In the rice fields outside Ubud, on a half-hectare of Balinese soil, Eelke Plasmeijer and Ray Adriansyah have built a rooftop food forest, an underground mushroom chamber, a koji fermentation lab, a 257-ingredient biodiversity library, solar panels, worm toilets, and a twenty-course tasting menu that uses nothing from outside Indonesia. This is not a restaurant with sustainable credentials. It is a functioning food system that happens to feed guests in its dining room.

First, The orientation


Ubud is a village that became the most important culinary destination in Southeast Asia — without anyone planning it.


Ubud is the cultural and spiritual centre of Bali: a town of temples, rice terraces, woodcarvers, dancers, and the specific energy of a place that has been the object of international attention long enough that it has learned to manage that attention without entirely surrendering to it. Tourists come for the Monkey Forest, the traditional healing culture, the rice paddies of Tegallalang, and the specific quality of late afternoon light through jungle canopy that makes Ubud's geography genuinely different from anywhere else in the world.


What nobody planned was that Ubud would also become one of the finest fine dining destinations in Asia. There is no obvious reason why a Balinese market town should attract chefs of international significance and then retain them. And yet it has: the Locavore project, which began on Jalan Dewisita in 2013, grew into the most decorated restaurant in Indonesia by the force of the Dutch-Indonesian partnership at its centre, and attracted around it a cluster of serious cooking — Room4Dessert, Blanco par Mandif, later Syrco Bakker's BASÈ — that made Ubud a destination for the kind of traveller who plans itineraries around meals. This happened because the food at Locavore was genuinely extraordinary, and because the philosophical proposition it embodied — that Indonesia's biodiversity is one of the great culinary resources on earth, and that no imported ingredient is necessary to cook at the highest level — turned out to be not only true but compelling in ways that extended far beyond a single restaurant.


Locavore NXT, which opened in December 2023 on a site in the Lodtunduh subdistrict just outside Ubud, is the fullest possible realisation of that proposition. The space is 47 times larger than the original restaurant. It won the Sustainable Restaurant Award at Asia's 50 Best Restaurants 2025. It diverted 98.4% of its waste from landfill in its first year of operation. It ranked 44th on Asia's 50 Best for 2026. The two chefs who built it describe it as a localised rebellion. They are, in the most precise possible sense, correct.

The People


A Dutchman from Holland and an Indonesian from Jakarta — two chefs who have been inseparable since 2006.


Eelke Plasmeijer began his kitchen career at the age of fourteen in his home country of the Netherlands. He trained through the Dutch hotel school system and worked in European kitchens, including time at Michelin-starred restaurants, before a mentor's invitation brought him to Jakarta in 2006. He was persuaded to take over as head chef at a city restaurant there. He was Dutch, it was Indonesia, and the combination was not the obvious one — but the Jakarta posting turned out to be not a detour but a destination, because it was where he met Ray Adriansyah.


Adriansyah was born in Jakarta to Sumatran parents, in a household where his mother's cooking was the first and most enduring culinary education. He grew up between traditional Indonesian food culture and an interest in international cooking, enrolled in business school in New Zealand, and then — with the specific decisiveness of someone who understands they are in the wrong place — stopped and enrolled in culinary school in Christchurch instead. After graduating he returned to Jakarta and applied for the sous chef position under Plasmeijer at the city restaurant where the story was beginning. They hit it off immediately. They have not separated professionally since.


"There is a major disconnect between the food we eat and its origins. Hold up an ingredient in its rawest form, and the majority of people don't recognise it. At Locavore NXT we are working closely with Nature in a way that hasn't been possible for us until now."

EELKE PLASMEIJER, CO-CHEF-OWNER, LOCAVORE NXT


Together they moved to Bali, where they ran the kitchen at the Alila Ubud hotel. The Alila concept of using local ingredients where possible gave them the first working version of the philosophy they would eventually take to its furthest conclusion: they pushed local sourcing beyond what the hotel expected, began thinking about what it would mean to use only Indonesian ingredients, and started wanting more space and control than a hotel kitchen could provide. The original Locavore, on Jalan Dewisita in Ubud, opened in 2013 as the first expression of the idea. No beef. No dairy. No white sugar. No wheat. No imported ingredients. The food was Indonesian and the technique was European and the combination produced something that had no real precedent.


