Locavore NXT

The Verdict

Locavore NXT is the second and current iteration of the restaurant that dragged Bali's fine-dining reputation into the global conversation. Chefs Eelke Plasmeijer (Dutch) and Ray Adriansyah (Indonesian) opened the original Locavore in central Ubud in 2013 with a thesis that most food writers treated as eccentric: a tasting-menu restaurant sourcing exclusively from Indonesia. By 2018 Locavore was on Asia's 50 Best. By 2023 the chefs had outgrown the original location, and they closed it — briefly — to build Locavore NXT, a purpose-designed culinary campus in the village of Lodtunduh, twenty minutes south of central Ubud.

The new building is genuinely unusual. A rooftop food forest — a working agroforest of native Balinese herbs, spices, and medicinal plants — supplies part of the kitchen's daily foraging. A dedicated fermentation kitchen holds the restaurant's evolving library of shrubs, vinegars, misos, and garums built from Indonesian ingredients. A mushroom-growing chamber produces species the chefs cannot buy. A micro-distillery handles the spirits programme. The dining room itself is open-concept, with clear sightlines into most of the working spaces.

The tasting menu runs to fifteen courses over three to three and a half hours and rotates seasonally. The cooking is not decoratively 'Indonesian'; it is structurally so. Sambals are built in-house from small-producer chili varieties. Rice is the work of a Balinese heirloom-variety project the restaurant co-founded. The sequence typically moves through raw seafood, fermented preparations, a series of grilled dishes from the open wood-fired kitchen, and a dessert programme built around Indonesian sugars and spices. Pairings can be either alcoholic (an unusually deep Southeast Asian natural-wine list) or non-alcoholic (fermented juices and herbal teas from the food forest).

The chefs have said publicly that they have no interest in global expansion. Locavore NXT is designed to be the definitive version of the concept. Reservations are among the most difficult in Southeast Asia to secure — two to three months in advance during Bali's shoulder seasons, and up to six months for July–August and Christmas.

Why It Works for Impress Clients

Locavore NXT is the Bali restaurant most appropriate for a client dinner that needs to be unforgettable. The narrative of the food — genuinely sourced from Indonesia, genuinely fermented in-house, genuinely ambitious — lands with sophisticated diners in a way that competes with Paris or Copenhagen. The three-and-a-half-hour format creates the pace for substantive business conversation. And the Lodtunduh location, rather than a hotel dining room, signals that the host knows Bali as a dining destination, not just a resort.

Also in Ubud

For travellers building a longer Ubud itinerary, see the full Best Restaurants in Ubud index and the dedicated Impress Clients occasion page. Related regional itineraries include the full Cities Directory and — for readers planning a longer Asian swing — the Impress Clients and Proposal global lists.