Home by Chef Wayan

Home by Chef Wayan is a simple, home-style diner in Pereranan, where one of Bali’s best chefs combines his skills as a fine dining chef with his love of Balinese food.

As a young boy growing up in Nusa Penida, Chef Wayan was obsessed with fire. Worried he’d burn down the house, his mother encouraged him to help her in the kitchen, where all the cooking was done on a wood-fired stove. Growing up in Nusa Penida, meat was rarely on the menu. In his early days, rice was also rare so the diet was based on starchy vegetables like cassava and corn that could grow on the arid island, and seafood, which was plentiful. To this day Wayan loves taking his fishing boat out and seafood is his favorite food to eat and cook with. 

Fast forward and Chef Wayan is cooking at Blue Hill ( check) in upstate New York and he began building the skills that would make him one of Bali’s culinary stars. 

“It was a real farm to table experience. We’d pick the produce in the morning and then meet to plan the menu. It inspired everything I have done until now. I still plan my menus around what produce I have on hand,” explains Chef Wayan. 

Back from the USA, Wayan helped set up Room4Dessert with Chef Will Goldfarb before heading to Potato Head Beach Club where he rose to Culinary Director overseeing restaurants like Ijen zero-waste seafood, Kaum, an Indonesian dining experience and Tanaman, the first high-end vegan concept restaurant. At the time, Chef Wayan and his colleagues had very little experience with vegan cooking, so their concept was to recreate plant-based versions of classic Indonesian dishes, it was brilliant. Home, his first stand-alone restaurant, is closer to his heart. As he heads to the US to promote his first cookbook, Paon, inspired by authentic Balinese cooking, he has numerous invites from leading restaurants around the world to share the food of his home. 

“We really didn’t have any experience but cooking is all about the flavor base and once you have that, you can do anything”, he explains. 

There are some delicious expressions of dishes inspired by his childhood memories on the menu at Home by Chef Wayan, including a brilliant braised lettuce with tempe crumble and a tamarind and palm sugar vinaigrette. A creamy potato risotto with baby calamari is an eye-opening dish with the most wonderful textures. Crispy kampung chicken wings come with a rica rica aioli, a local spice, while a crisp-skinned chicken leg curry has the most delicate flavors, it’s a dish you’d be happy to order in a high-end restaurant. Here the price tag is less than 100K. 

“I’m very proud to be Balinese and the food of our island should be shared with the world, it is one of the great cuisines in my opinion,” he says. 

One thing you notice on the menu, is the drinks and it turns out, besides the 3 recent graduates he cooks alongside in his kitchen, his beverage manager, Angling is equally creative. After four years behind the bar at Room4Dessert, he has taken his cocktail knowledge and created juice blends, smoothies and infusions based on cocktail recipes. There are a lot of temptations on the drinks menu, but the Bloody Bloody attracted my attention – a blend of fresh tomato, strawberries, and ginger. It sounded so strange I had to try it, expecting it to be awful, but it was fresh and fabulous and so well balanced you could hardly pick a single ingredient. It might be my new favorite juice, and healthy as a bonus.

There are many reasons I will head back to Home by Chef Wayan. It is definitely an experience all food (and drink) lovers should try at least once. 

Home by Chef Wayan is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, closed Tuesday.