There’s something almost futuristic about Locavore NXT, the brutalist, multi-faceted culinary hub surrounded by rice paddies just outside the bustling tourist hub of Ubud, in Bali, and it’s all rather delicious.
Perhaps it’s the expanse of glass and concrete, or the many Indonesian artworks hung, suspended, and placed within it, as though they were artifacts discovered and preserved, or perhaps it’s the refuge it offers from the sweltering summer heat in Bali, or the stark contrast between the fields visible through the windows and the laboratory-esque interiors, or the labyrinth of rooms, including the double-volume dining room, each table in view of the quietly buzzing open kitchen, that makes it feel as though you’ve stepped into the future. Likely, however, it feels this way because what happens inside it is so geared to a future where sustainability is key.
Dutch-born chef Eelke Plasmeijer and Indonesian chef Ray Adriansyah began the Locavore journey almost 15 years ago in central Ubud. The restaurant was rated as the most sustainable in Asia and the only Indonesian entry to hold a consistent place on Asia’s 50 Best. Then, in 2023, everything changed. What followed was, by any reasonable measure, even more ambitious.
This is Locavore NXT, a project that spans three floors, part outdoors, part indoors, including a food forest on the roof, numerous development-project rooms, underground spaces, beehives, recycling areas, overnight cabins and, of course, the kitchen and dining room.
It’s here that the tasting menu, called The Source, is currently running. This season, the kitchen goes back to where it all begins, digging deep into Indonesia’s wild landscapes, fringe farms, and rooftop gardens. There are rules that come with that: no imports, no dairy, no wheat. What’s left is a cuisine drawn entirely from the island. In many ways, it’s two chefs constantly asking themselves and their teams, “What’s next?”
They answer this question by returning to source and delivering it through 16 immaculate courses.
The experience begins in the bar area — a double-volume circular space with a huge banana tree at its centre and fermentation vessels lining the walls. It starts with what appears to be a pretty standard, if immaculately presented, antipasto selection, titled “Botanical Deception”. But, as the name suggests, nothing is as it seems.
The course is made entirely from local plants, some grown on-site and others foraged from the surrounding landscape. Unripe dates dressed in tamarind-leaf oil stand in for olives. Papaya appears in three ways: dry-aged, fermented into jam, and its seeds ground into a pepper substitute. The kenari cheese, a favourite from the old Locavore days made from an indigenous nut, makes a return. It is a dish that asks you to look twice at ingredients you thought you already understood, and makes the strongest case I’ve yet encountered for a vegan cheese, as much as I’m loath to admit it. It’s a course that shows the team’s skill and sets the pace for the meal to come.
This is a menu of progression. From the bar, we make our way down a staircase set within a water feature and into a basement, the Root System. It is the most futuristic of spaces, the red-lit underground room featuring a temperature-controlled 8m-long chamber where mushrooms are in bloom. It feels somewhat post-apocalyptic. Here, the bio-walls feature a series of interactive screens that display local ingredients via 3D renders, which can be manipulated via touch, and offer more information about what goes into the menu.
The chefs serve two consecutive courses from the same three ingredients in this chamber — mushrooms, coffee, and soya beans. Soysmilk from Javanese soya beans is pressed into silken tofu; the leftover okara feeds the next dish. The mushrooms are treated multiple ways across the two courses: lacto-fermented, blanched in vinegar, preserved, and confited in coffee oil. The residue from those processes becomes the shoyu and the dashi. “Nothing wasted” is a phrase restaurants love. Down here, in this glowing chamber where tech meets mushrooms, it actually holds and is delicious to boot.
Heading back up, the restaurant itself is an exhibition space of sorts, with materials sourced from the island and its artists. It features a wall composed of temple bricks, built using the same age-old technique, and a series of artworks, including a suspension of dissected porcelain sculptures (actually made of fibreglass) hanging above guests. It’s not just the tangible, though; accompanying the experience is a custom-designed audiovisual installation, “The Harmonious Source”, produced by Agency X with Black Hand Gang and Digital Nativ, which adds a sense of life to the room.
