Named after the looping script once scratched into palm leaves across maritime Southeast Asia, Samphire Rottnest’s marquee restaurant isn’t shy about its ambitions.

Lontara is a culinary love letter to the messy, fragrant sprawl of the archipelagos with equal parts homage and reinvention.

A meal begins not with overwrought flourishes but with krupuk campur: a heap of cracking crackers and a line-up of sambals that will set your nostrils fizzing like a freshly opened jar of horseradish.

Or maybe you want to start with the Angus flank steak steeped in tom yam spices, sluiced with nahm jim, a dish that plants you somewhere between Lombok and Phetchaburi if only for the length of a forkful.

At the helm of Lontara is Zack Fong, who for weeks has been dangling tasters of his new menu on Inst

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