Syrco BASÈ: A New Kind of Michelin Star Level Dining in Ubud

Tucked into the outskirts of Ubud, Syrco BASÈ is one of the clearest examples in Bali of what happens when Michelin-level technique meets Indonesian ingredients and tradition. It's a culinary destination built around food, people, place and curiosity, home to a restaurant, a bar, a shop, a regenerative garden, and KU Culinary Atelier, an intimate chef's counter experience for a maximum of 12 guests.

At its centre is Chef Syrco Bakker, a Dutch-Indonesian chef with two Michelin stars to his name, who brings his European fine dining background to bear on the flavours, producers and traditions of Bali and the wider Indonesian archipelago. The food is refined and precise, but it never loses the product or the place it comes from.

If you're searching for Michelin-quality dining in Ubud and curious about how sustainable fine dining is evolving, Syrco BASÈ is an essential visit.

Why Syrco BASÈ Stands Apart in Bali's Fine Dining Scene

Ubud has no shortage of chefs cooking beautiful food. What sets Syrco BASÈ apart is the ecosystem the food comes from.

The restaurant's regenerative garden isn't a photo backdrop. It's where the kitchen team works daily, where guests walk and learn before they sit down to eat, and where the kitchen's green waste returns to enrich the soil. Around that garden, Chef Syrco and his team work directly with the farmers, fishermen, growers and artisans they call their Bali Heroes, building relationships based on traceability and transparency rather than a supply chain of anonymous ingredients.

At KU Culinary Atelier, that connection becomes physical. A maximum of twelve guests sit directly around the kitchen, watching each dish come together with almost no distance between the ingredient, the chef and the person eating it. It's a different definition of luxury, one focused less on excess and more on proximity, knowledge and time.

KU Culinary Atelier: An Intimate Chef's Counter Experience

For travellers comparing fine dining and Michelin-star-calibre restaurants in Bali, KU Culinary Atelier is the closest thing to a tasting menu benchmark the island currently offers.

The evening begins with a walk through the regenerative garden, followed by a blessing at the property's temple, bites in a relaxed lounge setting, and then dinner at the twelve-seat chef's counter itself, a seasonal menu drawing on Indonesian land, sea and culinary heritage that unfolds over roughly 3.5 hours. Every course is built around what the garden and the day's producers are offering, rather than a fixed menu decided months in advance.

It's an experience designed for people who want to understand a place through its food, not just eat well, but leave knowing something about Bali they didn't before they sat down.

Michelin-Level Craft Meets Indonesian Soul

Chef Syrco's approach to Indonesian cuisine starts from a position of respect, not correction. Before any dish is reinterpreted, it's tasted, studied and understood: why it's made this way, why these ingredients, why this technique, what history sits behind it. Only then does the kitchen explore its own response.

The dry-aged duck betutu at KU is a clear example of how that plays out on the plate. Traditional Balinese duck betutu wraps the whole bird in spice and banana leaf and cooks it slowly over fire and earth until intensely tender. Syrco BASÈ's version dry-ages a Balinese duck for 14 days to concentrate flavour and crisp the skin, then separates the breast, cooked rosé in a more classically European style, from the rest of the bird, which carries the spice and depth of a classic betutu at the centre of a roulade. Two culinary traditions, European precision and Balinese depth, sit in the same dish without either one dominating.

That same instinct shows up across the menu: torch ginger, sambal, tropical produce from the garden, all filtered through the technical discipline of a chef who spent years cooking at the highest level in Europe.

A Michelin-Starred Pedigree, From the Netherlands to Ubud

Before Bali, there was Pure C.

For over a decade, Chef Syrco Bakker led the kitchen at Pure C on the Netherlands Belgium coast, earning his first Michelin star in 2011 and a second in 2018, making him one of the youngest chefs in the Netherlands to hold two stars at once. He trained under Sergio Herman at the three-Michelin-starred Oud Sluis before taking the lead at Pure C, and in 2022 he was named Chef of the Year by Gault&Millau, alongside an 18/20 score from the same guide.

It's worth being precise about what that means for Ubud. The Michelin Guide has not yet published star ratings for restaurants in Indonesia, so no restaurant in Bali currently holds a Michelin star, including Syrco BASÈ. What Bali does have, for the first time, is a chef who earned two stars elsewhere and chose to build his next restaurant here. What you'll find at Syrco BASÈ is Michelin-level technique, discipline and precision, applied to Indonesian ingredients, traditions and stories, by a chef whose training came from some of Europe's most demanding kitchens.

Experience It for Yourself

Bali may still be waiting for its first official Michelin guide. Until then, Syrco BASÈ offers something arguably more interesting: a two-Michelin-starred chef's European training applied, with genuine curiosity and restraint, to the ingredients and traditions of the island and archipelago he now calls home. Whether you're booking the à la carte restaurant, the tasting menu, or a seat at KU Culinary Atelier's chef's counter, it's one of the clearest examples in Ubud of what happens when Michelin-level craft meets Indonesian soul.