THE PUNCH INTERVIEWS
Meet Jorge, F&B and Duty Manager of Bambu Indah
Bambu Indah is a radically distinctive boutique hotel in Ubud, combining the best of antique architecture and design, innovative bamboo architecture with modern and sustainable practices in a luxury environment.
What is your story in hospitality?
I was born in Mexico and lived there until I was 13 before moving to Hong Kong with my family. Because my family was very conservative with money, I had to get a job in a restaurant.
One of my dad’s best friends was working in hospitality and gave me my first job as a runner and helper in a couple of restaurants in Hong Kong; that’s when I decided that I wanted to do what he was doing. He became my mentor.
He studied in Switzerland and helped me convince my father to send me there and pursue my hospitality career. I spent four years in Switzerland and did a couple of internships in Brussels and Morocco. Following my studies, I decided to get back into operations in Hong Kong where I worked in F&B for several years. I started as a server and grew all the way to operational management.
Later on, my mentor, who gave me my first job when I was 16, was now based in Bali doing hospitality consulting, he invited me for a consulting project for a private yacht. After that project, I was connected with John and Cynthia Hardy who hired me as Bambu Indah’s new F&B & Duty Manager.
What is Bambu Indah’s story?
Bambu Indah was born almost 20 years ago. The founders John and Cynthia Hardy were building Javanese antique houses for their sons and friends to host. Eventually, that turned into an opportunity to create a beautiful hotel using Javanese teak old houses, natural materials and innovative decor for guests who cherished that kind of hospitality. Over the years, they developed a circular property expanding sustainable practices, farming their own food for their restaurant, and designing natural pools for their guests.
The property closed for three years during the Covid pandemic and the founders took this opportunity to renovate almost everything. Today, Bambu Indah is offering new bamboo-built houses as well as an elevated riverside area with a new restaurant.
How do you achieve luxury and circularity?
To me, achieving luxury and circularity mostly comes from how you build the place and the kind of experience that you offer starting by using the right materials. At Bamboo Indah, we are mostly using bamboo which is extremely sustainable and with the help of amazing designers, we are being creative with our architecture, innovative bamboo-built structures and the finishes which give our guests a sense of luxury as soon as they come in.
Customer service, amazing hospitality, circular features such as our natural pools, incredible locally sourced food and involving guests in sustainable practices are also key elements in achieving luxury and circularity.
How Bambu Indah’s operations ensure minimum impact?
Everything we do, from the building to the operations have minimal impact.
If you look at our restaurant menu for example, most of our ingredients are either locally sourced from ethical local farms or grown onsite. Most of the things we build are from materials we found in our property. For example, instead of using or making cement, we use on-site rocks. We use old pieces of wood, we harvest our grass and use coconut tree leaves to cover everything.
In our rooms, we use LED light bulbs and remind our guests to be mindful about their energy and AC consumption. Throughout the property, we don’t use a lot of lights, instead we use oil-based candles which create a great natural ambiance at night.
We have a big waste management program in which we separate our glass, aluminum, and paper and we barely have any single plastic use. Instead, we offer creative alternatives such as wrapping take away foods in banana leaves and offering papaya straws. We also provide natural filtered spring water to our guests and use natural fibers for our pillows and sheets.
How do you help your staff understand the importance of working and living sustainably?
We try our best to educate our staff on the daily operations by showing the example and being very strict about what we stand for. When people come to Bambu Indah, it is very clear that we do not operate the same way as other resorts operate.
It is part of our leadership to constantly explain what we can do and what we cannot do and why. In every little thing that we do, we are showing the impact of our actions and making sure they everyone who works with us understand the importance of being responsible and working sustainably.
