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."