Ever since receiving Hospitality Investment World Culture Award in 2013, Tugu Hotels & Restaurants Group is continuing to embrace and preserve Indonesian culture in all of their properties including Tugu Kunstkring Paleis. This is why one can expect the establishment to be thick with the atmosphere of a bygone past.
Originally used to house Fine Arts Circle of the Dutch East Indies, an organisation that promoted the practice and the enthusiasm for the fine and decorative arts founded in 1902, Tugu Kunstkring Paleis retains the arty spirit with eclectic antique ornaments and paintings that are distributed around the domicile. As such, the establishment paints a nostalgic feeling of how the past may have looked like.
When it comes to dining, Tugu Kunstkring Paleis is essentially divided into two sections, which is labelled under The Pangeran Diponegoro Room and The World of Suzie Wong. The former is a spacious main dining room with a huge painting of Pangeran Diponegoro, which depicts his capture, as a backdrop. However, the imposing aura is toned down with straightforward and familiar Indonesian dishes, such as Ayam Setan and Tahoe Telor.
The World of Suzie Wong is an adjacent room for those who fancy casual drink and light bites over conversation instead. Inspired by the famous novel and film about love story between Suzie Wong and an English painter, the dimly lit room is decorated with giant red lanterns, a rickshaw and see through oriental partition screens.
But to take things up a few notch, one can also opt to dine in one of their private rooms instead. Here, you and your company will be attended closely by waiters dressed in traditional attire. A little wonder why a visit to Tugu Kunstkring Paleis feels like a brief time travel to another era.