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Welcome to LA Stories, a section where I interview people from all walks of life that have made LA their home.
Note: On May 19, 2024, Awan opened their second location on Larchmont Blvd, providing guests a fully immersive experience into the world of Awan. Their walk-up window in West Hollywood is still open!
Finding an ice cream shop in LA is as common as finding a smoothie place. They’re abundant, but not everyday do you come across a place like Awan.
Founded by Australian chef Zen Ong and his business partner, Tohm Ifergan, owner of Dayglow Coffee in West Hollywood and Silverlake, Awan is changing the concept of how we’re used to eating ice cream.
Zen previously worked at the upscale restaurant Bentley in Sydney. When he moved to LA, he worked as the head pastry chef at the Australian-owned restaurant and rooftop E.P. & L.P.
However, Zen always knew that he wanted to connect with his Indonesian roots, which is why he started cooking and developing Indonesian recipes on his own. Awan is Zen’s love letter to Indonesia and the culmination of years trying to perfect his ice cream recipe.
The flavors rotate on a regular basis, except for the Balinese vanilla. This was the first flavor Zen ever made and it was the start of everything. If it’s your first time going there, make sure to get it. To create this flavor, Zen uses vanilla beans imported from a farm in Bali and Indonesian coconut cream. To top it off, they use freshly shaved gula jawa (palm sugar).
Besides the unmatched experience, Awan’s ice cream is also vegan and gluten-free. The walk-up window officially opened in September 2021 in West Hollywood, nestled in a little alley next to Dayglow coffee. It feels much more personal than entering into a proper brick-and-mortar.
When I tried Awan for the first time in May 2022, my jaw dropped to the floor. I’ve never been to a place where I like every single flavor on the menu. What’s the secret?
Awan is more than ice cream. It’s about the experience. From the walk-up window to the customer service, Awan is making big strides in the LA ice cream scene. Going to another ice cream shop will never be the same for me. Depending on where in LA I am, if I want a scoop of ice cream, I’ll go to the most convenient spot. While they do the job, they don’t provide the same elevated experience that Awan does.
When you walk up to the window, either Zen or the employee Josh will greet you, and then depending on which flavors you want to try, they’ll bring you a tray with all the samples! Coming from a background of working in fine dining restaurants, customer service is at the core of Awan.
When I first met Zen and told him it was my first time, he said: “Do you want to try all the flavors?” At Awan, you’re encouraged to ask questions about them. It’s more than just ice cream, it’s about fostering relationships with the customer.
Note: After this post went live, Zen added: “When there are no customers waiting, we are more than happy to give samples of the whole menu. But if there is a line or others are waiting, we do have to limit it to 2 per person.”
Because Awan is about the experience, this is not the place where you go in a rush. It’s located smack-dab in West Hollywood, and parking is notoriously challenging in this area. Also, you may encounter a line of people that are seemingly taking forever to order, but be patient because you too will receive the same level of service.
On the Instagram page, Zen thoroughly describes in detail the backstory of each flavor in the captions. The pictures alone are enough to make me get in my car and drive straight there. The pixelated logo is also really cool and is the perfect example of how brand awareness should be executed. Marketing 101!
I personally don’t mind paying above what I’d normally pay for ice cream at any other shop. The portions, as you can see in the picture, are pretty generous. I always get one scoop with two flavors, and because the flavors rotate, it keeps me going back to try the new ones. This novelty is great for adventurous customers and adds to the overall experience.
How often do the flavors rotate? According to Zen: “There is no set schedule, but usually, 1 or 2 flavors will change a week.”
After going there a few times, I say that Awan may become the Apple of ice creams.
During my interview with Zen, we talked about his background as a chef, the inception of Awan, LA, and many more things! I hope you enjoy it! I can’t wait to see the future of Awan – this is just the beginning!
How did you and Tohm meet? What led to the creation of Awan?
