East Meets West
Bold flavours from Asian and Western cuisine meet by the beach at All Spice, the restaurant at The Royal Santrian Resort & Villa in Nusa Dua.
Along a beautiful stretch of jet-ski filled, azure blue ocean in Tanjung Benoa, you’ll find The Royal Santrian Villas. The 2.5 hectare property, with direct access to a pristine beach, an epic central swimming pool and perfectly manicured gardens, radiates the kind of laid back tropical luxury vibe that people dream about when they come to Bali. It’s a stunner of a setting, so it’s no wonder that All Spice, The Royal Santrian’s own restaurant, gets a fair share of its customers from people who stumble across it while strolling down the beach. Those people might be expecting nothing more than some simple seaside nosh, but All Spice’s sophisticated Eastern and Western culinary combinations are more than a match for its awesome beachfront location.
All Spice is a good name for a restaurant that seems to draw inspiration from so many places. The menu is split down the middle, with one page covering Asian cuisine and one covering Western. The Asian side mainly focuses on Japanese dishes such as sushi, tempura and teppanyaki (there is a dedicated teppanyaki table setup right by the beach). There are also some Southeast Asian specialities as well, such as a variety of Thai-style curries paired with proteins like soft shell crab and grilled sea bass. The Western side features standards like steaks and burgers, as well as a variety of more ambitious French and Italian specialities such as escargot bourguignon, prawn ravioli, duck leg confit and seafood risotto.
It’s easy to be sceptical when a restaurant features a variety of foods from such vastly different styles of cuisines. Fortunately, All Spice is headed up by two talented cooks: Chef Wayan Sirda, who handles Western, and Chef Budiyono, who brings his years of experience in Japanese cuisine to the Asian dishes. What’s more, these chefs are not content to simply recreate classic dishes; they are eager innovators as well and we were lucky enough to try some of their more inventive dishes during our last visit.
We started our meal with a light seaweed salad, the wakame mixed with lettuce and dressed with a deliciously refreshing yuzu vinaigrette, though the highlight was probably the tender morsels of sushi-grade tuna wrapped in nori that gave the salad body. Next up was Chef Budiyono’s “New Style Sushi Platter.” It’s a dish that amply shows off his skill at both traditional and modern sushi, with classics like California temaki and ebi nigiri sitting next to more unusual creations like the salmon temari, (featuring sushi rice shaped into a delicate ball and topped with a spicy mayo sauce), as well as a beautiful piece of aburi wagyu sushi. The tender rare beef, grilled lightly with a blowtorch, worked just as well with the rice as any fish. A bright yellow streak of saffron wasabi fondue on the plate added more than just colour to the plate – the saffron highlights the sweet notes of the wasabi, giving a very unique accent to each piece of sushi.
That was followed by one of the most interesting and delicious dishes we tried at All Spice – lobster with spicy miso and sea urchin sauce. You could almost consider it an Asian twist on the lobster thermidor. The luxurious sauce, composed of Korean-style spicy miso, creamy sea urchin and a seed mustard mayonnaise, might sound overpowering, but it actually did a fantastic job of bringing out the sweetness of the lobster meat.
We could have eaten several more of those moreish crustaceans, but we had to save room for our main course – an eclectic take on surf and turf featuring salmon and steak. The tenderloin came topped with a well-executed Bearnaise sauce while the salmon was served with a lovely citrus cream sauce. Both sauces did a great job of highlighting the quality meat and the rich potato gratin on the side took the dish way over the top in terms of satisfaction.
Dessert came in the form of another East-meets-West twist – tempura-fried ice cream. The thick shell made of crisp batter was cut open to reveal the creamy vanilla ice cream inside. The addition of warm strawberry sauce, featuring a touch of basil, and passion fruit seeds made the heavy sounding dessert surprisingly refreshing.
All Spice could easily rely on its stunning sunbathed setting to bring in diners, but the fact that the chefs are so ambitious in their eclectic offerings and so successful at pulling off Eastern and Western flavours at the same time make this a restaurant that is definitely worth driving to the beach for.
