Riva Reborn
One of Jakarta’s most beloved restaurants returns with a brand new concept and dishes that are even more riveting.
Located in the Park Lane Jakarta, RIVA was long considered one of the city’s best French restaurants. Many of the most prominent French chefs working in the region have come through RIVA, helping to maintain its sterling reputation for providing a truly fine dining experience. Although all good things must come to an end, many culinary connoisseurs in the capital were nevertheless heartbroken to hear that RIVA was closing its doors last year, albeit temporarily.
Having gone through a major reimagining, RIVA recently celebrated its re-opening on April 2. The new venue for the restaurant features separate areas for the grill, bar and lounge. The new décor is sleek and modern, with polished stone surfaces and a touch of industrial metal chic giving the bar and dining room a much more contemporary feel. Wine cabinets now dominate the entrance to the main dining room, which features an immaculate open kitchen.
In addition, the restaurant now includes two outdoor terrace areas, one facing the street and one with views of the hotel’s lagoon style pool. These areas are elegantly encased in glass so you can get the full outside effect without being too exposed to Jakarta’s sometimes extreme weather. Comfortable alfresco dining options are hard to come by in Jakarta, so the new RIVA’s outdoor terraces are a highly welcomed feature.
Helming the kitchen is the Park Lane Jakarta’s Executive Chef Deden Gumilar, an Indonesian national with nearly 20 years of experience working in some of Indonesia’s best hotels and resorts. He leads RIVA’s crack kitchen brigade, who have all trained under previous Michelin Star experienced French Chefs de Cuisine.
The new menu takes a much more continental approach to its cuisine than its predecessor. Although French dishes, such as pan-seared foie gras with mixed berry sauce, French onion soup and Duck Magret, are still prominently featured, there are numerous dishes that take their cues from other European and Asian cuisines. One of the best things about the new menu is the wide variety of small plates, which can function either as appetisers, light meals or tapas to share over drinks with friends. There are a lot of imaginative and bold combinations in these dishes, such as a salad of crab meat, apple and a pineapple. The shreds of crab and fruit are tossed with marinated artichokes, semi-dried tomatoes, virgin olive oil, lemon and pineapple dressing. The taste is beautifully balanced between the many sweet, sour and salty elements. We also love the RIVA spring roll, a crunchy parcel filled with savoury chicken, sweet prawns and rich foie gras. It’s a decadent bite made even more so with a creamy blue cheese dip.
The eclectic menu has mains ranging from salmon medallions, served with a creamy roasted pumpkin mash and a piquant espelette pepper Hollandaise sauce, to an Indian dish of chicken murgh makhani, featuring chunks of chicken breast served in a rich sauce of tomato, cumin and coriander. Despite the breadth of the dishes, each one is handled with the care and refined technique that diners have come to expect from RIVA. Vegetarians will be happy to know there is a good selection of meatless dishes aimed at them, including one of the city’s best mushroom dishes – a baked Portobello stuffed with button mushrooms and topped with a creamy Hollandaise.
Of course, one of the main attractions at RIVA is the grill, and the new menu’s meat selection does not disappoint. One of the highlights would be the various cuts of Sher Wagyu, a full blood wagyu breed from Australia that is grain fed for over 400 days to achieve an MB rating of 4 or 5, meaning ribbons of flavourful fat running throughout the tender muscle, lending each bite an incredibly flavour; full of beefy, mineral notes. They’ve also got steaks from two of Australia’s other top beef producers, wagyu from Ranger’s Valley and Black Angus from John Dee Warwick.
We are sure that the combination of the elegant new venue and impressive yet varied menu are sure to make the new RIVA just as big of a hit as the old.
(www.rivagrillnbar.com)
