In the Land of the Hornbills

In October 2025, Serumpun Sarawak returned to the rainforest. After the urban industrial-creative setting of Seaside Studio CASO in Osaka two months earlier, the third chapter of the movement was staged within Gunung Mulu National Park — Sarawak’s UNESCO World Heritage rainforest, home to the longest cave system in Southeast Asia, and the ancestral land of several of the indigenous communities whose cuisine the wider arc honours.

What Mulu argued through siting alone was straightforward. Osaka had answered the question of whether the cuisine could hold cultural ground on the international stage. Mulu answered a different question, and a more important one: whether the cuisine could return to the land that grew it without the mediation of a venue, a stage, or a city. The answer was the chapter itself.

Palate Asia carried the work on 23 October 2025 under the title In The Land Of The Hornbills: Experiencing Serumpun Sarawak In Mulu — the centre of the Mulu coverage, and one of the most considered single pieces in the wider Serumpun archive.

Mulu — the setting

Gunung Mulu National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site of exceptional standing — recognised for its biodiversity, its limestone karst formations, and the cultural heritage of the Penan, Berawan, Tring, and other indigenous communities whose ancestral landscape it remains. Siting Serumpun within Mulu was not theatrical. It was structural. The cuisine the wider arc honours — Iban, Bidayuh, Orang Ulu, Penan, and the broader thirty-four — is rainforest cuisine. Returning it to Mulu was the most architecturally honest move I could make in the founding year.

The hornbill — Sarawak’s state emblem and one of the most culturally resonant species in the Bornean rainforest — gave the chapter its title. In the Land of the Hornbills is the phrase by which Sarawak is known across the region, and Palate Asia’s choice to carry the chapter under it placed the work inside its cultural-geographic frame without further explanation.

We Are Nature, Nature Is Us

The Mulu chapter ran across 2 – 4 October 2025 at Mulu Marriott Resort & Spa, on the edge of the UNESCO-listed national park. The theme — We Are Nature, Nature Is Us — Everything is Everything — held the work at conservation standing without surfacing the conservation-and-cuisine relationship as marketing. I worked alongside indigenous-community partners — The Tuyang Initiative, CHASS, Earthlings Coffee Workshop, Dayak Lore, and Penan artisans — whose presence carried the chapter at the cultural-protocol standard the rainforest itself asked for.

Serumpun Sarawak’s return to Mulu is symbolic — it brings the world home to Sarawak’s living heritage. — Sharzede Datu Haji Salleh Askor · Chief Executive Officer, Sarawak Tourism Board

The discipline the rainforest asked for

Mulu is reachable only by plane or by river. There is no road. The monsoon held the chapter at its mercy — each morning began with whether the plane could land, and the menu was pivoted before service to match what the day permitted. Hyper-localism in Mulu was not a choice we made; it was the working condition the rainforest set. Mulu Marriott was chosen in part because ninety-five per cent of its staff are from the Baram region — the chapter could be carried by hands that already knew the ground.

When the Baram river ran high, we could not forage for Tekuyung — the river snails that have fed the Baram communities for many generations. We sought alternatives from the land and the riverbanks, with the crocodiles as the reminder that the rainforest set the terms, not us. We pivoted, the dish pivoted, and the discipline held.

The Tuak for the Mulu chapter was brewed by the villagers next to the Mulu Marriott — the true Baram brew, presented to our guests by the hands that had carried the recipe for generations. We were fortunate to be received as guests of their craft.

Mulu is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We coordinated closely with the Forestry and Park Department at every step — field expeditions, the protocols of access, and the gathering of knowledge from the indigenous communities. Within the site itself we could only forage from the hotel-designated land: fallen flora, seeds, the leaves and barks the rainforest had already let go. The constraint was the discipline. The discipline was the cuisine.

We were fortunate that our guide was Ismail, chief elder of the Penan people — a generous teacher whose English allowed the rainforest’s knowledge to cross. Through him we learned the indigenous methods of curing and fermentation, the survival foraging the Penan turn to when hunting is scarce, how to read a forest for navigation, the first-aid that medicinal plants carry, and the therapeutic properties of edible herbs and fruit. Several of those teachings travelled forward into the Osaka dishes — the chapter held knowledge older than itself.

The Osaka–Mulu contrast

The contrast between Osaka (August 2025) and Mulu (October 2025) is the spine of the wider arc, and it deserves to be surfaced plainly.

In Osaka, the cuisine was staged within a Japanese industrial-creative venue, alongside the World Expo, in a city of the highest gastronomic confidence. In Mulu, the cuisine was staged within the Sarawak rainforest, alongside the limestone caves and the canopy, in the company of the communities whose ancestral land it remains. Two months apart. The same cuisine. Two settings — neither lessened by the other; each deepened by its counterpart.

Osaka was the international debut. Mulu was the homecoming. The arc only works because both were attempted in the same year.

What carried forward

After Mulu, the architecture moved towards its concluding chapter — the Kuching Finale in April 2026, returning the movement to Sarawak’s capital and the institutional heart of its UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy designation. If Osaka was the debut and Mulu was the homecoming, the Kuching Finale is the return — to the city that carries Sarawak’s cultural-administrative weight, in the year that closes the founding cycle.

Mulu does not lessen the Kuching chapter that follows. It complicates it — and through that complication, deepens it.

See the chapter

The recorded story of the Mulu chapter — the rainforest setting, the indigenous-community partners, the service held within Gunung Mulu National Park — lives on the Serumpun Sarawak channel.

Mulu, October 2025 — Stories highlight →

Highlights by Atlas Collective.