Soléa Restaurant, Sanur: A Mediterranean Tasting Menu on Bali's Most Historic Rooftop
Soléa is a seasonal Mediterranean tasting menu restaurant on the rooftop of Bali Beach Hotel — Bali's first international hotel, opened in 1966 by President Soekarno. Run by the Locavore Group, it draws from 18 countries that touch the Mediterranean Sea. This is the story of how its reservation infrastructure was built collaboratively before opening day.
Table of contents
Eighteen countries touch the Mediterranean Sea. That is the creative brief for Soléa — a seasonal tasting menu restaurant on the rooftop of Bali Beach Hotel in Sanur, run by the Locavore Group. The menu draws from the full breadth of that coastline: Gazpacho, Bouillabaisse, Panna cotta, and the dishes between them, each "retold with subtle reinvention, shaped by seasonal produce." The setting is a rooftop on a building that has stood since 1966, at ten storeys the tallest in Bali for over a decade, with a rare vantage that takes in both the sunrise over the ocean and the sunset on the western horizon.
This is both a profile of the restaurant and an account of how its reservation infrastructure was built before a single guest arrived.
At a Glance
- Location: Bali Beach Hotel rooftop, Jl. Hang Tuah, Sanur, Denpasar, Bali
- Hours: Monday – Sunday, 5:30 PM – 9:30 PM (last order)
- Format: Seasonal Mediterranean tasting menu
- Inspiration: 18 countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea
- Executive Chef: Rafael Martinez Millan (Valencia; trained under Ángel León, Aponiente ✶✶✶, and Carme Ruscalleda, ✶✶✶✶✶✶✶)
- General Manager: Marine Lorain (Burgundy; raised at her father's Michelin-starred restaurant; previously Mozaic Ubud)
- Recognition: Bali Beach Hotel on the Savour BlackBook Asia Unadulterated List 2025
- Reservations: Via Revasi — booking essential
- Contact: solearooftopbali@gmail.com / +62 823 1353-1891
Table of Contents
- What Soléa Is
- The Menu: Eighteen Countries, One Kitchen
- The Team Behind Soléa
- How Soléa Fits Into the Locavore Group
- The Operational Challenge: Fine Dining Before Opening Day
- How Revasi Was Built Around Soléa
- Practical Information
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Soléa Is
Soléa is a seasonal Mediterranean tasting menu restaurant operating on the rooftop of Bali Beach Hotel — the Locavore Group's expansion from Ubud into Sanur. It shares the rooftop with Mistral Dining Bar, a companion cocktail bar that opens at 3:00 PM; Soléa itself comes to life at 5:30 PM when the kitchen begins its evening service.
The concept is deliberately wide in its geographical reference. Mediterranean cooking is not one cuisine — it spans Spanish-Catalan technique, North African spicing, Provençal seafood traditions, Italian dairy, Levantine vegetable preparations, and Greek simplicity. Soléa's approach is to pull from all of it. Dishes like Gazpacho and Bouillabaisse are recognisable reference points; what the kitchen does with them is shaped by Rafael Martinez Millan's training, the seasonal produce available in Bali, and the elevation of the rooftop setting.
The result is a tasting menu restaurant that has no direct equivalent in Bali's current dining landscape — where nearly every serious fine dining concept is either Indonesian-focused or European-classical. Soléa occupies its own category.
The Menu: Eighteen Countries, One Kitchen
Soléa's menu reads as a journey through the coastlines that border the Mediterranean Sea. The kitchen works with a seasonal brief — dishes shift as produce changes — but certain preparations anchor the programme across the year.
| Dish | Origin | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Gazpacho | Andalucía, Spain | Cold, fresh, intensely vegetable; the opening signal of the menu's directness |
| Bouillabaisse | Marseille, France | Classic Provençal seafood stew; reinvented with seasonal Balinese ingredients |
| Panna cotta | Northern Italy | Delicate, dairy-forward; "retold with subtle reinvention" |
| Seasonal dishes | 18 Mediterranean countries | Rotate with ingredient availability and kitchen research |
The language the team uses for their cooking is precise: "a wonderful melange of cuisines and flavours," dishes that are "retold with subtle reinvention, shaped by seasonal produce." This is not fusion — it is a kitchen that understands each reference point at the level of technique and then chooses what to keep and what to change. Rafael Martinez Millan's training under Ángel León at Aponiente — a restaurant built on radical rethinking of Spanish coastal cooking — shapes how the menu approaches reinvention.
The Team Behind Soléa
Three people define Soléa's character at the operational and culinary level.
