DENPASAR - Ngurah Sutedja leans forward in his chair and stretches his arm out to point through the window of his office, tucked in a well-lit corner of his expansive kitchen at the John Hardy workshop in Mambal, a sleepy inland farming community in central Bali. Beyond the glass, encased in a bamboo window frame, is the almost completed construction of a second kitchen devoted to what he describes as ‘pignics.’
Several men busy about carrying freshly-cut lengths of bamboo, while behind us the noise and energy resonating from Mr. Sutedja’s kitchen sound like the surging of waves breaking against rocks, as his kitchen team of twelve chefs, six stewards, and four service men and women prepare the daily organic lunch for the workshop’s seven hundred and eighty-five employees.
The ‘pignic’ kitchen, explains Mr. Sutedja, stems both from one of John Hardy’s seemingly constant stream of ideas, and also from a challenge extended to him by Cynthia, John’s energetic, striking and seemingly omniscient wife. “John came up with the idea to do a special lunch, and a few days later Cynthia ate babi guling in Jimbaran and returned home saying that it was the best she had ever had, that the skin was just perfectly crispy,” states Mr. Sutedja while laughing. “Of course I thought that I could do better, so we had to try it here at the workshop.”
But his challenge was larger than merely preparing Bali’s best babi guling – which is in itself no small feat – he had also to overcome cultural differences in preparing and serving pork in a diverse and multi-cultural work environment where Hindus, Muslims, and Christians strive to design, create and produce some of the world’s most exciting and beautiful jewelry.
Mr. Sutedja thought the problem through, and as he has consistently done during the past eight years that he has been working with John Hardy, he arrived at an innovative solution. He and his team built a special ‘pignic’ kitchen, a totally separate and self-contained environment in which to butcher, prepare and serve what is arguably the island’s best babi guling.
Mr. Sutedja’s creativity and novel approach to problem solving are nurtured in the workshop’s positive and natural environment. The property, framed by traditionally built mud walls, and containing organic vegetable gardens, fishponds, fresh fruits, and innovative bamboo-based architecture, inspires a rigorous and highly conceptual form of thinking.
The John Hardy concept of sustainability is an idea that permeates all aspects of life and labor at the workshop, from the silver designers to the gardeners and the kitchen, where one of the most distinctive elements of sustainability is used everyday.
The story goes that a while back the kitchen cooked with gas burners. A sudden lack of gas supplies on the island coincided with a special guest visit to the workshop, and Mr. Sutedja was forced to find a new way to prepare lunch. He ordered that fires be lit and dry wood be collected, and in this manner the kitchen prepared the VIP lunch. Just before the food was to be served, John Hardy himself came into the kitchen and took note of the wood fires.
“He asked me why I was cooking with wood instead of the gas burners,” smiles Mr. Sutedja. “I just explained to him that this way was the traditional Balinese way of cooking, and that it tasted better.”
After this John Hardy and Mr. Sutedja met frequently to discuss the kitchen and how to improve it in an environmentally sound, more efficient, and traditional manner. They experimented with several ideas before hitting on the rice husk stoves that are on prominent display and in daily use in Mr. Sutedja’s kitchen.
The stoves are simply creations that burn on discarded rice husk. A sack of rice husk costs Rp. 1,000, and Mr. Sutedja’s kitchen uses ten sacks per day to serve lunches and dinners to more than eight hundred people. He calculates his weekly rice husk expenditures as between Rp. 50,000 and 60,000, whereas before he spent Rp. 1,000,000 per week in cooking with gas stoves. And the food, all locally produced and mostly organic, apparently tastes much better when cooked in this way.
The rice husk stoves and the ‘pignic’ kitchen are but two examples of Mr. Sutedja’s creative thinking, something that he describes as having evolved from the nurturing and pressured demands of life at the John Hardy workshop, where constant innovation and a quest for a better way are institutionalized concepts.
“He is very creative,” states PR Manager Agatha Belinda. “We frequently encounter many challenges here. For example, we had to get ready for an event with two hundred people and wanted to do something organic. Pak Ngurah came up with the idea to use hollowed bamboo stalks as glasses and rolled lemon grass as straws. He always finds solutions to whatever problems or issues we throw at him.”
For his part, Mr. Sutedja remains modest. He is quick to smile and even quicker to praise his kitchen team for their hard work and innovation. If sustainability is about creative problem solving and using resources in fundamentally new ways, it is safe to say that Ngurah Sutedja is at the absolute fore-front of innovation in Bali; and as a Balinese from Gianyar, he hopes that more and more people take note.
“These are my challenges,” he says softly, “but there are many more problems that we must also solve together through cooperation and hard work.”
(Originally published in The Bali Times.)
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