Akar in Kuala Lumpur and ESA in Jakarta celebrate Modern Southeast Asian cuisine.
BY RENYI LIM
ESA
One singular sensation ESA’s exciting ‘new Jakarta cuisine’ aims to represent the Indonesian capital in all its colourful, vibrant diversity, playing with home cooking and modern culinary techniques to infuse their debut menu with a generous dash of nostalgia.
Here’s a tricky question: in a city as sprawling, densely populated, and diverse as Indonesia’s capital (its current metro area population stands at just under 11.5 million people), how do you define the Jakartan palate? “From our perspective, it’s very unique,” comes the response of Chef Aditya Muskita and restaurant director Jessica Eveline. ‘We, as part of it, grew up with a blend of cultures. The flavours of the city are so distinct: it’s bold, yet at the same time comforting. The cuisine itself is what we think of as being metropolitan. There are lots of versions of the same dishes, each having their own character.
“That’s also what we’re trying to do here: Indonesian food, but Jakartan character.” Enter ESA: a contemporary dining destination that launched in January this year, in the urban setting of the Sudirman Central Business District (SCBD). Taking its name from the Sanskrit word ‘esa’, which means ‘one’ or ‘singular’, not only is ESA the first venture for its three partners, but it represents their shared vision of ‘the new Jakarta cuisine’ and the collaborative spirit that drives the restaurant.
Having first worked together at Potato Head’s Attarine in 2016, when the modern Indonesian cooking movement was still gathering steam, Aditya and Jessica began discussing the possibility of opening ESA with Kevindra Soemantri – a former dining columnist at The Jakarta Post – in 2022. Their initial ideas are now bricks, mortar, and gleaming Nayati kitchen appliances, constructed as a welcoming modest-luxury dining concept centred around an open kitchen – complete with interiors by Surabayan interior and architecture firm KantorGG and warm, cosy lighting by Erreluce.
“Each of us has a strong role in the creative thinking process,” explains Jessica, managing partner of ESA. “Kevindra is always up to date with the dynamic restaurant business, Chef Aditya with his creativity in visualising his dishes and dream restaurant – and I’m the one responsible for making it come true.” For Aditya, whose resumé includes tenures in Mozaic and Room 4 Dessert in Ubud, db Bistro & Oyster Bar by Daniel Boulud in Singapore, and Christian Francesco Puglisi’s Michelin-starred Relae in Copenhagen, grappling with the challenge of representing the culinary essence of his home city is something he clearly relishes.
“I primarily draw inspiration from home-cooked meals, street foods, and Jakarta’s culinary legends. What sets our research and development apart is that we don’t simply replicate these dishes. Instead, we focus on the cooking methods and underlying flavours. Taking their DNA, then using that to create something extremely unique yet nostalgic,” he says. “One example is our ‘Biefstuk’ with mole and sukun (breadfruit), which a majority of people have never heard of – but they describe it as nostalgic. When you eat that dish, you’ll think you’ve eaten it before, even if it might be something you’ve never tried.”
ESA’s first menu, which leads with the theme ‘Season Heritage’, delves deeply into home cooking (primarily that of Aditya’s late mother), the blending of traditional with modern techniques, and long-forgotten ingredients that remain fundamental to Jakarta’s cuisine. As in every self-respecting Indonesian kitchen, bumbu (blended spice mixtures) and sambal are made from scratch, with similar rules applied to contemporary additions such as a savoury reduction of carrot caramel or batches of juice painstakingly fermented over three to six months in-house for the restaurant’s juice pairing menu.
Ingredients that are rarely available in Jakarta – coconut oil and palm sugar from Gorontalo in North Sulawesi, for example – play treasured roles in ESA’s food, linking back to years spent cultivating relationships with suppliers and growers across Indonesia. “We’ve collaborated closely with NOVIO Fresh by Ibu Nunik, who own farms in Bandung and Bali that offer local sunchokes and herbs not typically found elsewhere,” says Jessica. “We also source our fish from Pak Oka in Bali, a fisherman that Aditya knows. We don’t always guarantee the same type of fish for certain dishes as it depends on the season and his catch, but that’s the trade-off we’re willing to take to maintain the values we respect.”
An emphasis on sharing within their set dinner menu honours the collective Indonesian experience – and broader Asian dining cultures – of eating as a family at the same table. All the better to appreciate dishes like their current signature, Besan: a take on sayur besan, a traditional Betawi specialty typically served at weddings to welcome in-laws, transformed by Aditya into a flavourful, spicy foam with an unconventional pairing of chawanmushi and sunchoke artichokes. “The fascinating process behind this dish involved recreating a long-forgotten recipe with limited sources and ingredients obtained directly from the market,” he recalls. “This contemporary approach reflects the heart and soul of our restaurant, infusing the dish with rich flavours.”
Now that they’re more than halfway through ESA’s first year of opening, the business partners can perhaps begin to address the question on the horizon: which direction will the next season take them? “Our thematic approach is continuous, encompassing various eras of Jakarta and including modern influences from different cultures – how they have influenced and transformed the local market,” is their answer. “The flavours will always embody the essence of Jakarta: bold and impactful.”