By 2019, Locavore was ranked 42nd on Asia's 50 Best Restaurants, had won the Best Restaurant in Indonesia award, and had won the Sustainable Restaurant Award. The pandemic — which isolated Bali from international visitors for nearly three years — forced the closure of the original restaurant and gave the two chefs the time they had been promising themselves: to think, to plan, to design from scratch the space they had needed since year three of Locavore. They spent three years planning with Agency X and Budi Pradono Architects. They opened Locavore NXT in December 2023. What they built is extraordinary.

The Formation


From Holland and Jakarta to Bali — and the partnership that made both chefs more than they would have been alone.


Plasmeijer and Adriansyah's individual formations are interesting; their partnership is what produced Locavore and Locavore NXT. The Dutch hotel school tradition gave Plasmeijer a European technical base; Adriansyah's New Zealand culinary training and Jakarta formation gave him a different perspective on what Indonesian ingredients could be in a professional kitchen context. The combination — European technique and Indonesian instinct — is the foundational formula of the restaurant's cuisine.


  • (Netherlands) Eelke Plasmeijer — hotel school and Michelin-starred kitchens — Plasmeijer's Dutch formation gave him the technical European base that the Locavore NXT kitchen requires: the sauce work, the precision, the understanding of how classical European cooking technique functions at the highest level. The specific Michelin-starred kitchens in which he trained are not extensively documented, but the influence is visible in the cooking — in the clarity of preparations, in the understanding of temperature and texture, in the European logic applied to Indonesian materials.


  • (New Zealand / Jakarta) Ray Adriansyah — business school, culinary school, the decision that changed everything — Adriansyah's formation begins with a decision: quitting business school in New Zealand for culinary school in Christchurch. The willingness to change direction completely, to follow what he actually cared about rather than what seemed practical, is the same character quality that later produced the decision to close the successful original Locavore and build something forty-seven times larger from scratch. The Christchurch training gave him the professional baseline; the Jakarta formation gave him the meeting with Plasmeijer that produced everything else.


  • (Jakarta, 2006) The meeting — sous chef and head chef, the partnership begins — The specific circumstance of their first professional encounter matters because it set the operational structure that has defined both chefs' careers: Plasmeijer as head chef, Adriansyah as sous chef, working in direct daily proximity, developing a culinary language together rather than separately. The Jakarta posting was planned as a finite assignment; it became the beginning of a partnership that has not ended. The structure they established in Jakarta — two chefs, equal creative input, shared decision-making — is the structure that built Locavore NXT.


  • (Ubud, Bali) Alila Ubud — the first local sourcing laboratory — The hotel kitchen at Alila Ubud was where the local sourcing philosophy that would eventually produce Locavore NXT was first tested in a working restaurant context. The Alila concept of using local ingredients where possible gave both chefs the operational experience of sourcing from Indonesian farmers, fishermen, and foragers at scale — the producer relationships, the seasonal calendars, the specific challenges of building a menu from what the Balinese landscape provides rather than from what the international supply chain makes available. This is where the philosophy became practical.


  • (Ubud, 2013-2022) Original Locavore — ten years, the proof of concept, Asia's 50 Best — A decade of operating the original Locavore was the formation that neither chef could have received anywhere else. Not the formation of working in other people's kitchens, but the formation of building their own: sourcing from hundreds of Indonesian producers, developing relationships with farmers who grow specific varieties for the restaurant, building the fermentation programme in a space too small to contain it, winning Asia's 50 Best recognition, closing during the pandemic, and using the enforced pause to design the space they should have had from the beginning.
The Architecture and Facilities


Tropical brutalism above the rice fields — six thousand square metres designed from the worm toilets up.


Locavore NXT spans 6,000 square metres — half a hectare of Balinese land in the Lodtunduh subdistrict, south of the Ubud centre, surrounded by rice paddies. The building was designed by Budi Pradono Architects in collaboration with creative agency Agency X, in a style that the World's 50 Best describes as tropical brutalism: exposed concrete and modular forms, large windows that frame the rice-field view and allow tropical light and air to permeate the dining space, an intricately carved Balinese door as the threshold between outside and inside. The building spread across three levels — basement, ground floor, roof — housing over thirty rooms and specialised facilities. Solar panels are embedded into the architecture, providing approximately thirty percent of the restaurant's electricity. Rainwater is collected and recycled. The sewage system is operated by two thousand worms in a treatment plant in the basement. No chemicals are used anywhere in the building.