During the pandemic I was privately running a food program for a client. Tohm came on board as one of the beverage directors for the same client — he was running a coffee program for them. We were doing an event together and I brought the ice cream with me. Tohm tasted it and he was like, “Where did you buy this? I’ve never had anything like this. This is vegan?” I explained to him that I made it, and that it was a product that I wanted to get in grocery stores eventually. This was when vanilla was the only flavor. I’ve never tasted any of the other flavors, up until mid last year. But for the past 10 years, I’ve only been working on the vanilla flavor.
Vanilla is your signature flavor, right?
That was the first version of the dessert that I ever tasted in any restaurant that I worked in. I always made sure to put it back on the menu whenever I had the opportunity, but I would always change it by trying different machines and using different ratios. It wasn’t until the pandemic when a restaurant was selling their commercial ice cream machine and I dipped into my savings.
I had the idea of using that time to refine this recipe. When I bought the ice cream machine, I knew that the recipe was always designed to work in a restaurant, but just because something works in a restaurant, doesn’t mean it’s going to work on a mass scale. Especially when we’re talking about frozen desserts. When you’re making something at a restaurant, you’re serving it instantly, so the customer is having it fresh. The biggest issue with frozen desserts is the buildup of ice and the change of texture. So it was about focusing on how we could make sure this product got to the customer a week, two weeks later, and still be as luxurious as when you make it fresh. Once I had the confidence in knowing that the recipe was good, Tohm said: “Look, I’m really serious about this product. I really like it. I don’t know if anyone has shown interest in it, but I have a space in the back of my coffee shop. Tell me what you need for us to get started. Let’s start doing these weekly drops.”
Every week we’d release a new flavor. We’d start with the vanilla one week, and then we’d see what other flavors we could make. I spent a week seeing all the different flavors and themes that I could make with it. Like, this is how we’d adjust the recipe to make a fruit flavor, or a chocolate-based flavor, or coffee-based flavor, using obviousy Dayglow coffee — So I did about 8 flavors, all with different kinds of techniques. Because I made those flavors, I knew I could easily make 200 flavors. For me, the hardest part about trying to be creative with food, especially with desserts, is knowing when to draw the line, knowing how to do less and how to refine.
If you do too much, you lose focus. So we wanted to limit ourselves by being vegan and gluten-free. We wanted to focus on the execution, the branding, the service and the hospitality. That helped guide the essential elements of creating the best dessert, and something different.
We always wanted to be as different as possible because we don’t want to be compared to anyone else. We don’t need to be competitive with anyone, we can be competitive with ourselves and not worry about anybody else. We’re creating our own lane, but we also want to be approachable and not make people feel intimidated. There’s a fine balance.
The experience of eating ice cream at Awan is so elevated. In your own words, what’s the experience you’re trying to convey? Why ice cream specifically?
All I personally know is what it’s like to work in a restaurant, specifically fine dining restaurants. I found that not a lot of businesses treat people the same way I’m used to treating people in a restaurant. When someone comes to a restaurant to have a 12 course tasting menu, you’re maybe dealing with 20 or 40 customers a night, so you have a lot of time with them and you’re able to convey this hospitality. The whole idea for me was, how I could take that feeling of going to your favorite restaurant? There’s that deep sense of hospitality, where you know when you come to our establishment, our main goal is that you leave feeling better than when you came. From how I carry myself, and how I convey the importance of that style of service, to the people that work with us on the team, I do my best to live by example.
You only have a 3-5 minute interaction with a customer, and within that interaction, you have to try and figure out what they want out of the experience. People just want to feel special, not to say that we have to put up a big show for them. But at the end of the day, regardless if they’re rude or not, we’re purely here just to make someone’s day better. That’s our focus and the medium is ice cream.
To answer your second question, why ice cream? It’s such a universally known product and experience, at a price where people can dip their toes in the water and not feel like they’re taking a huge risk. I previously worked in an environment where people would pay up to $200 per person for a 2 and a half hour experience.
