Bukit Guide, where to eat

EAT

It is 6pm and the joint is thumping, packed to the gills with beautiful people sashaying about, capturing footage for their Instagram accounts and feasting with friends and families on tables arranged in a circular fashion around a large concrete amphitheatre that cascades down the face of a thickly forested valley. At the lower level, a wedding party dressed in white sip wine and cocktails and swap holiday stories around a fire pit as the sun sinks into the Indian Ocean, painting the sea and sky in a fresco of tropical colours.

I’m at Teja, a modern European restaurant that has enjoyed a roaring trade since it opened last year by combining drop-dead beautiful views with food that’s off the hook, a marriage of live fire cooking, premium ingredients and the mind of head chef Mike McGairy, a character who spends his evenings, not hidden in the back of a kitchen but parked in front of the front counter wiping little specks of sauce off the rims off plates and ensuring every single dish is perfect before it’s served to guests.

“My job during service is not to supervise or cook,” he explains. “It’s to bring everything and everyone who works here together, like the conductor of an orchestra.”

Divided into three sections — from the sea, the land and garden — the menu at Teja is extensive, with more than 40 options. To take out the guesswork, we choose the “Feed Me” menu, which includes 10 preselected dishes and offers ridiculously good value at only $60 per head.

Our first entree — a yellowfin tuna crudo with smoked tonnato and lemon — takes a relatively simple dish up several notches with a symphony of flavours. The second entree — beef carpaccio with tonnato and toasted rye — is also the most sophisticated version of the dish I’ve ever tasted. Then the mains: a dry-aged pink snapper with capers and sauce vierge so beautifully presented it looks nearly too good to eat, and a pork tomahawk steak with macadamia nut brown butter and smoked grapes. If you’ve never had a pork tomahawk, make it your business to try one. They are accompanied here by baby potatoes cooked in duck fat that melts in the mouth, heirloom tomatoes with sumac onions and ricotta cream. For dessert, there is a hazelnut namelaka with the fine crumbling texture of pastry handmade in a small hole-in-the-wall bakery in Paris.

When I ask Teja’s co-owner, Blake Johnson of NSW, about the secret of the restaurant’s success, he says: “Obviously, the location and sunset views help, but that will only get you so far in Bali. If you produce poor or average food, people will just come for a drink at sunset and then head off somewhere else to eat. It’s really a mixture of things, but the food has to be topnotch, the staff need to be happy and well taken care of so that they’re attentive to guests, and you need a passionate chef like Mike, plus good management, of course.”