Eelke Plasmeijer
The 37-year-old Dutch chef and co-owner of Locavore, in Bali, talks about the challenges of ‘going local’.
“At around 11 years old I knew I wanted to become a baker because my grandfather apprenticed in a bakery and though he ended up being a captain on a river boat, he kept baking bread and I liked eating it. Then I realised that bakers needed to wake up early. That didn’t sound like a lot of fun, so I became a cook instead.”
TELL US ABOUT YOUR CHILDHOOD. DESCRIBE YOUR JOURNEY TO BECOMING A CHEF.
“When I was 14 years old, my mum got me a job in the only restaurant in our village [Loon op Zand, in the southern Netherlands]. I worked there on weekends and holidays washing dishes. Then I moved to serving ice cream, to making salads, then to the hot section. I learned from the chefowner that working in a restaurant is a social thing; he created a family where we worked really hard, then after dinner on Sunday we drank beers together. I worked there for three years.
“Afterwards, I went to hotel school, De Rooi Pannen, in Tilburg. In my fourth year, I did two internships. I worked for a big hotel for five months and then I went to Amsterdam to a restaurant called Vermeer, which got its second Michelin star weeks after I arrived [in 2003]. After I graduated I went back to work there for another two years. I was not sure if I wanted to be a cook, with the long hours, yelling and bad salary, so a year later I studied journalism to be a food writer and I was back working in the first restaurant on weekends again. A year later I was again wondering if this was what I wanted to do.”
HOW DID YOU END UP IN INDONESIA?
“In 2006, a chef I knew at Vermeer, Stefan Zijta, suggested I visit him in Jakarta for a summer holiday. I stayed for a month and did some cooking and we travelled to Bali, and I decided I should work with him. I went home to pack and came back to Jakarta when I was 24 for what I thought would be one or two years.
The restaurant, Shy, was a beautiful place designed by Anouska Hempel and owned by a wealthy Indonesian family, but it was empty most of the time.
“We Dutch cooks knew the restaurant would not work out, and I was the last one
there. The day Stefan left, Ray Adriansyah [Plasmeijer’s partner at Locavore] walked in; he had just come back from cooking Western cuisine in New Zealand for 10 years. I hired him and we got along really well. Professionally, he’s super consistent, everything I am not. We have arguments, but not fights, no yelling. We trust each other. We got a job in a resort in Bali and we cooked in a French restaurant where we were free to do whatever we wanted. We started to use local ingredients like foie gras with rambutan. We liked Bali, it’s nicer than Jakarta because the standard of living is higher, there’s more to do and less traffic.”
HOW DID LOCAVORE COME ABOUT?
“After a year we were approached to run a hotel in Ubud. The place is green, it rains a lot, it’s not too hot and it has beautiful rice fields. But the staff didn’t care about their work and the general manager hired us to
change things. We came in, worked hard and that rubbed off on the staff and they turned it around. We did it for two years and then signed for one more year but we had to decide what to do next.
“We had already started to use local ingredients – it was fun and felt right, no one else was doing it, but why was no one else doing it? We wanted to stay in Ubud so we found a space and came up with the name Locavore and opened in 2013.”
HOW DID YOU SOURCE LOCAL INGREDIENTS?
“In the early days it was hard; we were busy cooking and getting ready for service. We had to get our staff to show us ingredients, but they said that the food was what they ate at home and that we couldn’t serve it. But that’s exactly what we wanted to do. It took time but eventually they came up with suppliers and ingredients we could use. Indonesia is tropical and massive; with 17,000 islands strung together, it is bigger than western Europe. We had to figure out what ‘local’ meant to us. In the early days we were still using beetroot, radish and fennel, things grown in Bali from imported seeds, but that felt unnatural. Why travel to Bali to have celeriac? It was tough in the beginning but it made sense to use Indonesian products, like coconut milk, not dairy milk, and instead of wheat we use cassava and rice. Eventually, we hired Felix Schoener to be our R&D chef, to work with new ingredients and create new dishes.”
TELL US ABOUT EXPERIMENTING WITH INGREDIENTS?
“Based on conversations with the Balinese you can figure out how ingredients are going to work. There’s experimenting involved, but nine times out of 10, you know what to do with them. It’s a challenge to get produce consistently and in the quantity we need. Global warming has affected the seasons. The dry season this year has been longer and hotter, so things are growing at different times. But there is still so much more to discover, there are so many islands we still haven’t covered.”
WHAT’S NEXT? “We found a big piece of land where we will build a Locavore from scratch. It’s 10 minutes outside Ubud. It will be casual, with an open kitchen, with more space but not necessarily more guests. The LocaLAB will be on site, and maybe a second restaurant for the staff, or a casual weekend restaurant. There will be five rooms for guests to stay in.”
Eelke Plasmeijer was recently a guest chef at Test Kitchen, in Sheung Wan.