My Life
Forty years in Ubud. How food, festivals and one island changed everything.
I came to Bali in 1974 and the island never really let me go. I came back. And again. And eventually, I stayed.
That first visit changed how I saw food, colour, ritual, and time. It changed how I cooked. It changed what I thought a life could look like.
By 1984, Ubud was home. I built a restaurant on Jalan Raya Ubud with a kitchen that smelled of turmeric and lemongrass. I had babies and a growing family of cooks, writers, festival-makers and friends who became part of the same story. We fed people. We told stories. We kept going.
CASA LUNA
Casa Luna opened in 1992. I wasn’t sure what it was going to be a restaurant, a gathering place, a kitchen that kept getting bigger. It turned out to be all three.
The menu was built around what I was learning from Balinese cooks: slow-cooked curries, house-made spice pastes, nasi campur served the way it was meant to be generously, unhurriedly, with the flavours doing the talking. Mediterranean food crept in alongside it, because food in Ubud has always been a conversation between cultures.
The lime tart arrived somewhere in the middle of all this. It has been selling out before midday for thirty years. I still think it’s one of the best things we make.
THE FESTIVALS
The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival started in 2004 two years after the Bali bombings, when the island needed a reason for the world to come back. I had no idea it would become what it has become. A week every October when writers, thinkers, poets and readers from across the world arrive in Ubud and the conversations go long into the night.
The Ubud Food Festival followed in 2015. Indonesia has one of the most extraordinary food cultures on earth layered, regional, ancient, alive. The festival exists to celebrate it, in the open air, with free entry, and the best cooks in the country at the same table.
Both festivals still feel, to me, like acts of love for this place and the people in it.
THE BOOKS & BEYOND
I wrote Fragrant Rice in 2003, part memoir, part cookbook, part love letter to Bali. Then Bali: Food of My Island Home, which went deeper into the cuisine and the culture that shapes it. Writing both books taught me how much I still had to learn about the island I’d been living on for twenty years.
Alongside the restaurants and the festivals, there is the cooking school, in the gardens of Honeymoon Guesthouse on Jalan Bisma, where guests from all over the world have been learning Balinese cooking since 1992. And there are the culinary journeys: through the Spice Islands, through West Sumatra, through the Indonesian archipelago that keeps revealing itself in new ways.
I am still learning. I am still cooking. I am still here.
Forty years. One island. More food than I can remember, and more left to eat.
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