Published on Prestige Indonesia, December 2008 edition
“I am really obsessed with food,” admits Laksmi Pamuntjak on the second floor of Emilie restaurant in South Jakarta. “As soon as I woke up in the morning, wherever I am, I immediately think about what I am going to have for lunch or dinner.”
Laksmi finished writing the first edition of “Jakarta Good Food Guide” in 2001, and the third edition came out last March. The series has sold 23,000 copies since its inception. It features 440 restaurants, casual eateries and street vendors, and it has photographs by the award-winning Paul Kadarisman. No less an authority than restaurateur and gastronome William Wongso has said of the guide: “At last, the benchmark for good dining in Jakarta is established through candid writing and honest critiques.”
Asked to account for her obsession with food, Laksmi ventures: “There is something about human nature that always yearns for something familiar. Taste, smell, aroma and texture, they all remind us of an ancient feeling.”
As for her good food guide, she laughs: “First of all you need to be crazy to do it,” Laksmi tries more than 400 restaurants in less than a year to write her guides. “I write down any impression or sensation of any kind that I feel when I eat something,” she explains.
“I have always been proud of my city, proud enough to put together a regularly more updated guide that tells people what they already know—that the city is made up of a great regional food tradition and a half-baked modern restaurant culture. Writing about food requires us to expand our horizon. It requires us to build a habit of doing research.”
Laksmi says she discovered that Indonesia is not ready for rating system, yet. “Nobody is saying that street food, a realm acceptable to most tongues and sensibilities, is beyond rating,” says Laksmi. “But rating systems are about holding restaurants to a certain set of standards designed, not just to nose out incompetence or any slip in standards, but also to recognize a good thing when we see it.”
But still, taste differs from one person to another. “National cuisines are never originally national,” says Laksmi. “They begin as regional cooking habits with ingredients limited to the national environment. But the era is changing and taste expands. It all depends on whether we have been used to experimenting since our childhood or not.”
When a cooking style gets slapped with a national appellation, she adds, it is frozen in place: its purity has to be protected from alien influence. Laksmi says she was lucky to have had the chance to experiment as a child, exploring various kinds of food.
“Basically, we are born experimental and are already curious,” she says. “And in the end, eating is about human interaction and a basic metaphor. It brings out the basic emotions, nostalgic memories that were associated with our childhood.”
Her experimentations, however, do not occur only on dining tables and restaurants. In the span of her writing career, Laksmi says she was lucky to have had the chance to experiment as a child, exploring various kinds of food.
“What is important for me at the moment is wrapping up my latest novel,” says Laksmi. So far, “The Blue Widow” has taken her four and a half years to write. “Right now I am actually facing a critical juncture, but I only need to do two more chapters.”
The novel is set on Buru Island, where alleged communists were detained for more than a decade without being formally charged or tried in court. “There is always a grey area in history where we can use any kind of interpretation,” says Laksmi. ‘The historical memory is often erased by a larger sense, the panoptic sense of history.”
Writing a novel for her means allowing the world of the character to “possess” the writer. “The world has to sink in on us, and we need to be a part of it,” she says about her creative writing process. “When I have to do other things, they disturb the writing process. I need at least one or two weeks to get back in tune with that world, and this requires full concentration.”
Laksmi has published several poetry collections: “Ellipsis” (2005) and “The Anagram” (2007), and a treatise on violence and “The Illiad”: “War, Heaven and Two Women” (2006), Also in 2006, she published “The Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art”, which has been translated into French.
Laksmi herself has translated 99 of Gunawan Mohammad’s poems: “On God and Other Unfinished Things” (2007), published by Katakita. “In the future, I would also like to review a story in mahabarata, especially the one on Ambar and Bisma,” she says.








