Eight
INDONESIA
If you had told me ten years earlier, that in the summer of 1997 I would be an executive chef in San Francisco, with the pick of other executive chef posts in the city, I would have laughed and had a tough time believing you. If you had told me that, later that same year, I would have left all of that—along with my relationship of seven years—to move to Indonesia, a country about which I knew nothing and had no prior interest, I would have said you were crazy. It is a mark of ambition never to allow oneself to grow too comfortable, but it is a mark of perversity, too. Clearly I have both in my system.
The culinary scene in San Francisco is broad and vibrant, but still, it is a city of under a million people, and after almost eight years of working in the restaurant industry, I was familiar with all the main players and beginning to feel claustrophobic. I have never been good at treading water, and I needed a shot of adrenaline.
There was something else going on, too. After seven years together, Melinda and I had slipped into a kind of stasis. For most of my twenties, our time together had been amazingly nourishing, a relationship of mutual support and encouragement. Melinda had opened up the city for me, provided me with a family away from home, and showed me, through her example, that being a great chef was bound up with the integrity of one’s personal relationships. But while I would go on admiring her, it felt as if our relationship had reached a natural conclusion. Endings can be difficult to spot when they happen, and for a while Melinda and I had been ignoring the signs. There was no drama. We weren’t fighting. But I needed to move on, and maybe moving countries was the cleanest and easiest way to do it.
All things being equal, Jakarta would not have been my first choice. While there were many parts of the world—Spain, Japan, the Middle East—I had long been obsessed with, Indonesia wasn’t on my radar at all. I had no idea what the food scene there was like, but I knew there would be very specific challenges. The reason a female-only kitchen was considered exciting and risqué in the first place was because women in Indonesia in that era had relatively few professional opportunities and little visibility in positions of prominence. If I took the job at the InterContinental Hotel, I would be the first female executive chef in the country. The opportunity to do good and inspire other women was compelling, but to be the first to do anything is to invite high levels of scrutiny and, more often than not, hostility, too. I wondered if there’d be a backlash or if I was being set up to fail.
Chefs are freelancers; they have little or no long-term security. The closest we can come to enjoying the trappings of a regular job, with pension contributions, paid leave, and good promotion prospects, is to get taken on by one of the large hotel chains, and after changing jobs for eight years, that was definitely part of the appeal. The InterContinental, like the Park Hyatt, is a highly sought-after employer and a safe way, I thought, to broaden my horizons and see a bit more of the world. And so I did something unwise: I suppressed my reservations in favor of the security blanket of a big corporate employer. At the planning stage, everything seemed wonderful and exactly as I hoped it would be. When you move across the world with a luxury hotel chain, the logistics are made very easy. You don’t have to find lodging; you simply live in the hotel. All the facilities, from housekeeping to the tennis courts to room service and the pool, are at your disposal. I had seen a photo of the hotel and it looked like a palace surrounded by a fabulous garden. In my wilder imaginings, I pictured myself on the equivalent of an extended five-star working vacation, a million miles from my modest life in San Francisco.
There was one odd detail: the hotel itself, although run by the InterContinental group, was owned by the family of Suharto, the military dictator who had been in power in Indonesia since 1967. This should have rung alarm bells. But by the time I came across this detail, I had made up my mind that I was leaving. I continued to ignore my doubts and pressed on with my plans.
Since arriving in America nine years earlier, I had become superstitious about first impressions. Landing in San Francisco for the first time, my overwhelming sense of comfort and recognition had been borne out by the life I came to live in the city. I would feel a similar sense of familiarity when I landed in Tokyo thirty years later.
But the moment I landed in Jakarta, I wanted to get out. I didn’t connect. It was hot and chaotic and there was no one from the hotel to meet me. I dragged my suitcase across the concourse, got into a cab, and directed the driver to the InterContinental Hotel. As I looked through the window while the unfamiliar scenery sped by, I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake.
