Laksmi Pamuntjak cooks up success

Laksmi Pamuntjak cooks up success

By David Eyerly

JAKARTA (JP): Cool jazz fills the air of Aksara bookstore, a
beautiful study in minimalist design in Kemang, South Jakarta,
that places the focus on the books.

Laksmi Pamuntjak approaches and offers me a hand, directing me
upstairs to the cafe W16. It is owned by restaurateur William
Wongso and, with the furniture gallery downstairs, is part of the
integrated concept of Aksara.

Laksmi is the director of operations and a partner, one of
three, all old friends, at Aksara. She is the author of the
Jakarta Good Food Guide 2001, which is now in its second edition.
She is an accomplished pianist, though she no longer plays
because "life consisted of everything else", a wife and a mother.

Laksmi determined at an early age the path for her life lay
outside the country.

"I always had in the back of my mind that I would at one point
go overseas to study, simply because I felt I needed the
challenge.

"When I reached the third year of junior high I felt that was
it, simply because I found the education system in Indonesia
severely lacking ... so I kind of pushed my father to sending me
to this international school (in Singapore)."

The age of 14 is a difficult time for most people, in the
transition from childhood to young adulthood, with all the
attendant fears and self-doubts. Laksmi made this transition as
eagerly and easily as she moved to Singapore, leaving the
familiarity of home and the comfort of her parents and living in
a boardinghouse with seven other girls.

She says she saw it as an opportunity and it became "the most
fulfilling time of life" for her in forming a camaraderie with
her peers.

After graduating from high school in Singapore, Laksmi chose
to attend Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, where she
received her bachelor's degree in Asian Studies and Political
Science, earning first-class honors.

"My father and mother are both activists in their own right,
and conversations at home have always been filled with analyses
of the latest political situation, so there was a very pronounced
aspect growing up and I've always been interested in that.

"It was also during that time, in the beginning of the '90s,
that the democratic forum was starting to emerge ... and I was
put in touch with quite a lot of student activists who were at
that time not able to express themselves other than in
underground fora, so I became more and more interested in
politics."

Difficult decision

She entertained several offers to pursue her PhD in Australia,
but, after years of living away from home, she chose to return to
Indonesia. The decision was a difficult one and her homecoming
proved equally hard, because after so many years of making a life
for herself in Singapore and Australia, Indonesia in many ways
felt more like a foreign country than home.

"There was probably this latent fear about coming back to
Indonesia and not being able to adjust, all those very, very
normal feelings that you experience having lived in two worlds
for so long .... "

By Laksmi's own admission she "was quite miserable for the
first two years, at least" back in Indonesia. She spent this time
writing about political, social and Asian affairs for several
leading magazines, but shortly had to put this aside.

"I got sort of overtaken by the tide of life in the sense that
I had to think about getting a job, and fending for myself, and
creating my own financial independence and all that."

During this time she married Djohan Kandar and the couple soon
had a daughter, Nadia, now five years old. Nadia was ill for the
first two years of her life, so Laksmi stayed home to care for
her. She says this simply, without giving away any of the pain
she must have felt during this period.

"Basically, I started putting politics aside .... When I was
looking after my daughter I started writing feature articles.
Then I discovered all these other interests like films, books, I
mean the love of books was always there, but like movie reviews,
restaurant reviews, which I found to be very fascinating."

She wrote mainly for this publication, but what she terms her
"passion for food writing" continued when she went with her
husband to Melbourne, where he was doing his MBA. She realized
food writing could be an "art in itself".

"So when I got back here, first of all I wanted to do this
book for Jakarta .... And I felt so much change, its
unbelievable, in both the depth and breadth of the culinary
landscape here .... There was so much change in terms of new
restaurants, new attitudes and a new trend toward casual
lifestyles, and restaurants had become such an important meeting
point for everything.

This eventually led Laksmi to write the Jakarta Good Food
Guide 2001, the first restaurant review of its kind for the city
and fast becoming a standard guidebook for Jakarta residents and
visitors to the capital. The success of the book has been
overwhelming, even for Laksmi.

"I didn't have any pretensions that is was going to be seen as
an expert's look at things, it was something I was doing for fun.
But of course I knew I had to be doing it with at least an
acceptable level of understanding of the food, of the different
cuisines of the world ... and I felt confident enough to write
it."

Despite the book's success Laksmi is still able to go to
restaurants unrecognized as she works on the updated version of
the guide, expected to be out sometime before April 2002. After
reviewing a good portion of the city's restaurants and now
revisiting some of these same restaurants, she has two criticisms
of Jakarta's dining scene: the importance of chefs is often
overlooked ("not a lot of people know who's really behind the
kitchen, whereas in other parts of the world where the culinary
scene is more advanced so much rides on the chef ...") and
restaurants largely lack consistency, which may be connected,
with too many trying to be what she calls the "in thing" without
putting food quality first.

Books

Aksara was first conceived in 1997 but put off when the
economic crisis hit. The store's minimalist design is striking,
but Laksmi says the main focus was ensuring the customers'
comfort in reading and browsing.

For Laksmi, a self-described bookworm who began reading at the
age of four, the job is something of a dream.

The bookstore is general in its content and has a large
selection of Indonesian novels. This is important for Laksmi, who
is excited by current developments in Indonesian literature.

"For all the cliches about Indonesians being less inclined
toward reading, toward writing, toward aksara-related activities,
we see, the obvious thing would be the recent phenomenon of
Supernova ... the interest it has generated because its so new,
its so fresh, its so well-done and its so groundbreaking ... it
has probably triggered a real resurgence of interest in
Indonesian literature, which is probably the same where Ayu Utami
managed to focus feelings a few years back with Saman.

"And publishers are mushrooming like you wouldn't believe, and
they are translating, for instance, important works, history or
literature or what not, that you would not even have thought
possible a few years back .... "

But are Ayu Utami and Dewi Lestari, the author of Supernova,
isolated cases or is there a vital Indonesian literary scene that
the average person may be unaware of?

"I don't know if they are isolated cases, but there are lots
of young, frighteningly intelligent, interesting people coming up
with work who may not generate the same media interest and
popular appeal as these two have for varying reasons."

But she notes there is a "vicious cycle" between publishers,
bookstores, writers and the reading community, when they must
work hand in hand for success. "And of course there's also the
educational system part in it, that makes the act of reading
important."

Laksmi is doing her part with Aksara and its calendar of book-
related events. But she knows that it will take more than just a
few book lovers and a couple of acclaimed young authors to create
a dynamic literary community.

"It is something that everybody has to think of -- it is a
collective effort."