By Phil Jarratt
Back “home” in Bali last week, I plunged straight into another film shoot, this one about the island’s rich surfing history for a Singapore-based TV program.
For me it was a great excuse to catch up with old Balinese surfing mates like G-Land camp pioneer Bobby Radiasa and Bali’s most successful pro surfer Rizal Tandjung, but over the course of the shoot I was taken back to another fascinating aspect of Bali’s recent history – a tale of two restaurants.
Ironically, in male-dominated Balinese business, it was two young women who created the iconic restaurants that paved the way for Balinese fare as we know it today, and both started with nothing, selling food on the street.
Born in Kuta in 1949, Zenik Sukenny began selling soft drinks on the beach at Kuta in 1970. Soon there were many drink sellers competing with her, but Zenik’s point of difference was that her drinks were icy cold, because she would collect them from her supplier early in the morning and break up a block of ice to wedge between the bottles of Coke and Fanta.
This, combined with her sunny nature and incredible ability to remember almost every customer’s name, soon gave her a thriving business, which evolved into a warung – or food stall – under the trees at the beach end of Jalan Pantai.
Having moved rapidly from drink-selling to warung management, Zenik went to her mother and asked if she could sell a pig on her behalf.
When her mother agreed, she grabbed a squealing piglet from the family compound and took it to the stepmother of a young friend, Made, who cooked and sold babi guling in a small warung near the crossroads that the tourists had nicknamed ‘Bemo Corner’.
At a time when the US dollar bought 210 rupiah, Made’s stepmother offered 225 for the piglet. Zenik took the money back to her mother and asked her how much she could keep.
Her mother asked, “Why do you want money?”
“Because I want to start a proper business,” she replied. “Give me the twenty-five and keep the 200,” her mother said, “but make it a good business.”
Thus Zenik started her warung with less than one dollar in capital, but soon she had a name for the best pancakes and fruit salad in Kuta, and decided to create a proper restaurant in her family compound in a gang behind Jalan Pantai.
A regular English customer named John who had worked in landscape design offered to make a pool garden at the front of the compound, around which the tables would sit.
An American customer suggested she call the restaurant “Poppies”, after his own establishment in California.
Poppies Restaurant had its soft opening at Christmas 1972. The first menu was handwritten and Zenik had decorated it with drawings of flowers. She also put her own name at the bottom so that her warung customers would know it was still her.
The big opening was 8 January 1973.
Mick Jagger, about to start the Rolling
Stones’ Pacific Tour if the governments of Japan and Australia would let him in, came over from Tandjung Sari for the evening.
Zenik recalls: “I gave him Table One.”
Poppies had arrived.
The restaurant has evolved over the years, but I can still sit by one of John’s ponds and channel 1974, when my friends and I would argue and laugh into the night, and Geoffrey, who’s still the barman today, would fuel our excitement with double Black Russians.
The brown door still leads into the small room where Zenik was born and her mother died.
And when I sat down with Bobby Radiasa last week to film an interview for the cameras, it was Geoffrey who brought us our mojitos.
When Zenik sold her mother’s pig to finance her business, a pretty
fifteen-year-old girl with hair down to her waist took the animal off into the
family compound to be slaughtered while Ibu Gede counted out the rupiah.
Made Masih had left school at thirteen to help out in the family business, and by 1970 it had become known to the hippies and surfers who frequented it as “Made’s Warung”, because the vivacious, laughing teenager gave the place its character.
By the time Zenik opened Poppies, Made had successfully converted
her warung into a small restaurant. Her father sold a cow and they used the
money to buy some tables and chairs and kerosene lamps, but they had no
refrigeration.
While Made opened up to serve breakfast each morning, her mother would walk the six kilometres into Denpasar markets and then walk back with the day’s food on her head.
In 1973 a young Dutch musician and antique dealer named Peter Steenbergen arrived in Bali and rented a room behind Bemo Corner, strode down the dusty Jalan Pantai to eat at a warung, and immediately fell in love with the gorgeous young girl who served him.
Peter started filling the restaurant with Dutch colonial antiques and
tribal masks, and it soon developed the look and feel of an Amsterdam coffee house, which made it the “it” place of Kuta.
In those days you could sit in the front row at Made’s for a few hours and the world would come to you.
Our filming finished, Arthur Karvan whisked us off to the 48th anniversary of Made’s Warung, held in the far more expansive Seminyak branch, which has its own dance floor.
In the centre of a vast crowd, that included just about every Bali vagabond, rogue and restaurateur still standing, Peter and Made, married now for 43 years, cut the cake and held court.
Only Zenik and John sent their apologies, too busy running their Poppies franchise in Thailand.
