The Dinner Series: Present Space

We couldn’t let 2023 pass without The Dinner Series! This time we gathered to dine with Fed and Made Dhanu in the Titik Dua gallery surrounded by the artwork of Salvita de Corte and Naomi Samara. 19 guests joined us for a 5-course meal plated on Jenggala ceramics and a very special performance ended the evening. As always, the Dinner Series was hosted by co-founder Maya Kerthyasa.

We started the design of the dinner wanting a very minimalist and clean table to ensure the artwork of the Present Space exhibition remained the focus of the evening. We chose single white lotus blooms and white canvas cloth for the tables.

Place cards featured a Joan Didion quote used in the curator’s note of the exhibition written in white under the watercolor lettering of the guest’s name so you could faintly read the words.

Guests were invited to explore the exhibition before being seated.

The Fed menu was inspired by ingredients that were once common in Balinese dishes but are slowly disappearing due to the globalization of culinary arts. The local ingredients are slowly being forgotten. Some of the dishes are based on reminiscing about a childhood snack, a combination of Rujak Es and Rujak Cermai, resulting in the creation of cermai granita which was served with raw fish caught by local fisherman. The dessert also came from a home-cooked snack that Made’s grandma always made when salak was in season. The dishes were all plated on ceramics by Jenggala, a heritage Bali brand celebrating over 40 years of making incredible tableware.

The performance was presented by St Udyana, a youth group from Taman, Ubud. The dancers also played instruments and surrounded the guests with a story of knowledge and culture flowing like water and filling up all the spaces.

The final touch came from Salvita De Corte as she washed the white on white printed menus with watercolors to reveal the menu of the evening for attendees. A perfect final moment.

The Dinner Series: Water Tiger

In the spirit of celebrating and connecting Bali’s brightest thinkers, Elami and Co. launched The Dinner Series: a string of intimate evenings in collaboration with Bali’s top cooks, artisans and creators in 2019. After a two-year hiatus, The Dinner Series 2.0 is back in 2022!

The Dinner Series is co-created with Maya Kerthyasa. Maya is a writer and has her first cookbook coming out in 2022 from Hardie Grant Publishing. In a past life, she worked for the Australian Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Guide.

We design each event to tell a piece of Bali’s story, from past to present. We felt the story of China’s influence on Bali is an unknown one and wanted to take the opportunity to explore it through food and culture. And from there the Water Tiger Dinner was born!

We knew from the minute we planned this dinner we wanted to invite a very special guest: Eve Tedja, a journalist based here in Bali who is of Chinese-Balinese descent. Eve Tedja is also associate editor of Epicure Asia. Eve was the subject of a beautiful article on the legacy of China-Bali relations written by Risiyana Muthia. She shared her story with the table before we started the meal.

We gathered to celebrate the Water Tiger, and also to pay homage to the deep cultural bonds between China and Bali which date back centuries and are interwoven in many different ways throughout our cultural and spiritual lives on the island. The guests were seated based on their shio, or Chinese zodiac animal and each guest had an origami animal waiting for them when they sat down.

Our meal was crafted by chef Dwi Perkasa from Fu Shou Noodle Club, who prepared a beautiful spread of Chinese and Balinese-influenced foods for our meal. The tea was from the Kerthyasa family’s farm up in Bedugul, grown organically, rolled by hand and roasted over wood-fire.

21 incredible people gathered around the table to celebrate, taste, and soak in the atmosphere. We were visited by two very special guests: the Naga Langit Barongsai and the Balinese barong from Ubud Kaja.

The Artists Dinner: Celebrating home-grown art in its many forms

Ceramicist, mother, teacher – Sekarputri Sidhiawati wears many hats and owns each of them with admirable bravado. We were lucky enough to join forces with her for our fourth instalment of The Dinner Series – The Artists Dinner – hosted by Sekarputri and her husband Agung Prabowo at their Tegallalang home studio, Arta Derau.

Sekarputri’s charming ceramic pieces have long struck a chord with all of us at Elami & Co. Her exploration of soft organic shapes, feminine colours and strikingly relatable statements on life and society, worked in perfect synchronicity with the evening’s theme of fertility, femininity and Mother Earth. She created 139 individual pieces – little bird-shaped cups, oval platters and goblets, among them – from which Thy Neighbour presented their modern Thai eats and cocktails.

No two pieces from The Artists Dinner collection are the same. Each plate, cup and bowl is marked with its own motifs and is laden with character. She extracted clay from her own backyard (the rice-field our guests dined upon) to create every bespoke piece for the evening. And the best news? Her entire collection is available for sale.

We decided to hit the quirk button for this edition for an art-fuelled evening under the stars. We took over the rice fields behind Arta Derau ceramic studio.

Poorich Suvarnapadip from Thy Neighbour was behind the pans, turning out eight courses of his bright, progressive Thai fare using ingredients harvested from the surrounding paddies- we’re talking snails and rice field crabs, here.

