Locavore NXT has returned with the second chapter of its The Source tasting menu, building on six months of research and development with a broader collection of ingredients gathered through foraging, cultivation, and work with local producers.
Titled The Source 2.0, the new menu shifts the focus from searching for ingredients to cooking with what the team has found. The previous chapter centered on going into Bali’s surrounding landscapes, including the restaurant’s Rooftop Food Forest, neighboring rice paddies, and nearby jungle, while working with fewer middlemen. The latest menu draws on the resulting ingredient library, which the restaurant says has grown wider and more diverse over the season.
The menu follows two main approaches. One focuses deeply on specific ingredient categories, such as root vegetables, which are explored through Subterranea, a mini-menu served in Locavore NXT’s underground Root System. The other takes a more whole-ingredient approach, using plants, seeds, roots, fruits, and leaves across different preparations.
Among the new additions are two non-dairy cheeses: a soy-based feta and a blue cheese made with noni fruit. The latter marks the first time noni has appeared in a Locavore NXT tasting menu. Often considered a challenging ingredient, noni is instead used as a central component of the dish.
The restaurant’s emphasis on using ingredients across different preparations also appears in a dish centered on the banana plant. The kitchen uses the root, trunk, leaf, heart, flower, peel, fruit, and seed, drawing from different banana varieties identified by the restaurant’s Ingredient Research team across Indonesia.
Chef and Co-Founder Eelke Plasmeijer said the dish also grew from research involving Locavore NXT’s young cooks, who were invited to participate in research at LabX for the first time this season.
Another menu highlight focuses on beans, using 15 varieties alongside pickled long beans and wing beans, stinky bean miso cream, lacto-fermented mung bean sprouts, betel leaf oil, and pea-pod savory ice cream. The dish is served with a betel leaf filled with crumbled fried-bean tempe made from kacang gede and bean XO.
The menu also draws from Indonesian regional dishes. Mackerel, jasmine, rumpu rampe takes inspiration from the Sumbanese dish rumpu rampe, traditionally made with papaya leaves and flowers. Rather than reducing its characteristic bitterness, the Locavore NXT team pushes it further, pairing the leaves and flowers with pickled and smoked mackerel, green papaya broth, and kenari-jasmine cream.
The same ingredient-driven approach extends to the restaurant’s Creative Beverage Pairings. The beverage team works exclusively with ingredients from the kitchen’s own supply, using the same produce foraged and cultivated for the tasting menu in both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. The pairings are designed to highlight the ingredients and complement the food rather than mask their flavors.
“The first chapter of The Source was about going out and looking. This one is about everything we found,” said Ray Adriansyah, Chef and Co-Founder of Locavore NXT. “Our library of ingredients is deeper and wider than it has ever been, as is our knowledge, and this season is us finally cooking from all of it.”
For Plasmeijer, the expanded ingredient library also creates room to approach familiar ingredients through less conventional techniques. “We wanted to do things that have never been done but have somehow always been here,” he said. “That’s what a deeper library lets you do, go primitive and progressive at the same time.”
Each Locavore NXT tasting menu is developed through a six-month research and development cycle, with every season introducing a new set of dishes and Creative Beverage Pairings. The Source 2.0 represents the latest stage of that process, turning months of ingredient research into a menu built around the breadth of what the kitchen has discovered and cultivated.
Locavore NXT
Jl. A.A. Gede Rai Gang Pura Panti Bija, Lodtunduh, Kecamatan Ubud, Kabupaten Gianyar, Bali 80571
