Blue Pepper Restaurant

Chef Sonja Pereira grew up in an enchanted circle of royal weddings and hunting lodge parties in Bandung, Indonesia even as the curtain was falling on the colonial era and the world was besieged by the anxieties of empire.
She emigrated to the Netherlands in 1985. As the home dinner party of her early years receded into folk memory and traditional Indonesian restaurants in the Netherlands seemed, well, too traditional, she set up a boutique restaurant called Blue Pepper to revive the splendour of festive Indonesian cooking.
Blue Pepper brings back to life what a royal Indonesian feast tasted like. Avoiding an extensive menu as well as ‘’simple’’ home cooking, Sonja focusses on a small selection of obsessively prepared dishes that change seasonally.
Her rijsttafel takes you from mellow hints of spice to wickedly complex, rich dishes where spices remain an obsession but using them properly is revealed as an art form.