The building was constructed over three years — an unusually long lead time for a restaurant renovation — and reflects the depth of thought that went into every design decision. The facilities are not additions to a restaurant; they are the reason the restaurant exists. Without the mushroom chamber, the fermentation lab, the rooftop food forest, and the R&D laboratory, Locavore NXT would be a restaurant with very good Indonesian food. With them, it is something that has no real precedent in the world of fine dining: a closed-loop food production system that feeds a tasting menu restaurant from its own physical infrastructure.


The Rooftop Food Forest


A biodiverse garden in the sky: an edible permaculture-style landscape of indigenous Indonesian plants, forgotten fruits and vegetables, and aromatic herbs grown on the building's roof. The food forest supplies ingredients directly to the kitchen — twenty-one types of leaves, flowers, and fruits have appeared in a single course. Views from the roof encompass the surrounding rice fields and, on clear days, the volcanic interior of Bali. Guests are brought here as part of the experience.


The Underground Mushroom Chamber


Located in the basement, the mushroom chamber currently cultivates thirteen varieties, ranging from common oyster mushrooms to cordyceps, hen-of-the-woods, lion's mane, and brown oysters. Many of these are varieties that guests have never encountered — Adriansyah notes that most guests have never tried brown oysters or lion's mane. The chamber supplies mushrooms to multiple dishes on the menu, including the mushroom tea made from ugly trimmings — the off-cuts of oyster, golden oyster, and chestnut mushrooms, boiled down, deglazed with arak, and dotted with long-pepper oil.


The Koji Fermentation Lab


A dedicated room — across from the R&D laboratory called Lab X — where a diligent team of chefs constantly develops koji strains, miso, tempeh, and all kinds of fermented preparations from Indonesian ingredients: kenari nut cheese, stinky bean miso, cassava tempeh, arak-based ferments. The fermentation programme is the source of the flavour depth and complexity that makes the tasting menu's plant-forward cooking taste as satisfying as it does. Nothing at Locavore NXT is simple; the fermentation lab is where the complexity begins.


The B.I.O. Library


The Biodiversity Interactive Open-Source Library: a collection of 257 local Indonesian ingredients, each 3D-scanned and documented with information about seasonality, traditional uses, and culinary application, presented on interactive touchscreen panels in the basement corridor. The library's vision is "research you can touch." It is simultaneously the restaurant's research infrastructure and a public resource — Plasmeijer and Adriansyah hope that others from around the world will eventually contribute to it. Guests pass through it as part of the meal's journey through the building.


Lab X — The R&D Kitchen


The dedicated research and development laboratory where the early stages of conceptualisation happen. Head of R&D Alfonso Cocinero, a Noma graduate, draws elaborate sketches mapping out each dish — detailed, colourful drawings showing the flow and ideas behind the tasting menu — before anything reaches the kitchen. Lab X is where a pickled snake fruit, a banana blackened in a vacuum sealer until liquid, a vegan cheese made from kenari nuts, and a black koji amazake honey jam might all appear on the same plate for tasting, long before they are ready for the dining room.


The Wood Rooms — Overnight Stays


Three on-site cabins offering guests the possibility of the full NXT experience: staying overnight after dinner and accessing a backstage pass to the different facilities — coffee cupping sessions, tempeh and fermentation workshops, morning walks through the food forest, access to the beehives and the R&D lab before service begins. For guests who want the deepest possible encounter with what the restaurant is doing, staying overnight converts a meal into an immersion in the food philosophy that the restaurant embodies.

The Food


Indonesian biodiversity as culinary proposition — twenty courses, nothing imported, everything alive.


The tasting menu at Locavore NXT is described differently from season to season — Nature's Compass, Nature's Flux, and other names that reflect the ecological framework within which the cooking operates — but its governing principles do not change. Every ingredient comes from Indonesia. No beef, no dairy, no white sugar, no wheat. More than seventy-five percent of dishes are plant-forward. Every part of every ingredient is used. And nothing is imported: not the spirits in the beverages, not the grains in the ferments, not the oil in the cooking. The rule is absolute, and it is the rule that makes the cooking interesting.

