The most acclaimed restaurant in Bali and the only Indonesian restaurant to appear on Asia's 50 Best Restaurants list — Locavore NXT in Ubud, where chef-owners Eelke Plasmeijer and Ray Adriansyah's 20-course tasting menu is built entirely from hyper-local Indonesian ingredients (sourced from named farmers, fishermen, and the restaurant's own food forest and mushroom cultivation chambers), where the dining experience moves through multiple designed rooms and environments (underground mushroom chamber, bar area with headphones playing the sonic landscape of the ingredients' provenance, the main dining room with the open kitchen visible), and where 'Nature's Compass' (the current tasting menu in 2025) represents the most sophisticated expression of Indonesian culinary identity available anywhere in the world.
Why It Belongs on the List
Locavore NXT is the evolution of Locavore, the restaurant that opened in Ubud in 2013 and immediately established itself as the most serious culinary address on the island. The NXT iteration, opened in a purpose-built complex south of Ubud surrounded by the gardens and food forest that supply ingredients, is an immersive dining environment rather than simply a restaurant: the evening begins at a bar area where guests wear headphones to hear a recorded sonic journey through the ingredients' origins, progresses through an underground mushroom chamber (where dishes involving the restaurant's cultivated fungi are presented in darkness among illuminated terrariums), and arrives at the main dining room with its open kitchen, rice paddy views through floor-to-ceiling windows, and the full sequence of 20 courses that change completely with the seasons. The current menu (Nature's Compass, 2025) is the most ambitious the restaurant has produced: cassava noodles with sea urchin, fish wrapped in bulun baon leaf, aged pork with cassava, rice koji porridge — dishes that would not exist in this form without the specific combination of Balinese agricultural tradition and contemporary technique that Plasmeijer and Adriansyah have developed over a decade. Advance booking: the reservation system opens months ahead and books within hours of release — book before planning the rest of the Ubud itinerary.
What Stands Out
- Only Indonesian restaurant on Asia's 50 Best list: the international recognition that confirms what every Bali food visitor has been saying for a decade
- Nature's Compass 20-course tasting menu: 20 courses from hyper-local Indonesian ingredients — the most sophisticated expression of Indonesian gastronomy available
- Underground mushroom chamber dining: the immersive room design that makes Locavore NXT a destination rather than simply a restaurant
- Headphones sonic journey of ingredient provenance: the bar experience that contextualizes the dinner before the first course
- The food forest: the restaurant's own agricultural land supplying the seasonal ingredient base — visible from the dining room
- Book months in advance: the reservation system books within hours of release — the Locavore reservation is a Bali itinerary-planning priority