The loneliness of those early weeks in Jakarta was difficult. Every night, I sat alone in my one-bedroom suite, surrounded by the empty corridors of the five-star hotel. I didn’t have easy access to email and the time difference made phoning home difficult. I knew no one in the city and felt like a virtual prisoner of the hotel compound. In the mornings I would get up and play tennis in the sports complex. I would take long runs through the garden and swim in the pool. To socialize, I would hang out with the general manager in his apartment. But it was an odd, dreamlike time, dislocated from any sense of the wider community.
What saved me was work. I had a kitchen to set up from scratch, and while cloistered in the five-star hotel I had no real chance to connect with the country, connecting with the people was different. The moment I started interviewing women for positions in the kitchen, everything changed for the better.
It is fascinating to me how, across vast divides of language, history, politics, and religion, broad human reflexes can remain the same. Some of these are good, some bad, but of all the universals I’ve encountered, one of the most depressing to me is the way women internalize lack of opportunity as an expression of their own shortcomings. I was starting to meet and interview young women interested in getting jobs in my kitchen, and the common narrative was the same every time. When I asked a young woman why she wanted the job, she might say, “This is my passion,” before adding hesitantly, “but how can I do it when I have no experience? What if I fail? I’m not qualified for the job you are offering.”
I would tell them my own story of turning up at Stars with no experience and asking for a job, but they would shake their heads and say that in Jakarta women were always in the back of the kitchen, peeling potatoes and missing out on the action.
I understood this, of course. And I had sympathy. For women, the landscape in Indonesia was different from that of the United States (although let’s face it, not that different). But I was also there to create opportunity and to teach them you have to reach out and grab things. At some point I just exploded. “Just fucking do it!” I said. “You guys can do it! We can do it together. Let’s be inspired by one another.” It was as big a deal for me as it was for them. For my staff, it was a big deal finally to have a mentor who would tell them yes, they could do this thing they had always wanted to do, and for me, it was a big deal to be able to pass on some of the opportunities I had been given myself, and to inspire confidence in women younger than me.
I hired thirteen women in all, all of them Indonesian or Chinese Indonesian. There could have been tension between those two groups. Historically, Chinese Indonesians have been targeted as a minority ethnic group in Indonesia, subjected to discriminatory laws and frequently scapegoated and attacked during periods of political instability. During those first few weeks, I was anxious that these undercurrents would take hold in the kitchen and destabilize the group. Nothing of the sort happened. We were united by the thrill of being together and taking part in what felt like a unique and unprecedented experiment.
I had left San Francisco in a state of near burnout, after working full pelt for eight years. At the same time, the speed with which I had risen through the lower ranks of kitchen life had perhaps made me a little smug. If I had left the city, in part, to fix this attitude before it hardened into complacency, the kitchen in Jakarta and the eagerness of the women I’d hired was like a shot in the arm. During those early days, one young woman I’d hired shyly approached me to say she had dreamed all her life of working in a kitchen, and assumed in Indonesia it would never be possible. I felt immensely humbled.
The menu I developed was Californian-French with a few Italian undertones. This meant using as many fresh local ingredients as possible, as per the basis of California cuisine. Not only was this hard in Jakarta, it was hard in the context of a hotel kitchen. This is something that would happen again and again in my career—being hired for my creativity, then discovering that the management of the restaurant had no real appetite for change and only liked the idea of doing things differently.
The first problem with using local ingredients was one of refrigeration. Deliveries came into the kitchen every morning at 5:00 a.m., an early start made necessary by the fact that it would get very hot later in the day, well into the nineties. But even with deliveries coming in that early, it was still vital to refrigerate en route, and this was difficult if not impossible to organize. There was no infrastructure in the city for refrigerated delivery, which ruled out buying local chicken or fish. Everything was set up to source ingredients from the outside, at vast expense, so that while local markets suffered, the French, German, and Australian import companies made enormous amounts of money.