This is a more demanding proposition than it sounds. The conventional fine dining assumption — that the finest ingredients come from specific privileged sources, many of them international — is the assumption that Plasmeijer and Adriansyah have spent more than a decade systematically dismantling. The counterargument they have made, through every menu at Locavore and now at Locavore NXT, is that Indonesia has one of the world's great biodiversities, that the specific ingredients available in Bali and across the archipelago are as flavourful and as interesting as any imported equivalent, and that the techniques required to make them shine at the highest level are the same techniques that any serious kitchen applies to any serious ingredient. The 257-ingredient B.I.O. Library is the evidence base for this argument. The tasting menu is the argument made delicious.


The World's 50 Best notes memorable courses from past menus: mud crab with rich bonito garum; banana blossom in white curry; cassava noodles with sea urchin and zero-waste dashi; raw lamb with fermented, pickled, and fruity condiments. These are Indonesian ingredients — the mud crab from Balinese waters, the banana blossom from local palms, the cassava from local farms — treated with a technical precision and a flavour intelligence that places them in the same category as any premium European or Japanese ingredient.


Seasonal Signature — Baby Squid with River Tamarind, Pickled Jicama, Blue Swimmer Crab Consommé


Grilled baby squid arranged like a miniature Kraken, with river tamarind beans and pickled jicama, poured over with a blue swimmer crab clarified into translucent amber consommé at the table. The R&D process began with Alfonso Cocinero's sketch: rain droplets on a lotus leaf, a giant squid hovering above. The dish realises this image while being completely about the ingredients — the squid from Balinese waters, the tamarind from the river floodplains, the jicama from local farms, the crab from the same waters as the squid. The consommé is poured tableside, the most theatrical moment in a menu that earns its theatre.


Fermentation Showcase — Mushroom Tea and Soybean Jelly with Kluak Shell


Soybean jelly, pickled mushrooms, cashew yoghurt, and kulim (jungle garlic) cream topped with kluak purée, honeycomb, and pickled flowers, served inside a kluak shell. Accompanied by ugly mushroom tea — the trimmings of oyster, golden oyster, and chestnut mushrooms, boiled down, deglazed with arak, and dotted with long-pepper oil. "Ugly" because the off-cuts were used. The kluak shell as vessel, the waste stream converted into tea, the fermented dairy analogue from cashews: this single course is the zero-waste philosophy made edible.


Indonesian Tradition Elevated — Tempeh — Cassava, Red Taro, Yellow Taro, Fermented Cassava Sauce


The Locavore NXT team always keeps a tempeh dish on the menu because tempeh is emblematic of Indonesian cuisine — a fermented soybean preparation that has been made across the archipelago for centuries and that the restaurant's fermentation programme has extended to other substrates: cassava tempeh, kenari nut tempeh, preparations that take a deeply traditional technique and apply it to ingredients that tradition has not typically used. The cassava tempeh with red and yellow taro, fermented cassava sauce, and Malang apple sauce with caramel kombucha is the dish that most directly places the restaurant inside Indonesian food culture rather than above it.


Rooftop Garden Course — Garden Plate — Twenty-One Leaves, Flowers, Fruits with Tofu Ant Egg Emulsion


Twenty-one types of leaves, flowers, and fruits from the rooftop food forest, arranged on a plate with a tofu ant egg emulsion and salt flower powder for dipping. Tiny deep-fried freshwater eels hidden beneath the garden, snake-like, found only on close inspection. The plate is the food forest made visible: the full biodiversity of a single rooftop garden on a single piece of ceramic. The ant eggs are Indonesian — a forest ingredient that has been eaten here for centuries — and the preparation is entirely of the moment. No imported ingredient touches this course. Everything came from fifty metres above where you are sitting.


