W

ith the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China slicing a swathe of death and starvation across the nation, and the Japanese invasion intensifying daily during the late 1930s, Fam Foeng Jin fled to Bali.

Packing a few belongings, the 20-year-old Hakka Chinese decided the odds on an arranged marriage far from her home and family in China was a better bet than staying in a nation shredded by simultaneous wars.

That was her first gamble with destiny; her next was setting up a bakso cart in Denpasar’s Badung market in 1940.  

Her cart grew into a restaurant, Atoom Baru, and 72 years later the traditional Hakka food of Fam is still being prepared as it always has been.  

Fam’s grandson Fransisco Hady, who inherited the restaurant, says his grandmother had little choice all those decades ago but to use any skills she had to make a living in her new land.

“I think she was a strong woman. My grandfather Lay Boei Tjong was always gambling and she had to work so the family could survive,” says Fransisco of his family’s matriarch, who died well into her 90s just two years ago.

Fam’s bakso cart and later restaurant had an edge that wooed customers into a lifetime of loyalty;
she made her noodles fresh each day, a custom that lives on as the restaurant nears its Golden Jubilee anniversary.

At 72 years of age, Mayun is as old as Atoom Baru and has been coming here for noodles his whole life.

“I have been coming here since I was a little kid, came with Mum and Dad since I was a baby. I often eat here because the food is nice and in the old days there was no other choice. Nowadays, there are plenty of other warungs, but still this is my number one choice. My favorite dish is pangsit mie kuah [noodles in soup],” says Mayun, who remembers when the restaurant was in full swing.

“In those days we had a table upstairs, it was open up there back then,” says Mayun, tucking into a bowl of noodles made at the restaurant just hours before.

There is a faded atmosphere at Atoom Baru these days, growing competition and a change in local diet has seen this stalwart of Denpasar’s restaurants shrink like an elderly woman: Tables that were once filled for the lunch rush remain empty, there is no clattering of dishes, no conversational hum, no waiting staff racing from table to table. The waiting staff are instead languorous, annoyed almost at being disturbed in their lassitude.

“In the past there was a movie theater nearby and I remember the shop being very busy when I was a child. Those two shops next door were all part of this one restaurant, now it’s not so busy so we just have this one space. I think we are quiet now because our food style is so old, maybe the younger generation likes a new style of food — in the past there was no competition in Bali. Here we are in an old part of town … tourists and locals now go mostly to supermarkets, not here to the traditional market,” says Fransisco of how the community around him has changed over the decades.

Though it costs in custom, Atoom Baru is resisting moves to more modern food styles, to influences such as peranakan (Indonesian/Chinese cultural fusions). Instead, Atoom Baru is sticking to what it knows best, what Fransisco calls “heritage Chinese food”.

Ancient food style offerings on the menu include birds-nest soup with crab-spawn, abalone and pigs bladder soup, liver and intestine and pork soup. But of these exotic dishes, today only pigs bladder soup remains available.  

“I feel proud to continue this [Hakka style] because it’s the tradition and I think we have to continue to serve this old-style food, because it is becoming rare. This is a very traditional cuisine — now you can find Chinese food served with influences from other areas, such as mayonnaise. This Hakka food is very simple, we just use fish sauce, soy, salt and pepper and wine for sauces. It was the common
Chinese food and here it is as it was in the 1940s — real old-style food,” says Fransisco of his goal to preserve his grandmother’s heritage cuisine.

He adds that protecting Hakka food in Indonesia also has political undercurrents.

“It’s also important [to preserve this food heritage] because in Indonesia we were not allowed to express Chinese culture and so preserving this for later generations is valuable. In the past, Chinese
culture in Indonesia was not seen so I feel it’s good for young people to know this food, to preserve this food as part of our culinary culture,” says Fransisco, reading again Atoom Baru’s red menus printed back in the early 1960s and still in use today.

“My grandmother had hundreds printed back then, so we have plenty of these old menus in stock,” explains Fransisco. The menus, typeset and printed in Surabaya during the reign of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, are written in Indonesian and in Chinese characters, pointing to the days when that until recently forbidden language was alive on the streets of Denpasar.