AKAR
In full bloom Aidan Low, the chef-owner behind the newly reopened Akâr Dining in Kuala Lumpur discusses renovations professional and personal, his enthusiasm for Japanese ingredients, and the satisfaction of seeing his Mekar menu blossom.
A meal at Akâr Dining commences with a series of visual teasers, all artfully arranged on a central kitchen island: a gleaming, neon-green chayote, a magnificent golden pumpkin, the cast-off tail shells of slipper lobsters, abalone shells, and soil-dusted beetroot. It’s a preview of the star ingredients that appear on the restaurant’s new 15-course tasting menu, Mekar – ‘blossom’ in the Malay language – which acts as a celebration of Malaysia’s local and indigenous ingredients.
In the course of Akâr Dining’s four-year history, chef-owner Aidan Low has consistently championed his home country’s natural bounty, going so far as to name his restaurant after the Malay word for ‘root’. Even in the restaurant’s earlier years, he could be found creating chou farci (stuffed cabbage) using rabbit meat bred in Rawang (Selangor) or welcoming the arrival of the autumnal culinary season with Malaysian kukur splitgill mushrooms, rather than imported ones. His penchant for finding pleasure in working with ingredients from the local terroir meant that Akâr Dining swiftly made its mark on the local dining scene. It was listed as a Michelin Selected Restaurant in Kuala Lumpur for 2023 and 2024.
This particular menu, however, is the first to be launched since the restaurant’s decision to shut its doors “for a season of reflection and refinement’ between March and June 2024 – an evolutionary shift that Aidan refers to as ‘Akâr 2.0’.“Akâr wasn’t exactly as I’d envisioned it – how it could be. It was as if the food had somehow exceeded what the whole space could contain, so we wanted to make the upgrade,” he explains. “But there were a lot of fears: we would be gone for a while. Were people going to forget about us? Would they still want to try something new when we offered it?”
The new Akâr is a very different entity compared to its predecessor – due in part to a collaborative renovation process between Aidan and Studio TCH, a graphic and interior design studio based in Johor Bahru. Gone are the open kitchen, the T-shirt and apron combos, the Scandi-chic furniture, the light wood tabletops, and the dove-grey walls. In their place are tailored dark blue chefs’ jackets, terracotta floor tiles, translucent wayang kulit-style screens, dark-toned wooden seats and tables, an elegant waiting area, and a solid sliding metal door at the entrance – a more grown-up, urbane, almost taciturn version of Akâr. “We’ve changed a lot about how we look and how we carry ourselves,” says Aidan. “We wanted to make the space a little more intimate.”
That intimacy doesn’t just stem from a sea change in the restaurant’s design direction, but in Aidan’s willingness to allow his own personality to become more closely and visibly interwoven with Akâr 2.0. “There are certain personal ideas in the interior design that resonate with who I am and my journey,” he acknowledges. It’s evident in the semi-open-air entrance and the ‘floating leg’ details on raised screens that mirror the structure of rumah panjang longhouses or kampung houses, right through to the round-cornered dining tables inspired by the rattan furniture of Aidan’s childhood home.
Where the previous Akâr Dining menus prominently featured French and European cooking techniques that Aidan picked up at the Michelin-starred 64° le Restaurant (now La Table d’Olivier Nasti) in Kaysersberg, Alsace, the Mekar menu looks further eastward. Japanese ingredients and culinary philosophies reflect the five years Aidan spent in Osaka and Nagano at the beginning of his career. There he learnt to speak fluent Japanese, and gained exposure in an assortment of Western-influenced restaurants and ramen and udon bars. “We still love Malaysia and intend to showcase its glories, but we didn’t want to lose ourselves in the whole process by framing ourselves within a border too much,” is his reasoning. “Cooking in Japan formed a lot of who I am as a chef and a person – I absorbed so much while I was there. I didn’t want the whole Akâr journey to be a completely strange and new path while focusing on Malaysia. I also wanted to be myself.” Embracing the unfailingly high quality of Japanese seafood, Aidan transforms their oysters into a rich ice cream that he pairs against the salinity of boiled chayote, grills saltwater-aged Hokkaido sardines unagi-style over a hay fire, and serves Akâr’s crab claypot rice with a Nagoya-style hitsumabushi broth.
But rest assured that Malaysian produce remains central to the conversation at Akâr Dining. A jicama and abalone spring roll comes with a seaweed, abalone liver, and kulim (jungle garlic) oil sauce; a breadfruit beignet is stuffed with salted duck egg jam and covered with duck floss; and the startlingly sweet and floral notes of Panama gold passionfruit grown in Sepang power a pre-dessert palate cleanser. “I think we’re now quite confident in certain flavour combinations, so we try to put less on the plate and simplify our food in that sense,” says Aidan. “I feel like it’s not just Akâr that’s gone through a renovation process – even I’ve gone through ‘Aidan 2.0’!”