Rafael Martinez Millan — Executive Chef. Born in Valencia, he trained under two of Spain's most decorated culinary figures: Ángel León of Aponiente in El Puerto de Santa María, a three-Michelin-star restaurant known for its work with marine ingredients and oceanic flavours, and Carme Ruscalleda, whose career encompassed seven Michelin stars across restaurants in Barcelona and Tokyo. The combination of León's experimental rigour and Ruscalleda's Mediterranean sensibility runs through how Soléa approaches its cooking.
Marine Lorain — General Manager. Raised in Burgundy at her father's Michelin-starred restaurant, Lorain grew up inside fine dining operations before becoming a professional. Her previous posting was at Mozaic in Ubud, one of Bali's longest-standing fine dining institutions. She understands both the European fine dining framework and the specific rhythms of the Bali hospitality market.
Raka Ambarawan — Head of Beverages, Locavore Group. Raka leads the beverage programme across both Soléa Restaurant and Mistral bar, maintaining continuity between the cocktail programme downstairs and the drinks pairing available during the tasting menu service.
How Soléa Fits Into the Locavore Group
The Locavore Group operates multiple venues across Ubud and Sanur, each at a distinct price point and format. Soléa is the group's Mediterranean fine dining proposition — separate in concept from the Indonesian-focused cooking at Locavore NXT and Nusantara.
| Venue | Location | Cuisine | Format | When to visit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Locavore NXT | Ubud | Hyperlocal Balinese | 20-course tasting menu, ≈ USD 120/person | Special occasion; book 4–6 weeks ahead in high season |
| Nusantara | Ubud | Pan-Indonesian | Sharing plates, à la carte | Casual dinner; culinary exploration of the archipelago |
| Soléa | Sanur | Mediterranean | Seasonal tasting menu | Fine dining in Sanur; Mediterranean focus |
| Mistral | Sanur | Mediterranean cocktails | Bar and small plates from 3:00 PM | Pre-dinner drinks; sundowner; companion to Soléa |
For guests staying in Sanur, Soléa provides a fine dining option that matches Locavore NXT in ambition but draws from an entirely different culinary tradition. The two restaurants are not interchangeable — they represent distinct creative commitments within the same group.
The Operational Challenge: Fine Dining Before Opening Day
Fine dining restaurants are operationally unforgiving. A failed reservation system on the first evening of service at a tasting menu restaurant — where each cover is pre-planned, pre-costed, and pre-prepared — is not recoverable the way a casual venue might absorb the error. The kitchen prepares for exactly the number of guests booked. The service team is briefed on every table. Overbooking, double-booking, or gaps in guest information create cascading failures from the pass to the dining room.
Soléa's pre-opening challenge was to configure all of this before the restaurant had operated a single service. There were no historical booking patterns to reference, no calibrated peak periods, no learned walk-in habits. The configuration had to be built from the service design itself — what the tasting menu format required from a reservation system at each stage of the guest journey.
Several specific requirements shaped the build:
- Branding precision. Operating within Bali Beach Hotel — a five-star heritage property managed by InJourney Hospitality — meant the guest-facing booking journey had to reflect Soléa's positioning, not appear as generic third-party software.
- Structured pre-service exports. Tasting menu restaurants brief their kitchen and service teams before each service. The reservation system needed to produce a clean, structured export that could be used in those briefings without manual reformatting.
- Configuration flexibility before opening. Service plans change in the final weeks before a restaurant opens. The system had to be adjustable without requiring a full reconfiguration each time.
How Revasi Was Built Around Soléa
Revasi's implementation at Soléa went beyond configuration. The pre-opening collaboration became, in part, a product development process.
PDF Reservation Exports for Service Briefings
The most concrete product outcome of the Soléa collaboration was the development of a structured PDF reservation export. This feature did not exist in Revasi's platform before Soléa's pre-opening process identified the need for it.
In a tasting menu restaurant, the pre-service briefing is the moment the kitchen and front-of-house team align on the evening ahead: who is arriving, how many covers, any dietary accommodations, any guest notes from prior visits. Having that information in a clean, printable format — rather than as a screen-view from a booking dashboard — is a practical requirement at this level of service.
The feature was built during the Soléa implementation and is now available across all Revasi venues. Client feedback was treated as product input, not a support ticket.
Brand-Consistent Booking Journeys
Soléa's reservation flow was configured to present as Soléa — consistent visual identity, custom guest messaging, no indication of third-party software in the guest-facing journey. At a hotel of Bali Beach Hotel's standing, brand consistency across every touchpoint is a standard expectation.