Artist and Elppin designer Carina Hardy also came on board, exhibiting her world-first Back to the Breast eco-inflatable installation, previously featured at Thailand’s Wonderfuit Festival.

As dark fell, our projection mapping team brought the night alive with Agung Prabowo’s amazing art moving over the surface of the inflatables.

Thank you, again, to Agung and Sekarputri for hosting The Dinner Series 4.0. Stay tuned for our fifth installment happening later in the year.

Get to Know: Maya Kerthyasa, food writer

We have been working with Maya Kerthyasa to co-create The Dinner Series. We want more people to know her the way we do, so we sat down with her and asked a few questions of our favorite food writer.

Would you like to share a little about your background and interests with us?

I am half Balinese and half Australian. I grew up between Bali and Sydney and studied journalism. Since then, I’ve worked mainly as a food writer. I spent four-and-a-half years at Australian Gourmet Traveller Magazine and wrote a little bit about travel, but my strongest love is food. And that’s something that I’ve been interested in since I was born, really. I spent a lot of my childhood running around the back of house at Ibah, my parent’s hotel in Campuhan. And I think, through that, I developed a really strong love of hospitality.

I did my first restaurant review when I was nine years old with a dear friend of mine, Jane Adams, who has become one of my biggest mentors. I remember the day vividly, and from that moment on I have been fascinated by restaurants and food culture as a whole.

When I was working in magazines, I was lucky enough to eat and write about many different kinds of food. Now that I’ve had a child and am spending more time at home, I’ve made it my mission to focus on the food of Bali. It’s so layered, complex and full of cultural significance, but it just isn’t spoken about internationally. I’d like to change that, and so that’s where I am at the moment.

Maya and her grandmother in the kitchen

What makes you interested in food and Balinese food?

Well, I have a very healthy appetite. That helps. I’ve been fortunate enough to have eaten some really wonderful food not just in Bali, but around the world. Both of my parents are good cooks. So many of my fondest memories are connected to cooking and eating.

I’m also really lucky to still have both of my grandmothers, who cook in very different but equally wonderful ways. Food is an interesting way to explore not only the flavors of a place, but also its history and culture. And that’s why I love it. If you dig deep enough into most traditional cuisines, you’ll find they are laced with stories. When you dissect the ingredients, the way they’re prepared, you might see the history of a place, how it’s been influenced by other cultures, colonialism or immigrants. You can see how food is used as medicine, how it’s used to celebrate, even to mourn. So, for me food is such a strong vessel for discovery and connection.

What is the story behind The Dinner Series?

I have a lot of respect for Mila, Daniela and the Elami team, so I was really excited when we started talking about The Dinner Series. It’s started off as a conversation and then slowly it grew, and we did the first dinner at Green Village with Wayan Kresnayasa from Potato Head, which was such an amazing way to start.

Mila and I both saw an opportunity to create eclectic boutique events in Bali. Not your run-of-the-mill party or festival, or four-hands dinner – events that truly connect and inspire people in the creative field. I wanted to give some love to the people doing solid stuff in the culinary scene. And for Mila, there was a strong creative drive. You know, life in Bali changes so rapidly and these days we are all so divided by geography, traffic jams, and our own busy lives, that we don’t really get together as much as we used to. So, I think there’s a bit of nostalgia in there as well. To put it simply, we want to find people doing great things and celebrate them in the most interesting way possible.

What projects are you immersed in right now?

The Dinner Series of course.

I am also in the process of recording my Balinese grandmother’s recipes in the hope of compiling them into a cookbook. I think there are so many layers to Balinese food that I haven’t yet explored, so I’m calling it a book about the food I grew up with. It’s taking a while, but it’s allowed me to spend some really precious time with my Niang who is in her 90s. And learning as much as I can from her, in more of a hands-on sense, as opposed to just writing and recording. It’s a very different approach for me, but it’s teaching me a lot about my culture, my family and who I am as a cook and a writer – having that ability to slow down and be truly conscious in the kitchen.

What is your routine to get inspired?

Every morning I try and do three pages of free writing. I’ve got a book especially for this, so I sit down with a cup of tea and my favourite pen and just write anything that comes to mind. Sometimes it makes no sense, some days it’s more of a diary entry, other times I’ll just write about the way the morning light is touching the kitchen bench that day. There are really no rules and it just gets my creative juices going.

The Elementals Dinner, April 5 2019

We will let our The Dinner Series curator and host of The Elementals Dinner, Maya Kerthyasa, summarize this magical night:

“When we started The Dinner Series one of the first things we wanted to do was take people back to the Bali we grew up in. So, last night Melati Gaymans and the Elami and Co girls brought Bukit Campuhan and the river Wos to the verandah of my little cottage, my grandmother and I prepared some of our favourite Balinese dishes, Rudi and Bawa from Akademi Bar at Katamama had infused araks and local-ingredient cocktails on the pour, and then we jumped in a time machine, rewound 20 years and watched a frog dance in the garden. My Papa, Tjok Ibah shared some anecdotes about his life growing up and Balinese culture going forward. And in true Bali style, it rained right up until the guests (who were an incredibly special bunch) started arriving at this mostly outdoor event. An especially big thank you to my Niang, Anak Agung Rai, who surprisingly doesn’t have Instagram.”