The chefs at their kitchen stations work effortlessly and efficiently, at a pace that, while covering a multitude of dishes, still makes for an enjoyable dinner in both length and number of courses. There’s cured fish marinated in passion fruit, berries, and vanilla oil. A dish of young coconut and coconut flower in a seaweed emulsion bridges coastal and forest ingredients. While largely drawn from the jungle, it is yet another inversion, one that takes you to the sea. Tiger shrimp with tropical fruit follows, a bright and refreshing step before the next break, which takes us up to the rooftop food forest and allows a wander through the source of so much of what lands on the plate.
Back down in the main dining room, the cooking is ramped up a notch. The next dish is a clever little twist on a ramen bowl captioned “Nic’s noodles” and arrives as house-made rice noodles coated in dashi, with a broth built from fermented tomato and durian, topped with a piece of succulent spiny lobster, the shellfish tender and glazed in a barbecue sauce made from local ingredients. It is the course that packs a punch equal to its presentation, and it is, by some distance, my favourite thing on the menu. The noodles, the broth, the lobster — all of it works so well, while still conveying a supreme sense of place.
The savoury courses carry on strong and run on through Bali beef with Surinam cherry, seasonal pickles, and a jicama dish with breadfruit tape and barbecue sauce, before the meal turns sweet with a study on local fruit and nuts: sapodilla with sacha inchi and kedondong; citrus, marigold, candlenut, and honey. And then, to close, a dessert built entirely around nutmeg, a spice whose history is intrinsically tied to the island.
Indonesia was once the only place in the world where nutmeg grew. It used to be one of the most tightly controlled spices, traded at high value, though the name is a misnomer, as it’s not a nut at all but the seed of a fruit. The dessert uses both the fruit and the seed. The fruit, gently spiced and acidic, is cooked in its own juice alongside a dash of the in-house Negroni, using only Indonesian ingredients; it’s a riff on the Italian cocktail. The seed features as nutmeg ice cream. It all sits on a warm coconut custard that ties it all together. A quiet, grounded way to end something this maximal.
The drinks programme holds to the same local-only rule. For The Source, the R&D kitchen, the fermentation team, and the group’s head mixologist worked together on pairings using ingredients from the rooftop food forest, rice paddies, and in-house fermentation projects. The result is a pairing menu well aligned with the menu.
By design, the sustainability credentials are substantial and exceptionally well implemented. Solar panels on the car park roof supply a significant share of the building’s energy. A circular waste centre ensures virtually nothing reaches landfill. In the basement, more than 20,000 worms process kitchen greywater and waste into fertiliser for the gardens (perhaps not to be thought of during dinner, but well worth exploring before or after to understand the depth of the project).
These elements have seen Locavore NXT win the Ethical and Sustainability Award 2025 from La Liste and the Asia’s 50 Best Sustainable Restaurant Award (it’s the only restaurant to have won it twice) and hold the top three-star rating from the Sustainable Restaurant Association.
There’s something futuristic, and yes, occasionally borderline post-apocalyptic, about the place. But then again, if the world were to end, Bali would probably be a good place to be. And what Plasmeijer and Adriansyah have built demonstrates that the island provides plenty. How wild can they go? The Source is their answer, and it is a thrilling one. The ambition, the obsession with place, the space itself, and the sheer technical reach of it make this a seriously impressive dining experience.
For those who want to see where The Source actually begins, an optional foraging experience is available alongside the dining reservation. It starts in the morning at LocavoreNXT, travels north to the jungles of Buhahan, and runs for around three hours with the restaurant’s foraging team through the landscape that supplies the menu. It ends with lunch made from what was found along the way, before the evening’s dinner experience.
From the July issue of Wanted, 2026.
