Across Indonesia, from the busiest cities to the smallest towns, a rumah makan Padang is rarely far away. West Sumatran cooking is among the most widely travelled regional cuisines in the archipelago, and many of its defining ingredients are just as familiar across the Indian Ocean to the west, in South India. Lamuri, the new restaurant from Executive Chef Aman Lakhiani on Sanur’s Jalan Danau Tamblingan, serves the food of the two regions side by side.
It is Chef Aman’s second restaurant on the same stretch of street, joining Junsei, his charcoal-grill yakitori-ya, and Tamba by Junsei, Bali’s first dedicated tea room and vinyl listening bar. While Junsei reflects his years spent studying Japanese cuisine from the outside, Lamuri celebrates flavours much closer to home.
A Familiar Taste
Chef Aman grew up in Jakarta in an Indonesian and Sindhi Indian household, but the idea for Lamuri took shape in Tamil Nadu, the state at India’s southern tip, facing Sri Lanka and the Bay of Bengal. On a family temple pilgrimage some years ago, he kept noticing how much the food had in common with the Padang dishes he grew up with. He soon returned, spending several months training in Chettinad cooking at The Bangala, a heritage hotel in Karaikudi known for preserving the region’s home-cooking traditions, and travelling through the region. The parallels were everywhere: coconut milk, turmeric and ginger, slow-simmered curries, rice at the heart of every meal and food served on banana leaves.
The Gateway
Curious why the two cuisines felt so close, Chef Aman began researching the history of Indians in Indonesia, which led him to Lamuri, an ancient kingdom and trading port at the northern tip of Sumatra, in present-day Aceh. Named in a Tamil inscription, Chinese trade records and the notes of Arab travellers, it sat on the sea routes linking Sumatra with South India and Sri Lanka, along which merchants exchanged spices and textiles, while ideas, rituals and cooking practices have travelled between these regions, potentially influencing Sumatran culinary traditions over time. Some of the parallels Chef Aman noticed have reflected this long history of contact; others simply stem from similar tropical conditions, where coconut, rice and seafood are plentiful.
For Chef Aman, what makes each cuisine distinct is just as important as what they share. “I care so deeply about representing the food without making it feel like it’s fusion,” he says. Most dishes remain rooted in their own culinary traditions, while a few explore the natural intersections in ingredients, techniques and flavours.
Around the Banana Leaf
The menu grew out of research trips through Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry and Sri Lanka, where the team ate in no-menu meal halls and ground masala by hand in home kitchens. At Lamuri, banana leaves are spread across the tables. Curries arrive in terracotta bowls and smaller dishes on steel plates, as in South Indian eateries, and much of the menu is best eaten by hand. As Lamuri puts it: eat with your hands, eat with your history.
Chef Aman was raised Indonesian and Indian, in a household where neither identity crowded out the other. That upbringing echoes Indonesia’s own founding principle, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, or unity in diversity: the idea that difference doesn’t need to dissolve for people to belong together. It is also part of the reason his family made Indonesia home.
Lamuri puts that idea into practice one plate at a time. A Tamil curry sits beside a Sumatran gulai, each recognisably itself, neither softened to meet the other halfway. “I grew up between two cultures that never asked me to choose,” says Chef Aman. “Lamuri is my way of putting them on the same table together, but not blended.”
From South India, Chicken 65, a Chennai classic, is fried golden with frizzled curry leaves; Meen Kuzhambu is fish simmered in a tangy tamarind curry; and at lunch, dosas are shatteringly crisp. From Sumatra, Dendeng Balado pairs brittle shards of dried beef and snappy potato chips with sweet, fiery chilli, and Ayam Tangkap Aceh, Acehnese fried chicken, arrives beneath a tangle of fried curry and pandan leaves. The crunch of the Sri Lankan Mutton Rolls, crumbed and filled with spiced meat, reflects the command of texture Chef Aman built through his training in Japanese cuisine and refined at Junsei. Where the traditions meet, Kare Kambing layers slow-cooked mutton with Sumatran and South Indian spices, and at dinner, Fish Pollichathu, silver pomfret grilled in banana leaf, uses a technique as familiar in Indonesia as in Kerala.
Vegetarians have plenty of choice, as in any rumah makan Padang or South Indian dining hall, and one standout is Gulai Jengkol, which puts one of Indonesia’s most divisive ingredients on the table: the pungent seed of a native legume tree, slow-simmered in a West Sumatran coconut curry. “You really have to know how to prepare it,” says Chef Aman. “So I’m very happy to be able to celebrate a product that’s unique to Indonesia and present it in a delicious way.”
A Room for Gathering
In contrast to Junsei’s dark wood and soft light, Lamuri is exuberant with colour and daylight. Deep red pillars rise to a peaked timber ceiling, terracotta floor tiles evoke the red earth of South India, and a long indigo banquette stretches across the centre of the room. Chef Aman and his wife, Kiara, designed the pillar mosaics by hand at Philip Lakeman Ceramic, just down the road on Jalan Danau Poso. “We wanted to bring our own character into the space,” he says. The building’s original Balinese carved wooden panels are painted vivid green, blue, orange and pink, inspired by South India’s painted temples, and wall hangings collected during the research trips complete a room that feels like a tapestry. The spacious open kitchen makes it all the more communal.
Long tables of family and friends pass dishes around, tasting everything and delighting in the familiar as much as the new. It is a scene that feels at home in Sanur, where relaxed meals in big groups have long been part of life. For Chef Aman, the restaurant “feels like a return to my roots, but also like the next stage of who I am becoming as a chef.”
Lamuri is now open Tuesday to Sunday for lunch (11.30 AM–3.30 PM) and dinner (5.00 PM–10.30 PM).
