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By Mihar Dias (C) Copyright December 2022
Omakase at Izakaya of Apurva Kempinski Hotel, Nusa Dua Bali is extraordinarily delicious with culinary delights that grip your entire senses all at once.
However, getting there from Brawa Beach where we stayed for almost two weeks took us almost three hours because of the year-end traffic.
Anyway, driving into The Apurva Kempinski Hotel at dusk is an entirely new experience. Lights like teardrops dripping from the ceiling greet you as you drive through the gates.
Then we noticed a few well-lit Christmas trees that seem to emerge out of a body of water, a reflector pool, as we alighted from our car. Their reflection on the water transforms the hotel entrance into a fairy tale wonderland.
Everyone just couldn't resist the temptation of snapping a few shots to send to our dear ones left behind at home.
As we climbed up a few steps to the lobby another surprise greeted us.
The lobby is just magnificent. It's filled with carvings, sculptures and collectable artefacts so beautifully curated that's so fitting for this highly acclaimed hotel.
Walking past an excellent exhibition by Raul Rananda of Jakarta in the lobby, we plonked ourselves onto a comfortable deck on the balcony across from the OKU Izakaya restaurant. The promo says: "Inspired by the award-winning OKU Japanese Restaurant Jakarta, Izakaya by OKU that emphasises in bringing out the best of its creations, in a dynamic and convivial atmosphere. This Japanese restaurant in Bali offers a bistro-chic setting and an open-kitchen dining experience, where guests and the chefs interact for deeper enjoyment. The elaborately crafted dishes consist of the finest ingredients, combined with the latest composition techniques to serve a truly tasteful and artistic piece of art on a plate." (Kempinski).
Every single word in that promo is true when the dishes landed on our table delivered by well-trained English-speaking waitresses who are superbly courteous and uniquely Balinese in style and sprinkled with a few Japanese phrases to remind us that we are after all, at a Japanese restaurant.
Our first dish is Truffle Salt Edamame. The edamame is wrapped around a ring of sliced radish sprinkled with truffle oil.
Edamame with a sprinkle of salt and truffle oil couldn't have tasted any better. To enjoy this dish you would have to pick the seeds leisurely one at a time with dainty chopsticks, place them on your tongue then chew on them slowly allowing the taste buds to do the rest. Yummy!
The next dish gently placed before us accompanied by an elaborate explanation is Karasumi Pasta.
The brief on the menu reads "angel hair pasta, bottarga, ikura, truffle kombu sauce."
We learned that Karasumi is made by salting mullet roe pouch and drying it in sunlight.
I looked it up later and found that It may have acquired its name from its resemblance to the blocks of sumi or inkstick imported from China or Kara for use in Japanese calligraphy. Thus, karasumi or Chinese inkstick.
Karasumi is an expensive delicacy and it is usually enjoyed with a cup of sake. It is in fact a softer version of the Mediterranean Bottarga which is combined here for greater effectiveness in tantalising your taste buds.
On the other hand, Bottarga is a dried pressed roe of mullet sold in blocks and is often shaved over many Italian dishes.
I found out that Mullet is just marine fish widely caught for food around the world.
Then there's Ikura which is Japanese for roe of salmon, characterized by large, plump, orange eggs that we can see clearly atop the angel hair pasta presented before us.
On top of all that, the chef added a sauce made of truffle plus Japanese dashi stock made from kelp seaweed or kombu or sea vegetables packed with nutrients and minerals including potassium which provides a unique umami richness to most dishes from Japan.
This dish is no exception. Without the kombu sauce, it would just be ordinary angel hair with mullet shavings and salmon roe.
Again we were advised to savour every single piece of angel hair slowly to enjoy the taste and allow each and every component brought together by the chef in this dish to blend well in our mouths before swallowing them.
The blended taste of al dente angel hair pasta, a faint taste of bottarga, ikura, and truffle oil plus the kombu sauce with the large plump salmon roe popping in your mouth is just exquisite.
We had six equally tastefully well-crafted dishes in all. The third is OKU Karange made of crispy black chicken thigh shichimi powder and balsamic teriyaki.
The craftsmanship is so intricate that when the dish was placed before us we thought everything on the plate was edible. The chef subtly indicates by sprinkling flakes of shichimi powder on the three pieces that were edible and decorating the dish with a leaf for effect. The taste is delicious. The chicken is well cooked with a piece of mushroom and blended with unique-tasting balsamic teriyaki sauce.
The fourth dish is a bowl of sushi rice wrapped in a slice of fresh torched salmon and served with superb sauces of togarashi mayo and ikura. That too is out of this world.
The fifth is truffle gyu. Wagyu beef sliced and well-seasoned wagyu on rice truffle sauce with onsen egg. You have to be there to taste the difference.
These are some of the mouth-watering dishes served at Izakaya Kempinski of Nusa Dua which happens to be one of the most unforgettable dining experiences ever for me and my friends.
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