HENSHIN
The Westin Jakarta
Henshin, the Japanese-Peruvian restaurant and rooftop bar at The Westin Jakarta, occupies the top three floors of Gama Tower in Jakarta's Kuningan business district. The Westin takes up the 50th to 69th floors of the tower, and when the hotel opened in August 2016 it was the tallest hotel in Indonesia. Henshin opened in 2017 on the 67th to 69th floors, with a bar and lounge, an alfresco rooftop bar, a fine-dining restaurant and private dining rooms overlooking the city. Henshin means "transformation" in Japanese. Silverfox Studios designed the interiors across all three floors and the arrival tunnel that leads to them.
Guests reach Henshin through a hidden entrance that opens into a long, narrow tunnel leading to a private lift up to the 67th floor. The tunnel is lined with a repeating sequence of white-lit, angled frames that narrow towards the Henshin sign at its end, reflected in a dark, polished floor.
Henshin serves Nikkei cuisine, which combines Japanese technique with Peruvian ingredients and flavours. Nikkei is the term for Japanese emigrants and their descendants. In Peru, the first group of Japanese immigrants arrived on 3 April 1899, when the Sakura Maru docked at the port of Callao with 790 passengers. Their communities shaped a cuisine that brought Japanese methods to Peru's produce and seafood.
Henshin opened under chef Hajime Kasuga, a third-generation Japanese descendant in Peru and a specialist in Nikkei cuisine. Kasuga has worked in kitchens for more than 25 years, opened his first restaurant, Hanzo, in 2005, and advises restaurants internationally on Nikkei cooking.
The interiors are built on two Japanese references: bingata and sake barrels.
Bingata is a traditional dyed cloth from Okinawa. The name combines "bin", meaning colour, and "gata", meaning pattern. The craft dates from the Ryukyu Kingdom period, around the 14th century, when Okinawa saw an influx of foreign goods and manufacturing techniques, and it is believed to have developed as a synthesis of Indian, Chinese and Javanese dyeing processes. Bingata was worn by the royal court. Its kimonos carried images of nature, such as fish, water and flowers, stencilled with dyes made from bark, berries and roots.
The second reference is the sake barrel. In Japan, sake brewers donate decorative barrels, known as kazaridaru, to Shinto shrines. Brewers also supply the sake that shrines use for ceremonies and festivals, and the barrels on display, which are empty, are offered alongside it.
The 67th floor holds the bar and lounge. The bar counter is clad in natural stone, and the indoor lounge, lit by floor lamps and set around a stone niche, opens directly onto the rooftop terrace. Outside, the alfresco bar continues the stone cladding beneath an illuminated counter top, with lounge seating along a glass balustrade overlooking the Jakarta skyline.
The 68th floor is the main dining room, arranged around an open kitchen counter and lined with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across the city. A feature staircase with lit treads and glass balustrades rises from the dining room to the floor above, beside a glass-floored opening. Walls and columns are clad in faceted, triangular mirror panels, and backlit amber panels carry swirling red line patterns above the kitchen counter, whose front is finished in a large-scale monochrome pattern. A gold patterned carpet runs beneath dark leather dining chairs and stone-topped tables along the windows.
The staircase arrives on the 69th floor at a display of sake barrels. Beyond it, the sake display is built from translucent barrel forms lit blue from within, set against shelves of sake bottles and furnished with red-orange leather armchairs. A large-scale bingata pattern is printed across the ceiling, and along the windows a double-height opening looks down the staircase to the window tables on the 68th floor.
The rest of the floor is given over to dining and private dining. A dining area is laid with a colourful printed carpet in the bingata palette, set with dark leather chairs against views over Jakarta, alongside private dining rooms, including one arranged around a long table.