Pre-Opening Workflow Testing
The founders worked on-site with Soléa's team before opening, testing the full reservation workflow against actual service scenarios. Configuration changes were made in real time, and the system's behaviour was validated against what the restaurant would actually encounter on opening night — not against a generic use case.
By the time Soléa opened, the reservation infrastructure had already been through the equivalent of several weeks of dry-run service.
Practical Information
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Address | Jl. Hang Tuah, Sanur Kaja, Sanur, Denpasar, Bali 80227 |
| Hours | Monday – Sunday, 5:30 PM – 9:30 PM (last order) |
| Format | Seasonal Mediterranean tasting menu |
| Setting | Rooftop, indoor-outdoor, Bali Beach Hotel (est. 1966) |
| Reservations | Via Revasi — essential for tasting menu service |
| Walk-ins | Not recommended; tasting menu kitchens prepare per cover count |
| Contact | solearooftopbali@gmail.com / +62 823 1353-1891 |
| Companion venue | Mistral Dining Bar opens at 3:00 PM on the same rooftop |
| Recognition | Savour BlackBook Asia Unadulterated List 2025 (Bali Beach Hotel campus) |
| Parent group | Locavore Group (Eelke Plasmeijer & Ray Adriansyah) |
Booking at Soléa
Soléa operates a tasting menu format where the kitchen prepares for exactly the number of covers booked each evening. Reservations are essential — walk-in guests cannot be accommodated in the same way as at a casual venue. Book via Revasi and note any dietary requirements at the time of booking. For guests also interested in Mistral Dining Bar, arrive at 3:00 PM on the same rooftop for cocktails before your dinner reservation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What kind of restaurant is Soléa?
Soléa is a seasonal Mediterranean tasting menu restaurant on the rooftop of Bali Beach Hotel in Sanur. The menu draws from the cuisines of 18 countries that border the Mediterranean Sea — Spanish, French, Italian, North African, Levantine, and more — reimagined with seasonal produce and the culinary sensibility of Executive Chef Rafael Martinez Millan, who trained under three-Michelin-starred Ángel León and seven-Michelin-starred Carme Ruscalleda.
Is Soléa the same as Mistral?
No. Soléa and Mistral are two distinct concepts that share a rooftop at Bali Beach Hotel. Mistral is a cocktail bar open from 3:00 PM serving a spirit-forward Mediterranean drinks programme and shareable small plates. Soléa is the fine dining tasting menu restaurant that opens at 5:30 PM. They share a team and a building, but run separate services, menus, and reservation systems.
How far in advance should I book Soléa?
Soléa operates a tasting menu format with a limited number of covers per service. Booking at least one week in advance is recommended, and two to three weeks ahead during Bali's high seasons (July, August, December). The kitchen prepares for exactly the number of guests booked — last-minute requests are rarely accommodatable.
How does Soléa compare to Locavore NXT in Ubud?
Both are Locavore Group restaurants operating at a tasting menu level. Locavore NXT in Ubud focuses on hyperlocal Balinese and Indonesian ingredients through a 20-course format. Soléa in Sanur takes a Mediterranean lens — drawing from the cooking traditions of 18 coastal countries rather than a single archipelago. They are complementary rather than interchangeable experiences within the group's portfolio.
What makes Soléa's setting distinctive?
Soléa sits on the tenth floor of Bali Beach Hotel — the building commissioned by President Soekarno in 1966 and for years the tallest structure on the island. The rooftop faces east and west, offering one of the rare Bali vantages that captures both sunrise over the ocean and sunset on the western horizon. For guests arriving from Ubud's forest setting, the coastal light and open sea view represent a complete change of environment.
What reservation system does Soléa use?
Soléa uses Revasi, configured during the pre-opening phase through direct collaboration between the restaurant's team and Revasi's founders. The implementation included the development of a structured PDF reservation export for service briefings — a feature now available across all Revasi venues — and full brand-consistent booking flows that reflect Soléa's positioning within Bali Beach Hotel.
Does Soléa accommodate dietary requirements?
Yes, but requirements must be communicated at the time of booking. Tasting menu kitchens prepare parallel menus for dietary accommodations in advance — the kitchen needs advance notice to prepare an equivalent experience. Note any allergies, intolerances, or preferences when making your reservation.
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Regilio
Co-founder, Revasi
Passionate about the intersection of hospitality and technology. Helping restaurants discover digital tools to transform their dining room experiences and turn first-time guests into regulars.
