“Why Bali?” I ask Frank Camorra as we sit in the breezy indoor-outdoor dining space surrounded by lush tropical plants at his latest restaurant, the first international outpost of his hugely popular MoVida brand at Seminyak’s chic new Katamama hotel.

“Good question!” he responds, as if not quite sure of the answer himself, but that torpor is more to do with the heat. It’s 35 degrees and 500 per cent humidity by 10am and my main concern is how the Spanish-Australian chef is going to serve his signature tapas, the anchoa, a plump salty anchovy atop a paper thin cracker crowned with a mouth-puckering tomato sorbet you spread like butter over the salty fish before it melts. It’s a race against the clock in Sydney, so I don’t like my chances in these steamy conditions.

“Bali is a new market for Australian chefs because the food we do works – the
way Australian chefs translate traditional cuisines is a hallmark of our style. We offer a different take on local flavours, with refinement for a global palate,” he says. “In Australia, we have to find local ingredients we can substitute for Spanish ingredients, and we’re doing the same here. We’re trying to use as much local as possible, from fish, fruit and veg to cheese – they’re even making a local version of manchego for us.”

MoVida replaces a traditional lobby in the boutique Katamama hotel, which has been built using traditional artisan techniques, from the 1.5 million red clay bricks handmade on site to the indigo fabrics from Ubud that adorn the rooms and the reproduction post-modern wooden furniture made in nearby Java.

“When designing Katamama, craftsmanship and local materials became a strong theme for me,” says architect Andra Matin, who worked closely with the hotel’s owner, hotelier Ronald Akili of Potato Head Beach Club fame, to execute their shared vision for a hotel that deeply reflects local tradition in every detail. “In Bali, most of the people earn their living through craftsmanship and art; they carve, paint, dye, or construct. This is what we wanted to emphasise through Katamama’s architecture.”

“The hotel is an oasis. The more you look at it the more you appreciate it because it is the work of artisans,” says Akili, who points out that a post-modern, mid-century hotel with a Spanish restaurant built with local Indonesian materials seemed like an impossible image at first, but one that gelled in the end because of the creative passion behind it, much like MoVida’s menu, which translates Spanish flavours to Indonesia via Australia.

“If you go to any restaurant in Spain, the flan, or crème caramel as it’s also known, is on every menu. It’s such a simple recipe, but we just couldn’t get it to work here,” says Camorra. “Everyone loves a good crème caramel that’s cooked perfectly, wobbly and silky, so we experimented and now we make our flan here with duck eggs instead of hen eggs – that’s unique to Bali. It’s served with pestiños, aniseed pastries traditionally served at Easter in Spain.” No such adaptations are made to the anchoa, which I order with a pre-dinner negroni from adjoining Akademi Bar. Instead they come with a concerned instruction from the waiter to “eat quickly” before the tomato sorbet turns into a pink puddle on the plate like the fluorescent sun setting into the ocean outside.