With ice cream, you can come in and have half a scoop of the classic for $3 or $5. If you don’t like it, it’s ok. Everybody wants their opinion to be heard, and we love hearing it because it helps guide us. But internally, as a team, we are easily the most critical people about how we do things. Before a customer tries one of our flavors, we’ve already gone over it so many times. It’s very rare for us to hear feedback from a customer that catches us off guard.
My personal goal is to showcase on a mass level the luxury that is Indonesian food, why it’s luxurious. I don’t want to do it in a way where I’m forcing it down their throats, but I want people to know that they can dip their toes in the water and get a feel of ice cream that is made with Balinese vanilla beans and Indonesian coconut cream. Eventually, we’re going to try to get Balinese sea salt and sugar from Balinese palm trees, where we can make the product 100% from Indonesia. This is also a product that was created during a time where no one could travel, so it was like, “How can we give people the experience of traveling without having to leave their homes?” I definitely lean into hanging out with people and coming out with ideas that are creative. Ice cream, as a platform, is a medium where people can be the most creative because it’s universally understood. It’s not so foreign texturally, but it’s also really difficult to do — and I love the challenge of it. There’s no one doing it the way we’re doing it, I think. I might be getting ahead of myself, but eventually, hopefully people are going to look at us as the gold standard of what vegan ice cream should be.
Lastly, traditionally I’ve been in restaurants and markets where you’re serving a clientele that spends a lot of money. For the most part, they’re usually adults that have that much money to spend on dinner. To create a product that anyone — from a 3-year-old kid all the way to an 85 or 90-year-old couple can enjoy — is amazing. Also, to challenge people that would never ever ever go and get vegan ice cream. That feeling of gaining people’s trust is an addictive feeling and it feels great.
Since your flavors rotate on a regular basis, what have been some of the most memorable ones you have put out?
I could tell you a backstory of every flavor that we’ve done and why I’ve been so excited by it. But some of the milestone flavors for me, are definitely the citrus flavors, like the Orange, the Blood Orange and the Mandarin. I’ve done a regular dairy version of those flavors in restaurants and it was my first time doing it here, completely vegan. The technique in how we do it, where we include all the zest in the recipe, I knew when people tried the citrus flavors, they were going to be like, “this is so different”, and we don’t use any extra flavorings.
The Harry Berry’s Strawberry flavor was definitely a big one. They obviously have this cult following.
The coffee flavor was a huge standout. We source all of our coffee from Dayglow Coffee, so their expert will prepare the espresso shots for us depending on where they feel the best coffee is at the time. The way of how dialed-in the technique is, to pull a regular shot of espresso and taste it with ice cream is so complex.
When Oreo started making gluten-free oreos, it just opened the doors for us. The amount of people that have come in that are vegan and gluten-free who haven’t had experienced a flavor like that because there’s nothing really out there, was really cool.
We’ve also done a bunch of collaborations, which have been really exciting. Ice cream is a great medium for collaboration, because it’s so malleable and super universal. We’ve had singers and artists that want to create flavors for a new album. The same way you can go to the Nike store online and create your own shoe, to give people the freedom to create their own flavor is a really cool thing.
When I tried the tortilla flavor for the first time, I was blown away by how close it tasted to the real thing. I can’t believe the flavors are vegan and gluten-free. Without giving too much away, what is your process of crafting ice cream that makes it taste so close to an orange or an oreo cookie?
It’s not a secret at all. Ice cream, at its most basic level is essentially a frozen emulsion of water, sugar and fat. Once you can break down a recipe into these main elements, and understand what can be pulled, what can be pushed in regards to the ratios mathematically, then, you can understand all the possibilities you can do. For example, that tortilla flavor, I had a feeling it would taste good because of the desserts I’ve done in restaurants before, where we used a similar technique with the tortilla. But instead of using tortillas, we’d use sourdough bread, so we’d burn sourdough bread and mix it into the ice cream and we’d make sourdough ice cream.
What is more LA than a tortilla? A lot of people thought it was a joke of flavor when we put it on, like a shock value flavor. But once they tasted it, they were like, “Oh wow, this is actually delicious.” Once I’ve eaten something that is so compelling that I can’t stop thinking about it, I want to put it back on the menu to continue working on it.
