When I ask people where to go in Pererenan, Shelter keeps coming up. Restaurant owners, long-term residents, first-time visitors, I've heard too many people telling me to try it, to go experience the Mediterranean food. Even Álvaro from Origen, just down the street, told me: "Shelter is one of the restaurants that is constantly busy along the street here."
So one afternoon I sat down with Stephen Moore, Steve, as everyone calls him, co-owner of Shelter Pererenan, Hut Cafe in Seminyak, and Nalu Ice Cream in Canggu. And somewhere in the middle of our conversation, he told me this story: he was recently on holiday in Rajasthan, deep in the Indian countryside, in the middle of a tiger safari. Three English guys walked into the resort restaurant. One of them mentioned he'd been to Bali two months earlier. Found this restaurant. Said it was his favourite meal he'd had in years. And that restaurant was Shelter.
The deeper I got into the conversation with Steve, the more I understood that for him, being a chef was never really just about the cooking. "Cooking is the easy part," he told me. "That's 10% of it. It's the staff, it's the opening hours, it's the banjar, it's the consistency, it's the toilet rolls, it's the deliveries, it's the electricity." With this mindset, when a mutual friend reached out and offered him the chance to build a restaurant together, the iconic Shelter was born.
The hunger to learn, even when it's hard
Steve grew up in Colchester, England, in a household where food was everything. His mum cooked every single day, pies, cakes, sausage rolls, pastries, and the family sat down together every night. His father, as English as they come, somehow taught himself Cantonese cooking, spending three days preparing a 20-dish banquet once a month for family and friends.
"It was a very nice environment to be around," Steve says. By the time he was in primary school and his teacher had him making cupcakes, it was already decided. He wanted to be a chef.
"At primary school, the teacher asked me to cook. We did a cooking lesson and the teacher said, right, we're going to make cupcakes. For some reason, I loved it. And all through school, all through my childhood, I wanted to be a chef."
He enrolled in his local technical college in Colchester, completed two years of City and Guilds training, then an advanced diploma in professional cookery, one of only a handful of colleges in Great Britain offering it at the time. Part of the program meant going overseas for industrial placement. He went to the South of France first, cooking in a small restaurant, going to the market every day. Then Switzerland. And that's where things got hard.
"We were very homesick. No one could speak English, and we were on the phone every night calling our mums, crying, wanting to come home." His friend's mum told him to come home if he didn't like it. His mum told him to stick at it. The next morning, his friend was gone. Steve stayed.
"I would have got on the next plane out of there because I felt so shit. But I stayed, and then the guys in the kitchen embraced me and took me under their wing. They saw that I had a little bit of steel, that I didn't quit."
Building the toolkit across every experience
What followed was 36 years, and counting, of collecting. Small restaurants, famous restaurants, Michelin-starred kitchens, hotels, catering companies. Stints in London, Australia, India, and eventually Bali in 2010, back when the island's dining scene was a handful of beach clubs, the Oberoi, Ku De Ta, and old-school French spots.
"I've been very diverse in my jobs," he says.
"They've all guided me in certain ways in my career. A little bit of technique in something, a dish somewhere, an ingredient. And travel, seeing different cuisines and different cultures has rounded and shaped my career completely."
Two people shaped his understanding of hospitality specifically. Adrian Zecha, one of the key figures behind Aman Resorts, who he worked with in India. And Morris Tazzini in Australia, who ran Icebergs. "It was basically about making people feel so comfortable in your restaurant that they feel like they're at home. It's not just about the food or the service, it's every little detail. If you were to invite friends to your house, how would you make them feel? You wouldn't have a dirty toilet. You're basically inviting people into your house every day. That's how I look at it."
When opportunity came, he was ready to catch it
COVID shut a lot of things down. Steve lost his job at Ku De Ta. A mutual friend, who would later become his business partner, asked him if he could cook dinner every night at his villa. He said yes.
"He had an amazing villa, beautiful kitchen, wood oven, and he's Lebanese. He said, can you cook my family recipes? I never cooked Middle Eastern food before, but I learned a little bit about it in Sydney from a Lebanese colleague who used to cook us food once a week." He said. Little did he know, two of the guests at one of those dinners are now his business partners. They'd been behind the original Shelter Cafe in Seminyak since 2016, closed it during COVID, and wanted to reopen it in Pererenan. They came to Steve and asked if he could help with the cafe.
