Eight courses into a weekday dinner at Gajah Putih, my fellow diners and I are bathed in a soundscape that transports us to the rice fields just beyond the restaurant’s periphery. Melodic birdsong and the quack-quack-quack of Bali ducks fill the darkened room, as beams of vivid green light pour onto a central stage where server-actors walk in slow circles, clear plastic umbrellas in hand. Then comes a crack of thunder and a blinding white flash. Parasols open up; one by one, the performers hang them on hooks strung from the rafters and make their exit. For the next few minutes, water droplets falling into the upturned umbrellas mimic the flow and rhythm of tropical rain. The calming New Age music crescendos. Our servers reappear with the next dish: duck fillet in a kaffir lime–spiked jus, dried tamarillo, and sprigs of fresh mint and gotu kola.
A blend of contemporary theater and story-driven cuisine, Gajah Putih debuted last August inside a nondescript concrete box on the southern outskirts of Ubud, in Bali’s central foothills. The 30-seat venue stands among a fresh crop of new or reopened avant-garde restaurants that are cementing the town’s reputation as a fine-dining destination. Broadly speaking, the immense potential of the local culinary scene hasn’t been lost on the Indonesian government, which has teamed up with the United Nations World Tourism Organization for a pilot project to turn Ubud into a “global hub of sustainable and authentic community-based gastronomic experiences.”
While it will take some time for that initiative to bear fruit, chefs and restaurateurs are blazing their own trails. Chris Salans’ Mozaic — a pioneer of independent fine-dining in Bali — awakened from
