Potato Head Family is one of Indonesian most-prominent F&B groups with its award-winning Potato Head Beach Club in Bali and Jakarta's Kaum restaurant that serves authentic Indonesian cuisines - the eatery group takes pride in its high-quality dishes paired with unique concept design.
This year, PTT Family launched a brand-new, plant-based restaurant aptly called Tanaman (means plants in Bahasa) inside the new OMA-designed Potato Head Studios, boasting a dome-shaped space along with reflective floors and neon lighting, while a large central bar and open-kitchen adds more nuance to the venue. For menus, Tanaman offers a plant-based spin on Indonesia’s most loved comfort food.
Recently, Jakarta Veg Bible caught up with its two masterminds: Chef Wayan & Chef Indra and asked them about the latest establishment, menus, and so much more! Read the complete interview below.
1) Hi, can you tell us more about yourself.
Chef Wayan: I am the Group Executive Chef at Desa Potato Head here in Bali, and heading up the culinary team across all of our restaurants for the group. I am originally from Nusa Penida and grew up by the sea, working as a fisherman and caring for livestock with my family. I originally learned to cook with my mom but then moved to the US in 2010 to train in Chicago and obtain my Culinary Arts degree.
In Chicago, I worked at two Michelin-starred restaurant Acadia, before moving to New York in 2015 to join Chef Dan Barber at Blue Hill Stone Barns, the premier farm-to-table restaurant ranked #11 in the world. Back in Bali, I initially helped Chef Will Goldfarb open Room4Dessert in Ubud before starting out at Potato Head and be part of the launch of KAUM, our Indonesian eatery in Jakarta, as well as our sustainable seafood restaurant, Ijen and now of course, Tanaman.
Chef Indra: I am the R&D Chef of Desa Potato Head with main focus on our Indonesian recipes and across all of our brands, including Kaum, Ijen and Tanaman. I have been working at Potato Head just over a year and prior to that was working at a range of global restaurants where I was lucky enough to work with some of the world’s best chefs! I have worked at Noma in Copenhagen, Faviken and also in Attica in Australia before joining the talented team at Locavore in Ubud and also a few months with Will at Room4Dessert as well, which allowed me to develop my creativity and honed my culinary skills. Now my focus is on the new restaurant, Tanaman, and refining and progressing the menu here.
2) What's the inspiration behind Tanaman's plant-based menus? What's the menu creation process like?
Chef Indra: The inspiration for Tanaman came from the brief to create a menu which is familiar but is reinterpreted with plants. So we looked at a lot of home-style cooking and Indonesian recipes from our mothers and families as well as street vendors in Java, and then looked at how we could substitute other local vegetables and plants as ingredients to create a similar texture or consistency to the original dish.
There are already a number of plant-based dishes in Indonesian gastronomy, so we
only need to applied a “Tanaman” approach for them. For example, I used caramelised coconut milk combined with Balinese spices to replace the shrimp paste to make the dishes vegan friendly.
3) What's the challenge you faced when creating the menus?
Chef Wayan: To start off with we faced challenges to make the dishes completely vegan and plant-based - as most Indonesian cooking is made with shrimp paste and fish sauce, so we worked hard to create an alternative with similar flavour derived from plants. As mentioned, we use candlenut with caramelised coconut to achieve a similar umami taste to the fish sauce.
One of the biggest challenges is the availability of the ingredients - for example the eggplants in our sate, or our Bistik Terong (Eggplant Steak) was proving to be quite difficult for the supplier to meet our demands, so we have adjusted our menu based on this.
4) Tell us about your favourite dish in Tanaman and why?
Chef Indra: My favourite dish would have to be our Sayur Bening - a comforting soup cooked by mothers all over Indonesia. Everyone has their own recipe which is slightly different. I actually called my mom for the recipe of the one we serve in Tanaman - I have fond memories of eating it after school. It’s a light mushroom broth with root vegetables, fresh corn and chayote.
5) We feel that Indonesian cuisines already have rich and diverse plant-based menus, but in your opinion, why is there still "confusion" when it comes to Indonesian vegetarian dishes? What could change?
Chef Wayan: We think the traditional mindset for many Indonesians will eventually start to adjust to plant-based, we have grown up eating a lot of meat and proteins in our dishes, but we don’t realised that we also have been consuming tons of vegetarian dishes in our menus. We think the stigma is hard to shake, but actually the transition to plant-based is quite easy due to our familiar vegetarian dishes already imbued in Indonesian dishes.
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