On Sanur’s evolving high street, London-born yakitori restaurant Junsei pairs precision-grilled skewers with an intimate room, a vinyl soundtrack, and Tamba’s cocktails right next door.
You might not be aware, but Sanur, once the bastion of the Birkenstock-wearing sexagenarian (and no, it doesn’t mean what you think it does), is having something of a renaissance. While much of southern Bali is straining under the pressure of overtourism and poorly maintained infrastructure, Sanur offers stability and elegance, with tree-lined shopping streets, a pristine beachfront promanade and (relatively) light traffic. Its chic new persona is drawing in new restaurant concepts too, the newest among them, Junsei, an import from central London.
We begin, as any evening at Junsei should, not in this intimate little izakaya, but next door. Tamba by Junsei opened its floor-to-ceiling glass doors just as the last light fades over Jalan Tamblingan, and for a serene 45 minutes before dinner, our appetite for yakitori is instead sated by smooth tracks and innovative libations.
By day, Tamba is Bali’s first dedicated tea room, pouring first-harvest Okumidori and fuller-bodied matcha from Shizuoka and Kagoshima. And while that might appeal to your mother, as night falls, it becomes something else entirely, a ten-seat, vinyl-led listening bar where head bartender Dedi Mulyadi’s Volume 01 menu moves in a deliberate arc from lighter, clearer pours into deeper, more textured ones crafted from koji, kombu vermouth and roasted rice syrup.
The sound system is calibrated so that Lakhiani’s personal record collection fills the room without swallowing conversation, and with happy hour running 5 pm to 7 pm on buy-one-get-one cocktails, it’s an easy, unhurried place to lose track of time before the main event.
That main event is a few steps away. Junsei has landed on Sanur’s high street at exactly the right moment: this stretch of southeast Bali has long traded on slower mornings and calmer shores rather than restaurant buzz, but a wave of considered new openings is quietly changing that, and Junsei feels like proof of concept. On the night we visit, every seat at the open kitchen counter is taken, with the remaining tables — the restaurant holds 24 diners inside and 16 on its outdoor terrace — filling soon after. Book the terrace if you can; more on why below.
The room itself does a lot of the talking. Junsei has kept much of the original structure of the building intact, layering in natural materials and a sleek, restrained finish that never tips into minimalism for its own sake. The open grill anchors the narrow interior, its charcoal glow the visual centre of the room, while the low hum of vinyl drifts through from Tamba next door, tying the two spaces together. It’s a good-looking restaurant, but a purposeful one — everything in the room is there to serve the food and the pace, not just the photographs.
Founder and executive chef Aman Lakhiani opened the original Junsei in London in 2021, having trained across Europe, the UK and Japan after growing up in an Indian-Indonesian household. In Sanur, that grill is now in the hands of head chef Krish AJ (a Junsei Jakarta alumnus), whose team undergoes up to a year of training before they’re allowed near the binchōtan.
It shows. The charcoal — dense, high-carbon, and prized for its clean, steady heat — does exactly what it’s meant to across a run of skewers cut from nearly every part of a locally sourced, organic chicken. An organic chicken thigh comes glazed in tare sauce; a grated daikon arrives as a palate cleanser (though I think it would have benefited from being served chilled); and chicken neck, paired with fermented rhubarb whose flavour is more suggestion than statement, is served crispy, fatty, and gloriously savoury. Wings slide clean off the bone; the chicken tail skewer is warm, gooey with palate-pleasing, heart-stopping goodness; and the chicken aorta, for the adventurous, is chewy, salty and genuinely delicious.
Beyond the offal, red snapper braised in a soy broth with spring onion arrives fragrant and delicately sweet, with an unexpected note of passionfruit running through it. A chuck flap Wagyu skewer holds its own against the poultry, and the tsukune — a chicken meatball skewer served with a raw, organic Balinese egg yolk for dipping — sits right on the line between sin and satisfaction, exactly as it should.
A bowl of local rice rounds things out competently (though a short-grain Japanese variety would have suited the meal’s register better), while a coconut granita, topped with salt and pomelo, resets the palate before a dessert of honey-laced Japanese-style French toast, topped with rhubarb compote and a dollop of miso cream (serve this the morning after and they’ll never leave).
My only niggles keeping this from being a perfect meal would be the noise (it only takes two white women and a bottle of sake to turn an izakaya into a drama den), so ask for a terrace table if the weather allows; and the lack of napkins, a strange omission given the finger-friendly fare. However, neither is enough to dampen the recommendation.
What Junsei ultimately proves is that Sanur no longer needs to borrow its energy from Seminyak or Canggu. There’s a confidence to how unhurried the whole evening feels, from Tamba’s amber-lit cocktails through to the last bite of honey toast (honestly, it’s culinary crack), that suggests chef Lakhiani and his Sanur team understand exactly what they’re building.
Junsei and Tamba by Junsei sit side by side on Jalan Tamblingan; arrive early for a drink next door, and book ahead — word is already travelling fast.
