— Cerita kami
Our story
How a kitchen from Jakarta found its second home, eight thousand kilometres away.
In 1987, Ibu Sutarmi opened a small warung in Tebet, South Jakarta. She had three tables, one wok, and a recipe for rendang that her own grandmother had whispered to her on a kitchen stool when she was nine years old. The neighbours started coming. Then the neighbours' friends. Then the neighbours' friends' children, who would grow up and bring their own.
Forty years later, her grandson Agus stood in a tiny kitchen in Soho, Hong Kong, holding the same wooden spoon, stirring the same bumbu his grandmother had taught him to balance — garlic, lemongrass, candlenut, kaffir lime — and realised something. The smell was the same. The taste was the same. The kitchen had moved, but the food had not.
“We didn't bring a restaurant to Hong Kong. We brought a grandmother's kitchen, with all its arguments and its love.”— AGUS · FOUNDER & HEAD CHEF
SERASA opened in late 2026 with one promise: nothing would be shortcut. No imported spice pastes. No frozen rendang reheated under heat lamps. No “fusion” to make the food more palatable to a Hong Kong audience who, as it turned out, didn't need any palatability adjustment at all.
Every morning at 6am, Agus is at Wan Chai market, hand-selecting galangal, turmeric root, kaffir lime leaves, and fresh red chillies. The candlenuts come direct from a co-op in West Java. The kecap manis is from a fourth-generation maker in Cirebon. The rice — a particular short-grain variety that holds its shape under pandan steam — is shipped twice a month.
The team is small. Six in the kitchen, four on the floor. Most are Indonesian. Two are Filipina who fell in love with Indonesian food while working for an Indonesian family in HK and have, against all reasonable expectation, become two of the best sambal-makers in the building. The language in the kitchen flips between Bahasa, English, Cantonese, and Tagalog. Everybody understands “sedap” without translation.
This is a restaurant about a place — not the place we are now, but the place we carry with us. If you grew up in Indonesia, we hope SERASA tastes like home. If you didn't, we hope it tastes like an invitation to one.