I was like, “why is this recipe so good?” and then I’d looked at that recipe compared to every other recipe, and saw that the ratios were done in the same way. So if the ratios are the same, what happens when you change the ingredients? What happens when you change the brand of coconut cream? And then we realized that it was the quality of the ingredients. You can’t just use cheap coconut milk and cream and do it the way we do it. It comes down to sourcing the ingredients.
I think If we were to take our business model and show it to a traditional ice cream company, they’d probably be shocked by how much work we put into what we do. If I’m completely honest, we should charge more for the way we’re doing it, but I know that I’d rather give people something more approachable, and options where they can have a $5 or a $12 scoop. So in that way, we’re not alienating anyone because a traditional ice cream scoop is $3.50 to $5.
What do you like about living in LA?
I think growing up in Australia, everyone always advocates that Sydney is a multicultural city, and for the most part, it is. But after moving to LA, this is really what a global city feels like. A few years ago I realized I wanted to focus purely on Indonesian food. Being in a city like LA, where there are not many cities around the world I think, that are similar to it, made sense. It’s a city where a lot of people are finding out who they are and during that process, it opens to new experiences and they’re open to meeting and engaging with people that are very passionate about what they do, in whatever niche market they’re in.
It’s always been a dream of mine to get a Michelin star for an Indonesian restaurant. Once I heard the Michelin Guide was coming back to LA, along with the feedback I was getting from people that tried the product early on, it felt very natural for the product to be birthed in LA — but with the potential to go as big as possible. It’s very difficult to operate a small business in LA, especially in California, but if you do it right, it has a huge potential to be successful because the economy is really strong here, especially now coming out of the pandemic. There’s so many people that are interested in high-end experiences and there’s a lot of disposable income here. If we were to do the same business model in a small town it would be different.
But LA, given the affiliation with a luxurious lifestyle and appreciation of good quality things like produce, it made a lot of sense. There’s still a lot of people in LA who have a very traditional mentality of “no, you should only pay this much for ice cream.” A lot of people still eat at diners and that’s ok, but to give people the opportunity to be like, “Hey, for $5 you can try what we think is a luxury item.” They may agree and say, “Wow, this has completely changed the way I look at this style of food or product.” LA is beautiful like that. You don’t get that open-mindness culturally in other cities.
What does Awan mean?
I spent a long time thinking about an Indonesian word that could describe it. I wanted it to be an Indonesian word, given that it is an Indonesian product. I didn’t want it to be a difficult word to describe, and I wanted to keep it as short as possible. Awan, which is pronounced “AH-wan”, translates to “cloud” in Indonesian. I thought that was kind of poetic, given that the first flavor that we did was vanilla. When it comes out of the machine it has this fluffy, bleach white, cloud essence. Texturally, it’s very light and fluffy to eat, and it’s not filled with eggs or dairy — it’s not overly sweet. It’s almost as light as a cloud.
It’s not a health food item by any means, but experience wise, if you were to compare that same scoop of regular ice cream compared to ours, I would say ours feels much lighter. It’s more decadent in texture because it has that coconut based flavor and you don’t feel super sluggish after eating it. The vanilla flavor is so much cleaner than a lot of other flavors because you can really taste the depth of the other ingredients are incorporated into it.
It’s a fun play-on-words with “I want”, it’s so simple that a kid can pronounce it. It’s a pretty looking four-letter word, and is actually a difficult word to draw and to make it look symmetrical. But after tinkering with it, we realized it looked really good in all caps.
What are your favorite restaurants in LA? Any Indonesian recommendations?
The Indonesian restaurant that I frequent the most is in Palms and is called Mr. Sate. They’re fantastic. If you ever go there, the Soto I think is the standout food, their soups are fantastic. They have turmeric, chicken broths, noodle soups, coconut, coconut beef broth and things like that. Their vegetable soups are also great.
