Chris Salans

Glazed Barramundi Again?

The Mozaic Restaurant, where a six-course gourmet meal sets you back a mere $60, has been called (by New York magazine) “the best deal on the planet.” But the phrase could apply equally to the lifestyle of Mozaic’s owner and chef, Chris Salans, A92. Salans, you see, does his cooking in paradise. The Indonesian island of Bali is both his home and his culinary playground.

Combining local ingredients and gourmet imports with classic French technique, Salans has created a cooking style he calls “modern international Balinese cuisine.” He might, for example, season a roasted monkfish fillet with a reduction of spices from the northern Balinese village of Munduk. Local berries, melons, and star fruit find their way into sorbets. And let us not forget the barramundi. This freshwater fish, common in nearby northern Australia, receives a balsamic glaze and is served as an appetizer with a sauce of black olives and Balinese kluwek nut. Hungry yet?

The cuisine is as much an adventure for diners as it is for the chef. “The menu changes every day,” Salans says. “It’s all very creative, very spontaneous, very last-minute. My cooking technique allows me not to have to think ahead of time.” To find out what’s for dinner, tourists will gladly travel an hour or more from the bustling resorts along Bali’s southern coast to Mozaic’s more sedate inland location in the town of Ubud. And the culinary world has taken notice: Mozaic was selected for the 2007 guide Les Grandes Tables du Monde (The World’s Great Restaurants) by the international association Traditions & Qualité.

One of the benefits of living in an island paradise is that one can be a culinary star without succumbing to the pressures of international celebrity. Salans finds that Balinese culture values the balanced life—it’s the ideal setting for him and his Indonesian wife, Erni, to raise their two young children in.

At the same time, the island is not so remote that Salans must do without his Spanish saffron or French Valrhona chocolate. “With about a thousand hotels and other lodgings in Bali, there is a huge import delivery system in place,” he says. “You can get pretty much anything as long as you are willing to pay for it.” In fact, working in Bali gives him an edge over upscale chefs in American cities. Not only can he get the same gourmet ingredients as any chef in Boston, he says, “but I can get one hundred percent of the local Balinese stuff.”

For this former Tufts biology major who once entertained ideas of going to medical school, the road to paradise has had its twists and turns. Born in the United States and raised in France by his French mother and American father, Salans was nurtured by his mother’s hearty home cooking, the art of which she acquired in the Sologne region, birthplace of the tarte tatin (a rustic upside-down tart of caramelized apples, game, and mushrooms). After graduating from Tufts, Salans felt the pull of fine dining and returned to France to study at the Cordon Bleu. Afterwards, he endured a rigorous apprenticeship in the kitchens of “tyrannical” French masters.

He then returned to the United States as a sous chef for the New York restaurateur David Bouley. It was at this point that he became intrigued with Asian cuisine, and subsequently embarked on his first stint in Bali, working at two hotels there and meeting his future wife. “Being a chef allows you to travel the world,” he says. “As a lawyer, a banker, a doctor, you can’t work everywhere, because of permits, needing to learn the language. But as a chef, you can work in a kitchen anywhere in the world.”

Then it was back to the States, working in quick succession as head chef at Bouley’s Bakery in New York and Thomas Keller’s Bouchon in Napa Valley. Then back to Bali, spending three years as a head chef at other restaurants before opening Mozaic in 2001.

Of course, no paradise is without its troubles. Overdevelopment, pollution, and climate change imperil the island, and tourism has been unstable. Bali has long been buoyed by American and, particularly, Australian visitors (the island is only a half-hour flight from some parts of Australia). But terrorist bombings in 2002 and 2005, compounded by outbreaks of avian flu in Indonesia and by the 2004 tsunami (which, unbeknownst to many travelers, left Bali unscathed), caused a significant drop-off in tourism. “That bit into the market,” Salans says. Now things are looking up. The void left by Americans and Australians, he says, is being filled by tourists from within Asia—notably Korea, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong—and from Russia.

Salans, 37, has become as much a businessman as a chef. He has launched a catering company and a high-end kitchenware shop, and joined with Miele, the German appliance manufacturer, to open a cooking school for tourists and professional chefs. He is considering developing a line of Mozaic-style vacuum-packed meals for hotels in the region. And he dreams of a cookbook, or a TV show on Indonesian cooking. “I have lots of ideas,” he says.