The Beverage Philosophy — Local Spirits Pairing — Brem, Arak, Tuak, Fermented Flowers


No wine. No imported spirits. The beverage programme at Locavore NXT is built entirely from Indonesian ferments and local spirits: Brem (Balinese rice wine), Arak (palm spirit), Tuak (palm toddy), and preparations made from locally sourced ferments manipulated through secondary fermentation to create unique flavours using flowers, fruit, spices, and kitchen leftovers. The drinks programme changes as the tasting menu changes, creating pairings that share the local sourcing philosophy of the food. An early collaboration with Raka, the restaurant's head of beverages, established this approach from Locavore's first days. It has only deepened at NXT.


The Dehydrated Course — Savoury Fruit — Watermelon, Passionfruit, Banana Miso, Cherry Tomatoes


Dehydrated watermelon with passionfruit, banana miso, and two types of cherry tomatoes — one sweet, one salty. The course reflects one of the kitchen's recurring propositions: that fruit, treated with the same attention a conventional kitchen brings to protein, becomes something unexpected and satisfying as a savoury element. The banana miso (made in-house from bananas that have been fermented with koji) bridges the fruit's sweetness and the tomatoes' acidity. The dehydrated watermelon concentrates its flavour to the point where it no longer reads as refreshment but as umami. The course is entirely from Indonesian farms. It is also unlike anything else.

The Multi-Space Experience


A meal that moves through the building — garden shed, paddy lounge, mushroom chamber, and finally the dining room.


The experience at Locavore NXT is not delivered to a single table. It unfolds through the building, across its three levels and multiple specialised spaces, as a deliberate journey from the outside world into the food system that produced the meal. The sequence changes as the menu changes — Plasmeijer has said that they like to change the movement of guests when the menu changes — but the general arc is consistent: arrival through the garden shed, lounge with paddy views, descent to the mushroom chamber and B.I.O. Library, main dining room, laboratory interlude, return to the dining room for the mains.


The garden shed serves as the reception — a small outdoor structure, covered but open to the air, where the first greetings happen and the transition from the taxi or motorbike that brought guests from Ubud begins. From the shed, guests enter the lounge and bar, a space with high ceilings and large windows overlooking the neighbouring paddy fields, where the first snacks are served alongside the local beverage programme. The lounge establishes the register: not the white tablecloth formality of a European three-star, but the warmth and openness of a space that is genuinely trying to show guests where they are and what this land produces.


At a point in the meal — typically between the opening snacks and the main courses — guests descend the black staircase that the restaurant calls the root system, passing the mushroom chamber and arriving at the B.I.O. Library in the basement. The Balinese carved door at the entrance to the staircase rewards examination: at first glance a traditional decorative piece, on closer look a collection of images that include, for those who look carefully, a UFO abducting a pig. The basement tour gives guests direct visual contact with the mushroom cultivation, the fermentation systems, and the 257-ingredient database. A laboratory interlude mid-meal — between starters and mains — takes guests to Lab X to taste experimental preparations and see the R&D work in progress. Then back to the dining room for the main courses.


"We are not perfect, and we acknowledge that. But our approach is to show, not just tell. For ten years, we made excuses about space. Now the space is 47 times bigger, and the excuses are gone."

EELKE PLASMEIJER, ON LOCAVORE NXT


Each stage of the journey is escorted by a dedicated team member. With approximately one hundred staff members, most of them under twenty-five and most of them having sought out Locavore NXT rather than been recruited in the conventional way, the service is a team of people who genuinely believe in what they are doing. The soundtrack — Björk and Radiohead during the meal, according to one published account — establishes a specific and unusual register: not background music designed to smooth the dining experience, but a genuine aesthetic choice made by people who listen to this music and think it is right for the space.

The Place


Bali is not a backdrop — it is the reason this restaurant exists and could not exist anywhere else.


Plasmeijer has said it directly: "Forget about doing this in Europe. A building with all these facilities and a team this size? There's no way. It's not cheap here, but it would be absolutely unaffordable if we were anywhere else." The economic reality of Bali — where land costs, labour costs, and the cost of construction are a fraction of European equivalents — is one of the enabling conditions of Locavore NXT. But the more fundamental reason the restaurant exists in Bali rather than elsewhere is not economic but ecological: Indonesia has one of the greatest biodiversities on earth, and Bali's specific climate and agricultural culture produce the specific ingredients — the ant eggs, the kluak, the exotic fungi, the twenty-one-species rooftop garden — that the menu requires.