Honestly, the food that I probably eat the most in LA are tacos, because they’re accessible, affordable, and they’re cheap. It’s similar to ice cream in a way where it’s like a fleeting moment. A taco doesn’t taste great two hours later usually, it tastes great when it’s freshly made so you want to enjoy it as soon as someone has made it for you, kind of like when you’re sitting at a sushi counter and someone makes you a piece of sushi, there’s just different levels of how something can taste.
Any taco places recommendations?
For me the follow-up question is, what is the kind of taco you want to have?
Obviously Mariscos Jalisco is a classic, just the engineering behind how the tacos are made and how you experience them, from the freshness, the crispness, the friedness, the seafood, the sauce… all that is delicious and the price point is so good. They could charge more and I’ll be happy to pay for it.
I love Tacos 1986, I think they’re fantastic. The Perron, which is the one that’s off the menu with beans is so good. I also love the way they do the Vampiro.
Dayglow Coffee, I’m not saying that because Tohm is my business partner, but because his appreciation for coffee is very similar to my appreciation for food. The lengths that they go to to source the coffee, and the kind of baristas that they have on their team in regards to how they execute the coffee, not only just traditional coffee — but the way they do their signature drinks and the techniques that they use in order to make some of their more creative drinks — is just so different.
For frozen desserts shops, Mateo’s Ice Cream & Fruit Bars, amazing. They’re the only other business in LA that I look to and I’m envious of. They do an amazing job in sourcing incredible produce, processing it in-house and giving it to you as fresh as possible.
They have so much variety and seasonality that you just don’t see in other places. I frequent that place a lot. They don’t have anything on the menu that’s there to shock you, it’s there because they truly believe it’s delicious — whereas other businesses put flavors or ingredients on the menu just because someone is going to buy it. But, are they going to really enjoy the whole thing? Mateo’s approach is very similar to ours: “We love this experience, how can we share this with somebody else?”
For date night, Horses on Sunset is fantastic. I think that’s one the most important restaurants in LA right now in regards to how they’re executing and the way they do things.
The fried chicken sandwiches from Daybird, the bagels from Courage Bagels…. Even just the regular fruit vendors cutting fresh fruit on the side of the streets is very LA to me. Anyone that’s visiting LA I think, needs to experience that. Eventually, for myself, I would love to do a version of that where we source really interesting fruits, and do it in a way at the Awan store where people can come in and have the same experience, they can have fresh fruit cut in front of them.
What are your favorite places in LA?
I’m a big advocate for exercising, so Runyon Canyon I think is a beautiful way to not have to drive very far to feel what it’s like to be in LA nature, but also an amazing view and get a great workout in. I love playing pickup basketball games in local basketball courts like Pan Pacific, or some of the ones on Crenshaw. Hanging out with friends, I love doing that… The galleries: the Broad Museum, LACMA…fantastic. Going to parts of Malibu and going to the beach is a great way to decompress myself, put my phone in airplane mode and switch off for a little bit, which is a rare thing to do.
What is the most rewarding part about being a business owner?
There are a lot of opportunities when you’re working for someone else, where you can curate and experience their product and have an impact on their business, but oftentimes it comes at a cost of stress.
There is something extremely liberating about being home, or being anywhere, having a thought, materializing that idea, developing it in your own time. Then, validating it by tasting it and feeling it. When you taste it, you have that child-like, day before Christmas experience where you’re like, “I can’t wait to share this with people and see if they feel the same way.” When you have your own business, you can’t blame anyone else, like the local County, there’s no excuse. Every business in the city is playing the same game, we all have to live under the same restrictions.
Being able to have complete creative freedom is something that I had never had before. I worked in restaurants before, and when I told them I wanted to put more Indonesian food on the menu, they said that it wasn’t a good idea, it wasn’t marketable, that no one knew what it was and that it was a risk. So I thought, if it’s presented in a certain way, people are going to enjoy it, so the only way you can do that, unless you work with a business owner that gives you that freedom, is to just do it yourself.
