Bumbu Bali's Heinz von Holzen Featured Chef at Salzburg’s Famous Hangar-7 in June 2007
To describe Hangar-7 in Salzburg, Austria you might say it was a gourmet restaurant, a cutting edge contemporary art gallery, a performance and presentation venue, home to several trendy bars and an aircraft museum. In fact, it's all this and more. Defying description or categorization, the impressive and steel-and-glass structure and all it encompasses, in the word of its creators, is "a place where art, passion, technology and refined living meet." Founded by the Flying Bulls of Salzburg, a group of pilots and aviation enthusiasts who scour the world for vintage aircraft that they purchase and lovingly restore, Hangar-7 is the home to the group's historical collection of aircraft – some more than 60 years old – all maintained in an airworthy state, ready for their next flight leaving from the adjoining Salzburg airport's runway.
Von Holzen's career didn't get off to the smoothest of starts. He was interested in technology and began studying mechanical engineering. But three and a half years of working in an office bored him to such an extent that he decided to look for another apprenticeship position. Changing to a chef's apprentice, he fell in love with cooking on the very first day. Von Holzen started at the Hotel de La Paix in Lucerne, worked his way up the culinary and career ladder in various Hilton hotels, arrived in Singapore as a sous-chef in 1985, where he switched to the Hyatt Regency, subsequently becoming head chef of the Grand Hyatt Bali in 1990.
Balinese restaurants, explains von Holzen, tend to offer very similar dishes: a little Indonesian, a little Italian, a little French. In his search for authentic Balinese recipes, von Holzen staged a cooking competition for 159 Balinese staff at the Grand Hyatt. He was surprised and overwhelmed by the variety of flavors and dishes that emerged as a result of the competition. The recipes uncovered at the Hyatt went into "The Food of Bali," forming the foundation for each of the dishes served by von Holzen at the Bumbu Bali today: roasted duck or grilled fish in banana leaves, ox tongue in sweet nutmeg sauce, braised squid in lime basil.
Several books, numerous promotional trips and well-attended cookery seminars later, Heinz von Holzen has become the ambassador of Balinese cooking. The Bumbu Bali has been rated the best Balinese restaurant in Bali several times, and von Holzen himself has been voted one of Bali’s 21 most important personalities owing to his services to local cooking. "Balinese cooking," says von Holzen, "has genuinely taken hold over everything I do." Is there anything typically Swiss left of him? A love of endurance sport, perhaps. And of course the discipline and enthusiasm with which he prepares and globally promotes Balinese cooking.
(3/31/2007)