He agreed, and started consulting. Wrote a breakfast menu, a lunch menu. It was going to be casual and simple. Then one of his business partners asked about dinners. Steve said the kitchen couldn't handle it, but he had another idea. He'd seen an outdoor kitchen concept in Mexico. There was a garden going unused. "Why don't we do this really cool kitchen in the garden so when people walk in, they see the people in action?"
They built it. Three weeks from opening, his other business partner wanted to use the new outdoor kitchen for his birthday, wanted Steve to cook the same food from the villa dinners. "So I cooked the dinner and we sat there at the end of the night and I said, man, this is beautiful. Why are we doing a cafe? We should do a proper restaurant." Three weeks out, he rewrote the entire menu. They opened as a restaurant. "And then from day one, we just went zero to a hundred."
Hut followed a year later when they had the chance to reopen the original Shelter Cafe in Seminyak under a new name, just to keep the two distinct. Then a space came up in Batu Bolong where Nalu Bowls had been. "Let's do a cool ice cream concept," Steve said. Nostalgic flavors, lemon meringue pie, chocolate cookies. Nalu Ice Cream, an offshoot of Ettore Gelato, was born.
The entrepreneurial gap, what he wishes he knew
For all the experience he built across 36 years, Steve is candid about one gap: business.
"Going back to my third year at technical college, I wish I'd learned about the ins and outs of business. I'm there carving flowers out of mushrooms and carrots. You don't use that ever. It's amazing, but it doesn't teach you how to run a business. That little bit of knowledge at the beginning is very, very powerful."
It's something he thinks about a lot when he watches talented chefs struggle.
"It's amazing, it's an incredible amount of chefs, but a lot of them go broke. At the end of the day, I can make an incredible dish, but if it doesn't make money, there's no point."
He's made peace with the juggling act, food cost, menu consistency, margin management, all of it running alongside the actual cooking. And he's direct about what makes or breaks a restaurant here. "Consistency. There's no point in me doing dishes or cooking food that my guys can't replicate." He pauses. "It's a million little things done well and consistently. It's not one thing, it's an immense amount of moving parts."
Passing the entrepreneurial hunger to the next generation
When a member of his kitchen team is making mistakes around food wastage, Steve walks over and throws money in the bin. Actual money.
"And they're like, that's crazy. I said, why is it crazy? It's the same thing. You've given them an example, a visualization of what that costs. To them, it's half a bunch of parsley. But it may cost 10,000 rupiah. If you physically put that money in the bin, then they understand."
His executive chef Fran leads this work day-to-day, teaching the kitchen team about waste and spoilage, and about being what Steve calls "a really good business chef." "Because without them understanding that," he says plainly, "we don't have a business."
The goal isn't just a well-run kitchen. It's people who leave Shelter better than when they arrived. "I want it to give them the skills and confidence to push forward in their own careers." He's watched Bali's hospitality scene go from almost nothing to world class in the time he's been here, and he believes the next generation of people coming up through it deserves to understand the full picture, not just the craft, but everything behind it that keeps the lights on.
Never stops learning, the fire cooking
Even now, 36 years in and three venues running, Steve is still finding new things to be a student of. He started following Francis Mallmann on social media, the Argentine chef who appeared in season 3 of Chef's Table on Netflix, famous for cooking everything over open fire in Patagonia. "I thought, wow, this is an incredible way of cooking." The algorithm then surfaced Charly Pretet, a fire-cooking specialist from Terra Firma. Steve reached out, invited him to Shelter when he was passing through Bali, and they hit it off.
"He flies around the world doing these crazy events, cooking for 80 to 800 people, everything over fire." When Steve started doing it himself with his chefs, the humility came fast. "We were like, shit, this is harder than it looks. It's constantly looking after the flames and the heat. I thought it was about mad recipes and techniques, but it's not. It's literally learning how the fire and the coals and the ash and the heat work. A 10-hour cook, you're there all day."
It became the foundation for one of Shelter's fire cooking events with Charly, more educational, showing the skill involved and how fire gets used in different ways. And if you ask Steve whether he'd ever want to teach in a more formal setting, a technical college, a regular classroom, he shakes his head. "I teach, but in a restaurant environment. I wouldn't go to a technical college every Monday to Friday. I would do events, I get bored otherwise."
The next chapter for Shelter is already in motion: a new location in Uluwatu, more ice cream stores, an eye on overseas expansion. The boy from Colchester who stayed in Switzerland when his friend went home, who cooked Lebanese food he has never cooked before, who rewrote a whole menu three weeks from opening, is still doing exactly what he's always done. Saying yes to the hard thing, figuring it out, and making sure the people around him come along for it.
"Just creating wonderful memories," he says. "That's it."