This wasn’t purely a question of logistics. There was a moral dimension, too. Working for a five-star hotel in a developing country is a shocking tutorial in double-standards. Everything I saw in Indonesia was skewed toward pampering the expat at the expense of the local. The very word “luxury” had come to mean foreign bought and imported, rather than anything originating in Indonesia. Locally sourced produce was, by definition, instantly despised as inferior, so that quite apart from my difficulties with refrigerated delivery, when I tried to buy local, it shocked the hotel management—although they never outright prohibited me from doing it.
As soon as we opened, we were the talk of the town. An all-female kitchen in Jakarta really was a freak show. Every lunch and dinner seating, groups of people—mainly businessmen—came in to gawk at us while eating. A hotel is a strange environment to live in to begin with, but this made it feel even more surreal.
In spite of all this, there were many days of complete happiness. Although the hotel management urged me to source my ingredients from abroad, they didn’t try to influence the menu and, within the constraints of the system, I had a lot of freedom. And building my team of thirteen women was like building a community, with a sense of sisterhood that I loved. Our team worked fantastically well together and it was an inclusive and diverse kitchen—at least in racial and economic terms.
In terms of gender, of course, it was single sex, something that in other contexts I have criticized. I don’t believe in separating women into their own unique category, but I do understand the value of symbolism. In a country in which women had had so little opportunity, the strength of this particular gesture was self-evident. It was a statement and it worked. People took note. If a hotel chain as prominent as the InterContinental saw fit to hire women chefs, perhaps they weren’t so bad after all. And in the context of the InterContinental Hotel in Jakarta, helping to bring about this shift in thinking was deeply gratifying.
After weeks of building up the restaurant infrastructure, training staff, and putting the menu together, I wanted to take my team out to dinner to thank them, and made a reservation at the Park Hyatt, another luxury hotel where the restaurant was supposed to be good. The manager took my name over the phone and a few days later we arrived en masse at the check-in desk at the restaurant. The manager looked at me, looked over my shoulder at my team, and said, “Are you eating with those people?”
Indonesia was a country in transition at that time, as Indonesians fought to free themselves from thirty years of Suharto’s rule. My strong sense was that foreigners needed to step aside and let the people of the country lead, but there was still an awful lot of racism to overcome. “Yes, they’re my team,” I said to the manager of the Park Hyatt. “I made a reservation.” And he said, “They’re Indonesian.”
I was instantly, incandescently furious. The notion that they shouldn’t be there was crazy to me, although it was familiar to the rest of my team. One woman leaned in and said to me quietly, “Chef, it’s okay, we can go somewhere else.” Well, you can imagine. I have never been good at biting my tongue and I have a physical aversion to bullies. “No way,” I said and turned to the manager. “Listen: you’re going to treat them as well as you’re treating me. They’re the people of this country, working their asses off, and they deserve to be treated with respect.” Reluctantly, he sat us down.
I think of the women I worked with in Jakarta often. To my immense joy, I still occasionally hear from them. I had an email recently from a woman who asked, “Do you remember me?” She had entered my kitchen as a young woman with no experience, and was writing to tell me she was now an executive chef. “You inspired me,” she said, “when I thought that path would never be open to me.” I replied that of course I remembered her. I said the best experience of my life was being able to inspire and to be inspired by the people around me. “I’m so proud of you,” I wrote. “Please continue your success and keep in touch.”
That dinner was the first and last time we all went out together. Toward the end of 1997, spurred on by the Asian financial crisis, the Suharto regime started to crumble. Student demonstrations and anti-Suharto riots in Jakarta spread across the country. As the government disintegrated, we spent Christmas holed up in the hotel. It was a particularly unsafe location since it was owned by the Suhartos. None of us was allowed to go out, and expats were told it would be necessary to leave. My contract had been for two years and I sometimes wonder if, had it not been for the riots that Christmas, I would have stuck it out to the end of my term. In spite of the success of the kitchen and my enjoyment of the staff, I was still feeling terribly lonely. I never did connect with the country. And the fourteen-hour time difference with San Francisco felt like an unbridgeable gap.
When management asked us where, precisely, each of us would like to be evacuated to, I replied without hesitation. “Take me to LA,” I said. In spring 1998, Suharto would resign after thirty-one years as president, and I would be back in America.