Also, know that there is a very good chance you might fail. Understand that failure is a part of the process and that you shouldn’t stop. It might be a reason why you need to adjust or strip yourself of your ego, “Maybe people aren’t ready right now for the experience I originally thought, maybe it’s going to take some time.” It’s very easy for me to critique other ice cream shops, but until you do it yourself and realize how difficult it is, you really can’t have an opinion. There’s a lot of things that other ice cream shops are doing way better than us.
Really?!
100%. Think about our menu offerings for instance — we only offer scoops. It took a while for people to be ok with it. We had a big amount of people asking, “Can I get this in a cone?”, “What do you mean you don’t have this flavor anymore?”, all these things that people are traditionally used to. But with those limitations, we’re able to focus on other parts of the business that we use as our strength and we do things that other ice cream shops can’t do. They can’t rotate their menu as much as we do, they can’t find an ingredient at the Farmers Market and put it on the menu the next day. It’s a whole process that has to go through the factory and supply chain.
Having a small business is a dream in America. That is part of the American Dream, to shoot your shot on one of the biggest markets in the world. Every major business started as a small business, and people forget that, look at Ben and Jerry’s. They started in an old gas station in Vermont, or look at the story of Halo Top and see the amount of times they almost went bankrupt. Once you’re ready to go down a very rocky, uncharted territory, you just have to go for it. As long as you’re willing to lose it all.
How does it make you feel to see people waiting in line and enjoying your ice cream as we speak?
We opened the business during winter. It was very grim at some points, very grim. There were days where we’d only sell two scoops of ice cream. We completely underestimated the location and our marketing budget. I also worked in restaurants, and it was the same thing. It was really quiet and really dead. Not because of things that you can control, but because people may have not heard of you, or they may have not read the LA Times. When you think about it, most ice cream shops are in high foot traffic areas. It’s about convenience because it’s a product that can melt. You kind of have to plan your day around it, it’s not something you can take to go and eat it at home later.
So, to have experienced the quiet times, and to now be sitting talking to you and seeing kids and couples getting out of their cars feels incredible. It validates a lot of the belief I have for the product and the experience. Especially given the location that we’re in… West Hollywood isn’t accessible. It’s not off a highway.
I’m excited for people that are coming now to show them how much better is going to get. Everything we’ve been doing has been made with one induction burner, one pot, and one ice cream machine. We don’t even have an oven or storage. Everything has been done at its base minimum.
What excites me is to see everyone get so excited about what we’re doing now. We hope to structure ourselves a bit more with financial backing and build our team, so I’m not juggling as much and I can focus more on the food and the experience. But it feels amazing, I grew up on the north shore of Sydney, in a suburb called Mount Colah. When I started cooking, if someone had told me that I was eventually going to start a business in LA, where people would drive an hour to come to try a scoop of this ice cream… there’s no way! I don’t take it for granted.
(At this point, Zen paused to congratulate a couple that waved to him as they walked back to their cars with cups of ice cream. The woman turned her hand around to show off an engagement ring.)
There’s something about food — we’re a part of their history now. These customers that walked away now were celebrating getting engaged.
We’ve had people come in that just graduated from college or to celebrate their birthdays with a scoop. There’s a huge responsibility, and it’s a challenge and a lot of stress, but the payoff is incredible. Not only can we make someone’s day better, but someone’s potentially going to look back in 5 years time, 10 years time, or even tomorrow and be like, “Remember that experience?” To be able to be a part of someone’s life in that way, I think, is so rewarding — and I know it sounds so soapy and cliché, but I don’t take it for granted. It’s a very intimate experience to feed someone, and you need to have a lot of trust. I understand the responsibility of how important that is, and I try to focus on how to improve and improve, hoping that people understand that is a great feeling for sure.
What is the future of Awan?
Future plan is to go as big as possible. At the moment, we’re so microfocused on the texture and the quality of the ice cream, that we’re only serving scoops. People haven’t expressed it, but we have plans on building a full menu and a full experience. From different kinds of toppings to different cones, to merch, milkshakes, to beverages, to handheld items.