The relationship between the restaurant and the community that surrounds it is as serious as the relationship between the restaurant and the ingredients it sources from that community. A social enterprise incubator to support local businesses is being finalised. In late 2024, ten chefs from Asia's finest restaurants gathered at Locavore NXT for a pop-up dinner to raise funds for the Amisewaka Desa Les Community Centre, which supports young Balinese people in developing skills for hospitality employment. Several graduates of that programme now work full-time at Locavore NXT. Adriansyah has said: "There's something about doing it here in Bali that makes it feel like it matters a little bit more, with an impact that's just a little bigger."


The rice fields that surround Locavore NXT are not decorative. They are the landscape in which the restaurant's food grows, the landscape whose farmers the restaurant exists to honour, and the landscape that the floor-to-ceiling windows of the dining room frame as the visual context for a meal made entirely from what that landscape produces. Sitting in the dining room at Locavore NXT, looking out at the rice paddies through the glass, eating a course made from twenty-one ingredients grown on the roof above your head: this is what the design of the whole place is trying to produce. The view and the meal are the same statement.

Before You Arrive



Everything practical, plainly told


  • Address: Jl. A.A. Gede Rai Gang Pura Panti Bija, Lodtunduh, Kecamatan Ubud, Kabupaten Gianyar, Bali 80571. The restaurant is in the Lodtunduh subdistrict, approximately 3–4 kilometres south of central Ubud on the road toward Mas. It is not easily visible from the main road; use the full address in Google Maps or Waze. The garden shed entrance is the first point of contact.


  • Getting There: There is no public transport option that is practical for this address. Taxi or rideshare from central Ubud: approximately 10–15 minutes, depending on traffic on the Lodtunduh road. From Kuta or Seminyak: approximately 45–60 minutes by taxi. From Sanur: approximately 40 minutes. From Nusa Dua: approximately 60–75 minutes. The restaurant's team can assist with transport recommendations when you book. Motorbike taxis (Gojek, Grab) are available and reliable. Having the full address saved in your phone in Indonesian is advisable.


  • Reservations: Essential, and typically weeks to months in advance. Reservations through the Locavore NXT website or by phone at +62 821 4495 6226. The restaurant seats approximately thirty guests per service and is fully booked for most of its operating days. Dietary requirements must be communicated at booking; the kitchen is experienced in adapting the tasting menu for genuine restrictions. Vegetarian and vegan menus are available on request. The overnight Wood Rooms require separate booking and significantly increased lead time.


  • Opening Hours: Lunch: Tuesday to Saturday, seatings from approximately 12:00–13:30. Dinner: Monday to Saturday, seatings from approximately 17:30–20:30. Confirm current service times when booking. The multi-space experience, including the mushroom chamber tour and lab interlude, extends the meal to approximately three to three and a half hours. Plan transport accordingly — calling a taxi on arrival is difficult in this location; arrange return transport before you leave.


  • The Menu and Pricing: A single tasting menu of approximately twenty courses, changing seasonally (typically three to four times per year). Current pricing is approximately IDR 1,950,000 per person (approximately USD 115–120 / €105–110) for the food. The creative beverage pairing without alcohol is approximately IDR 650,000; with alcohol (Brem, Arak, Tuak, and fermented preparations) approximately IDR 850,000. A wine pairing using Indonesian wines is available for approximately IDR 1,500,000. Note that Indonesian government tax and service charge add approximately 21% to all prices; the listed prices are before these additions. By the standards of serious fine dining globally, this represents exceptional value.


  • Staying Overnight: The three Wood Rooms offer the full NXT experience: overnight stay after dinner, followed by workshops in coffee cupping, tempeh-making, and fermentation; morning access to the food forest, beehives, and R&D lab; breakfast using produce from the restaurant's own gardens. For guests travelling specifically for Locavore NXT, the overnight option converts a meal into an immersive encounter with the food system that produced it. Book well in advance; the Wood Rooms have limited availability and are the most sought-after element of the NXT experience beyond the meal itself.


  • What to Wear: Smart casual, adapted for Bali's climate. The restaurant moves guests through multiple spaces — outdoor garden shed, air-conditioned lounge, basement, main dining room, laboratory — so layers are worth considering. The basement and mushroom chamber are cool; the arrival spaces are outdoor or semi-outdoor and warm. Comfortable footwear is advisable, particularly for the basement descent and the multi-space journey. The restaurant does not enforce a formal dress code; most guests arrive in smart tropical casual.