Flavours and folklore from the power of the elements

This evening was about tapping in to the many bounties of traditional Bali - the flavours, the sounds and the natural environment. Dinner was prepared by Anak Agung Rai, the 90-year-old mother of Tjokorde Raka Kerthyasa and a former palace cook, with the help of her granddaughter, Maya Kerthyasa.

The dinner was held at Maya’s private home on the banks of the Wos River in Campuhan.

We worked with Melati Gaymans to create an incredible ‘edible landscape’ down the center of the table in the shape of the Campuhan Ridge, with the two (male and female) rivers running down each side. If you look closely you can see Pura Gunung Lebah (Campuhan Temple), the old Dutch bridge and the alang alang fields of the ridge. For the rivers we used agar agar, as well as taro leaves for the grasslands of the ridge, and pandanus leaves for the alang alang.

For place cards, we wrote each guest’s name with rice grains.

The menus were hand-lettered by Michellina Suminto on recycled paper to form candle holders for the table.

The food

Anak Agung Rai, or Gung Niang as she’s known around Ubud, cut her teeth in the kitchens of the Puri in the 1940s. She was just a girl when she married Tjokorda Ngurah of Saren Kauh, who taught her much of what she knows about sacred Balinese foods and how to prepare them. Now in her 90s, she continues to cook the way she did in the palace, using wood-fire and completely natural ingredients. “Once you disconnect from nature,” she says, "you lose sense of what truly matters in life.”

Gung Niang’s cooking is lauded across the island and has been studied by chefs, home-cooks and international television crews, alike. There’s something in the sincerity of her food that reconnects the diner to flavours of a bygone era – Balinese food in its truest form. You can taste the land in the leaves and roots she harvests from her garden, there’s a life-force from the animal she butchered with her own hands, and most importantly, in every knife-stroke, and mouthful – there’s a resounding sense of ritual and purpose.

The performance

The house that hosted the dinner was once home to Cristina Formaggia, an Italian dancer who mastered Balinese topeng dance. We invited her former group from Pura Desa Batuan to come and perform in the garden by torchlight.

Watch the video of the night below:

The Indigo Dinner, December 15 2018

There’s a seat with your name on it.

The Dinner Series is about connection and immersion. We’re inviting our most creative friends on a string of dining journeys which shine the spotlight on Bali’s innovative flair.

Each meal, setting and decoration has a story of its own. Every evening takes a surprise turn. We want you to talk, learn and share—but most of all, we just want you to have a good time.

The Indigo Dinner: Honouring and preserving an ancient art form

Our second Dinner Series event took us into Threads of Life’s natural plant-dye studio for a sensory exploration of all things indigo. Chef Fernando de Souza from Mana Uluwatu designed a vibrant menu with a nod to the various cultures that work with this wonder-plant.

There were big flavours, great conversation and, yes, lots and lots of indigo.

Our collaborators

Threads of Life

For over 17 years, Threads of Life has worked to conserve the precious basket and textile arts of Indonesia by commissioning local weavers. Founders William Ingram, I Made Pung and Jean Howe work with over 1,000 women on 11 islands across the archipelago. They help them to manage their resources, form local coops, recover and preserve the skills of their ancestors and work in fair environments. Their Ubud Gallery offers a deeply educational insight into Indonesia’s myriad textile traditions. At their studio in Petulu, they take the learning experience even further, through immersive workshops spanning batik, dyeing and weaving using all-natural fibres and dyes.

Mana Uluwatu

The latest venture from Drifter’s Tim and Seewah Russo, Mana is just the kind of sharp, thoughtful restaurant the Bukit has been waiting for. The kitchen, headed by Fernando De Souza, draws from the various cuisines of Asia and South America. The result was a menu that’s equal parts fresh, soulful, and sophisticated, with a healthy dose of laid-backness thrown in for good measure. De Souza has a stellar repertoire, having cooked aside the likes of Jean-Georges at New York’s Perry Street and Bali’s own Agung Nugroho At Chandi, Fat Gajah and Arang Sate Bar. For The Indigo Dinner, he touched on the flavours of India, Japan, Indonesia and Peru.

We created table settings featuring indigo dyed threads, handspun cotton from Java, indigo placemats created by Threads of Life, hand-painted place settings, and traditional clay dye pots, all under a canopy of indgo-dyed cloth. The menus were hand-lettered and then screen-printed onto cloth.

Jasmine Okubo performed and held the audience spellbound as she danced a specially created piece inspired by the human-nature connection.

The Dinner Series is co-curated with Maya Kerthyasa.