All this time has been a concept for us to understand and nail the core of the base of the ice cream. We’re already testing out different products that we haven’t sold yet, like handheld items and novelties. Eventually, we’d like for people to have their own ice cream machine at home, where we can sell them the base, and if they have a fruit garden, they can make their own version of Awan at home. We’ve also been thinking on how we can create a thermo-insulated bag to carry pints, but design-forward enough that people can use it as a handbag to throw their car keys and go to the gym.
The one thing they don’t teach you when you become a chef is how to manage a business. I’m figuring that out as I go. I’ll preach this to anyone who’s going to work with me or ask me for advice: If you’re interested in being in the food business, know that it’s more than making a plate of food for someone.
For instance, ketchup or the hot sauce trend there is at the moment. People are starting to realize: “I know a recipe on how to make a better hot sauce, but I don’t know how to make a business plan out of it.” The real value of becoming a chef, and having more food knowledge is that everybody needs to eat. A lot of the traditional food systems have been the same way for so long, that I don’t think people are realizing how many opportunities there are for new upgrades to be made. I don’t think this answers your question, but I think it’s important to push these boundaries.
The way we’re doing it is very controlled, it’s almost like a pop-up. We know this can work on a mass scale, let’s figure out how to get it nationally, potentially globally. Let’s partner with the right people to do it. I think we could do it ourselves, but it would take longer.
For me, I romanticize the idea of having a flagship store in every major city. Also, potentially having walk-up windows in locations that may be very high rent, but have high foot traffic. The same way people feel when they walk into an Apple store, hopefully they’ll feel that when they walk into an Awan store and be drawn by the design, the architecture, the experience, the hospitality and the product. Then, if you haven’t tried it, when you do, you’d be like, “Ok, it makes sense”. There’s a very fine line of being gimmicky when the product isn’t that good and we see that a lot. But we’ve already taken care of the product, now we can elevate any other element of the experience. From the uniforms, to the way the light hits the countertop, to the merch.
A dream of mine would be to connect the Indonesian and American part directly, and have a store in Bali, or somewhere in Indonesia and open globally. It’s going to take some time to get there, but we’ll see.
If one or a handful of young Indonesian chefs see what we’re doing and inspires them to also do the same thing with Indonesian food in a different way, that’s the main thing for me. Without anybody creating new paths, people don’t want to take the risk of going on a new path. I’m going to hope that people look at what we’re doing and be like, “Oh, wow. I also want to cook Indonesian food.” All the Indonesian chefs that I know, including myself, up until a couple years ago were not cooking Indonesian food. They were cooking French, Japanese, Italian because those cuisines pay the most. If people are happy to pay $5, $10, $15 for a scoop of ice cream, they’d be happy to come to a tasting menu of Indonesian food, it just needs to be presented in a certain way. You can’t just expect people to pay the same price as a gelato overnight. There’s centuries of culture and education there, and there’s a huge responsibility to educate people on why we’re different, and why we think we should be on the same stage.
Hopefully, not just in Indonesia, but people in Mongolia, Kazakhstan or Finland, are looking at the way we approach things and say, “Oh, I can also use the same template, apply that to food that I had growing up, and not be ashamed of it.” If you were to tell someone a couple years ago, “Hey, let’s get vegan ice cream”, it would be a joke. Let alone Indonesian vegan ice cream. So, we own the fact that we’re different and lean into it. We’re different on purpose, we’re not trying to be different for the sake of being different. We’re trying to give people a new experience, and we believe that it’s the best that it can possibly be.
Hours:
Monday – Friday 3PM-10PM
Saturday and Sunday – 12PM-10PM
Address : 866 Huntley Dr, West Hollywood, CA 90069
Make sure to follow Awan on Instagram, and subscribe to the newsletter on the website to stay updated on their latest flavor releases!
Zen’s IG: @zendonesian
Tohm’s IG: @tohmifergan
I wanted to end this post by sharing this amazing recommendation list of Zen’s essential restaurants in Sydney!