  • Combining with Ubud: Locavore NXT is sufficiently far from central Ubud to require planning as a destination rather than a casual addition. The most practical approach is to base yourself in Ubud for several nights and treat the Locavore NXT dinner as one of the principal objectives of the stay. Central Ubud's other restaurants — Blanco par Mandif on Jalan Raya Campuhan, Room4Dessert near the Monkey Forest, Syrco Bakker's BASÈ on Jalan Dewisita — offer context for the wider Ubud fine dining scene. Spending two or three days eating at different levels of Balinese and Indonesian food culture before Locavore NXT deepens the meal substantially.
Things Worth Knowing Before You Go



The notes that belong in no other section


  • Book the overnight Wood Rooms if you can — the full NXT experience is what the restaurant was designed for — The tasting menu experience at Locavore NXT is extraordinary in its own right. The full NXT experience — staying in one of the three Wood Rooms after dinner, accessing workshops and the backstage facilities the following morning — is what the restaurant was specifically designed to offer. The workshops: coffee cupping with the restaurant's team, tempeh-making in the fermentation lab, a fermentation workshop using the kitchen's koji strains. The morning: the food forest before service, the beehives on the roof, the R&D lab with Alfonso Cocinero explaining what the next menu iteration will look like. This is the difference between understanding Locavore NXT as a restaurant and understanding it as a food philosophy that happens to have a very good restaurant at its centre.


  • Take the local beverage pairing — it is the most internally coherent choice at this restaurant — A restaurant that uses no imported ingredients in its food should be paired with beverages that observe the same rule, and the Locavore NXT beverage programme — built around Brem, Arak, Tuak, and locally fermented preparations — is designed with exactly this philosophy. Asking for wine at Locavore NXT is the equivalent of asking for a burger at a kaiseki counter: technically possible, but missing the point. The non-alcoholic pairing, built from fermented local fruits and flowers, is the right choice for non-drinkers and for anyone who wants to experience the full range of what Indonesian fermentation produces in a beverage context.


  • Pay attention in the B.I.O. — the database is the most unique intellectual object in the restaurant — The basement corridor that houses the Biodiversity Interactive Open-Source Library — 257 local Indonesian ingredients, 3D-scanned, documented with seasonality information and traditional uses, displayed on interactive touchscreen panels — is the most unusual element of the Locavore NXT experience and the one most easily passed through without engaging with it. This would be a mistake. The library is the research infrastructure that underpins the tasting menu: every ingredient on the evening's twenty courses is in that database, documented and researched. Stopping at the panels, looking up two or three ingredients from the menu you have just been eating, understanding where they come from and how they have traditionally been used: this is the education the restaurant is genuinely trying to provide.


  • Eat at other levels of Indonesian food culture in Ubud before dinner — the tasting menu is most legible with this context — Locavore NXT's twenty courses are in direct conversation with Indonesian food culture at every other level: the nasi campur stalls on Jalan Raya Ubud, the babi guling roast pork preparations, the lawar salads, the sate from the morning market, the specific flavours of Balinese spice pastes and fermented soy preparations that appear in every warung in the town. The tempeh course, the kluak preparation, the banana miso — these are transformations of deeply familiar Indonesian ingredients. Having eaten those ingredients in their everyday forms before sitting down at Locavore NXT makes the transformation visible and the skill behind it more fully understood. Spend a morning at Ubud's Pasar Umum market and eat at one of the traditional Indonesian restaurants in the centre before the evening's reservation.


  • Examine the Balinese carved door before descending to the basement — there is more to find than immediately appears — The large Balinese carved door at the end of the bar, which serves as the entrance to the staircase descending to the mushroom chamber and B.I.O. Library, is at first glance a traditional piece: ornate, detailed, consistent with the decorative vocabulary of Balinese carving that guests have seen throughout Ubud. On closer examination, there is considerably more to find: imagery that subverts the traditional iconography in ways that are playful and specific. A UFO abducting a pig has been confirmed. Others are waiting. The door is the restaurant's statement that nothing here is quite what it appears to be on first glance — a theme that continues through the meal.


