain instantly recognizable. There’s a a light coconutmilk dish with snake gourd and moringa leaves, served in a coconut shell—and an aromatic chicken soup ( soto ayam kulat pelawan) loaded with the aforementioned mushrooms, which are only found on the islands of Bangka and Belitung, off the east coast of Sumatra. A pomelo sorbet soups up the humble rujak, Indonesia’s ubiquitous tangy fruit salad, but doesn’t dilute the blend of sour, sweet, and umami that makes the back-alley version so addictive.
Kaum is just one of a raft of notable new restaurants in Bali that are dragging Indonesian cooking—so often relegated to the hotel buffet or street-side warung—into the limelight, driving a long-overdue revival of interest in one of Asia’s most varied and underrated cuisines. Another newcomer is Manisan, which occupies a joglo- style pavilion overlooking a rice field at the Alaya Resort in Ubud. With a menu conceived by Indonesian food legend William Wongso and an interior design by the late, great Australian-born landscape architect and Balinist Made Wijaya (this was his last project), there’s plenty to admire here. The menu crisscrosses the archipelago, largely faithfully, with pan-Indonesian staples like satay, fried rice, ikan bakar (grilled fish), and sambal, the chili-led condiment without which no Indonesian meal would be complete. More impressive is the selection of lesser-known dishes, like binte biluhuta Gorontalo— a light, spicy-sour soup from northern Sulawesi with sweetcorn, shrimp, and young coconut—and udang tangkap, an Acehnese recipe that combines jumbo prawns with crispy pandan and curry leaves.
Of course, casual Balinese restaurants and resort menus have featured Indonesian dishes for as long as anyone can remember. But the cuisine’s elevation to the realm of finer dining is a relatively new thing for the island. It began, one could argue, in 2013, when Kieran Morland, Jasper Manifold, and Melissa McCabe, who had worked