Loloan Lobby Bar

The name reaches back to a bar built in Petitenget, on the Bali coast, in 2004, and the house cocktail keeps the thread alive: Ingat Loloan Bali, gin sharpened with fresh turmeric, wildflower honey, tamarind, mint, and grapefruit, poured as a remembrance of that original. Loloan Lobby Bar carries the memory into Uptown Waterloo, a few steps off the King Street spine on Princess Street West — a Southeast Asian kitchen working behind the polish of a hotel-style lobby bar. It asks to be read two ways at once: as a cocktail lounge, and as a dining room with serious intent behind the curry.

The kitchen makes its case on the à la carte mains. Bpet Massaman sets roasted Muscovy duck breast against a massaman curry with longan, crushed peanuts, an apple-pear salad, and a claypot of rice and barley. Gaeng Luang is the seafood statement: roasted black cod in a Southern Thai yellow curry with tiger shrimp, clams, yu choy, and lumpfish caviar over jasmine rice. Venison Adobo runs roasted striploin through an adobo demi-glace with a parsnip-and-pomme purée, berry compote, sweet-potato shoestrings, and coconut-vinegar pickled radishes. Even the vegetarian plate is built to hold the table: Gudeg, young jackfruit slow-cooked in coconut and dark palm sugar, arrives with an Earl Grey tea egg, sambal krecek, tempeh goreng, and bok choy. To start, Khao Soi Khun Yai folds Northern Thai curry and flat egg noodles into black cardamom, pickled mustard greens, and roasted dry-chili oil.

Read the other way, Loloan runs like a proper cocktail bar, and the drinks are the front door. Ingat Loloan Bali leads a signature list that treats the Southeast Asian pantry — turmeric, tamarind, palm sugar, sambal — as bar ingredients as much as kitchen ones, so the glass and the plate speak the same language. A cocktail can stand in for a first course here, and often does. The lobby-bar framing is not decoration. The long bar, the late hours, the hotel polish: these are what a guest meets first, and the kitchen reveals itself second.

The week is built to give the bar its own occasions. Thursday brings a rotating drinking-food feature, a snack board made for the glass — kamote chips, shellfish in Jimbaran sambal, beef sate with peanut sauce. Sunday turns over to oysters: PEI shells served fresh, grilled, baked, dropped into a red-curry vodka shot, or stacked by the dozen with prosecco and nam jim. Weekends add a tasting menu for tables that want the kitchen to drive, and from five to six, Monday through Thursday, an early-bird prix fixe — three courses, fifty-eight dollars, or seventy-eight with pairings — opens a full dinner on a weeknight budget. Its courses come from the same kitchen as the full carte, so the early seating trades nothing on the cooking.

Loloan prices itself at the top of the uptown scale, and the lineage explains the confidence. It opened in 2018 as a sister restaurant to Bhima's Warung, Waterloo's long-running Southeast Asian dining room, and it works the same broad map: Malaysian, Thai, Laotian, and Indonesian. The lobby-bar concept, and the name, trace to that first Loloan on the Bali coast, which is why the place reads less like a themed bar than like a transplanted memory — hotel polish and Southeast Asian cooking arriving together rather than bolted on.

How the evening goes depends on the night. Early in the week, it is a quiet three-course dinner before six; later, the lounge stretches toward one in the morning, the kitchen narrowing to oysters and drinking food while the cocktails carry the late hours. Through all of it, the first drink is still the one named for Bali — a small act of remembering, poured before the curry arrives.