  • The taxes add 21% to all listed prices — budget for this in advance — All Indonesian restaurant prices are quoted excluding government tax (PPN) and service charge, which together add approximately 21% to the listed amount. At Locavore NXT, a tasting menu listed at IDR 1,950,000 will appear on the bill as approximately IDR 2,360,000. The beverage pairings are similarly affected. At current exchange rates (approximately IDR 16,500 per USD), the total spend for food and the local beverage pairing with tax and service is approximately USD 160–175 per person — exceptional value for the quality and ambition of the experience, but worth knowing in advance rather than being surprised by.


  • Arrange return transport before you arrive, not when the meal ends — Locavore NXT is in the Lodtunduh subdistrict, south of central Ubud, on a quiet lane that is not well served by passing taxis. Calling a Gojek or Grab at the end of the meal — in the dark, on a lane without a recognisable landmark to share with a driver — is significantly more complicated than having your hotel arrange a taxi in advance or having a driver wait. The restaurant can assist with transport logistics; ask at the time of booking. The experience is approximately three to three and a half hours, which makes a precise return pickup time feasible.



  • Locavore NXT is not a restaurant with sustainable credentials — it is a food system. Arrive ready to engage with that distinction — The word "sustainable" has been used so frequently in restaurant marketing that it has become nearly meaningless. Locavore NXT is one of the very few restaurants in the world at which the word remains accurate: 98.4% of waste diverted from landfill in the first year of operation, 100% local sourcing with no exceptions, solar-powered, rainwater-recycled, worm-toilet-operated, farmer-partnered, community-funded. These are not claims made in a press release; they are operational facts built into the architecture of the building. Coming to Locavore NXT with the same scepticism you would bring to any restaurant that describes itself as sustainable, and then being shown — not told — that the claims are real: this is the experience the restaurant is designed to produce. Show up ready to have the scepticism dissolved.
Why This Restaurant


What Locavore NXT actually is


There are restaurants that are sustainable. There are restaurants that are philosophically committed to local sourcing. There are restaurants that are technically extraordinary. And there are restaurants in beautiful settings. Locavore NXT is all of these things, but that description fails to capture what makes it genuinely singular: it is the only restaurant in the world that has built its own food production infrastructure from the ground up, as an integrated part of the restaurant's design, and then invited guests to tour it as part of the meal.


The mushroom chamber in the basement is not a gesture toward sustainability. It is the source of thirteen mushroom varieties that appear on the menu, including species that most guests — including most professional chefs — have never cooked with or eaten. The rooftop food forest is not a kitchen garden that adds freshness to dishes. It is a permaculture system that supplies twenty-one different leaves, flowers, and fruits to a single course. The fermentation lab is not a fermentation programme that produces a few house condiments. It is the source of the flavour complexity — the kenari nut miso, the banana koji, the arak-fermented preparations, the cassava tempeh — that makes the plant-forward tasting menu taste as deeply satisfying as it does.


Locavore NXT is a powerhouse of eco-conscious, plant-based cuisine. A Willy Wonka-style wonder factory spanning a rooftop food forest, a fermentation lab and an underground mushroom chamber. The awards are already rolling in. With nature woven into every detail, eating here is an incredibly grounding experience, linking guests and the environment in a way that almost feels spiritual.

ASIA'S 50 BEST RESTAURANTS, ON LOCAVORE NXT


Eelke Plasmeijer started cooking in Holland at fourteen. He came to Jakarta because a mentor called him and persuaded him. Ray Adriansyah quit business school in New Zealand to enrol in culinary school because he understood himself well enough to know he was in the wrong place. They met in Jakarta in 2006, moved to Bali, spent a decade at the original Locavore on Jalan Dewisita, closed it during the pandemic, and spent three years building something forty-seven times larger that uses two thousand worms to process its sewage. They describe this as a localised rebellion. They are correct. It is also, in the rice fields outside Ubud, on a half-hectare of Balinese soil, the most ambitious and the most coherent answer to the question of what a restaurant can be that exists in Asia today.


Go local or go home. The cap says it. The building means it. The mushrooms are growing in the basement right now, waiting for the next menu.