JAKARTA - Lunch comes fast at the Balkan Shawarma franchise in Senopati, part of South Jakarta’s gastronomy belt. The menu carries words that land in tropical Indonesia with, perhaps, a few raised eyebrows from the locals. It reads like ćevapi, Serbian burger, sarma, papanași.
The smell arrives before anything else, something smoky and spiced and faintly herby, nothing quite like the shawarma joints that line the surrounding streets. That’s Balkan fast food in the tropics, a culinary dispatch from the other side of the world, sitting on a Jakarta street like it was always meant to be here.
The name itself is a hybrid. Shawarma is Middle Eastern and Ottoman-derived street food, but Balkan Shawarma uses the wrap-and-pita format as a vehicle for Balkan spices and Eastern European grilled-meat traditions.
The man behind all of it is Marius A. Lukman, a born-Romanian, raised-Italian, and if the paperwork is smooth, soon-to-be Indonesian.
“Terima kasih”, an Indonesian word for “thank you,” he says when praised for his fluency, which is hardly surprising for someone who’s spent years in the archipelago.
Marius’ Story
There is the most original question that follows everyone living abroad and Marius has heard it enough times that it has become a bit of a running joke. How come Indonesia? He grins and concedes that the answer is longer than the question deserves.
“I met this special person 14 years ago,” he says. “I met someone special in one of my hostels in Rome. And then that someone special became part of my life today. My son was born in Bali … and (my) life became the life I am now in Indonesia.”
He grew up in Făgăraș, a small city in the Transylvania region of central Romania, tucked at the foot of the Făgăraș Mountains. He describes it as “an Indonesian village with ninety percent of the people removed” and the electricity being cut off at six in the evening.
Nicolae Ceaușescu, who ruled Romania from 1965 until his execution on Christmas Day 1989, spent the 1980s forcing through harsh austerity to repay Romania’s foreign debt, compressing imports and pushing exports while ordinary Romanians endured rationing, shortages, and cuts to electricity and heating.
That was the kind of Romania, or rather, the Socialist Republic of Romania, that Marius was born into. After 1989, when the regime collapsed, many Romanians left for Italy, Spain, Ireland, and other European destinations. The Romanian diaspora is now one of the largest in the world relative to population, with some estimates putting it at around 5.6 million to 5.7 million people. Italy alone hosts just over one million Romanian citizens.
His mother met someone, and at fourteen he followed her to Italy. He calls this genetic. The *very same *small window, opening up and pulling someone somewhere they never planned to go, and he would spend the next two decades building a life in tourism there before the pattern repeated itself in a hostel in the Italian capital of Rome in 2013 or 2014, where he met an Indonesian woman who would eventually become his wife.
“To be honest with you,” he says, “I never wanted to settle myself in Southeast Asia, kind of. But that's how everything started.”
He arrived in Indonesia a few years later. Jakarta came first, and with it an Italian restaurant that lasted until the city got to him. “I was shell-shocked by that. Big city, stress, chaos, traffic, smoke, CO2... I was like, ‘Oh, this is not what I want from life.’”
Marius then sold up and moved to Bali, but as he stood in the middle of the island’s thriving tourist scene, something clarified. “I'm Romanian at the end of the day. I’m from the Balkan. I have something that no one else ever tried, heard, tasted, watched, felt in a tropical island with destinations like Bali. You know something? Let me create a product that no one ever heard of.”
The product was mici, the Romanian grilled minced-meat rolls, served alongside ćevapčići, its Bosnian-Serbian cousin. He started with a small Balkan food outlet in Seminyak’s party strip and within two years, the place had made national television in Romania and gone viral in Bucharest and his hometown Făgăraș. By 2019, they were running an 800-square-metre restaurant with live music.
Then, COVID-19 came and the entire world was shut down. Bali’s economy contracted by 9.31 percent in 2020, the deepest provincial contraction in Indonesia, as the island fell from more than 6.2 million foreign tourist visits in 2019 to just 51 direct foreign tourist arrivals in 2021. Bali’s provincial government has said more than 54% of the island’s economy depends on tourism, so in Seminyak and Kuta, hotels, restaurants, and shops shut their doors as international travel stopped almost overnight.
“We kind of have to... you know what happened, two years we shut down everything.”
What came out from that reset is Balkan Shawarma as it operates today, a franchise under PT Balkan Gourmet Group, with outlets across Jakarta, Bali, and Surabaya. On its official website, the company presents the brand as a partnership-based business, listing locations including Senopati, Kemang, Ungasan, Teuku Umar, Gading Serpong, BSD, and Surabaya.
The idealistic Bali chef has made room for something more deliberate. Marius now manages 155 employees and more than 15 managers. “Same root, same flavor, same taste, same everything,” he says, “with a little bit of management and a bit of, you know, all that business side added to it.”
Striving for Authenticity, 10,000 Kilometres from Home
How do you maintain authenticity, 10,000 kilometers away from home?
To Marius, the answer is acceptance. “What survives is what’s accepted,” he says. He has applied this thinking to his food, his business, his whole approach to building something in a country he was not born in.
Chasing pure authenticity, he argues, is an ego trip and ego does not pay the bills. “So I put on the table everything that my mother fed me... and there is one thing that I have to understand: if I make it too (authentic), I’m not going to get accepted.”
“That’s how the (human) philosophy of life is. So I created as authentic as I can, but I have to twist it with your acceptance. In order for you to accept me, I have to put my guard down a little bit,” he says.
The ćevapi, finger-shaped minced meat rolls central to Bosnian and Serbian cooking, are made here with beef and lamb fat, leaning Bosnian in technique but Romanian-Serbian in spirit. “Since I was closer to Vojvodina, which is Serbia nowadays, it will be more like a Romanian-Serbian style,” he says. “Because we are neighbors. Being neighbors, we kind of interfere and we inspire each other quite some time from wordings, language, food, music.”
Vojvodina is an autonomous province in northern Serbia that borders Romania, and its cuisine reflects centuries of Serbian, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, Croatian, and other regional influences.
Research published in Sustainability in 2022 described Vojvodina’s gastronomic heritage as deeply multiethnic and noted that the food traditions of Vojvodina’s Romanian minority include distinctive soups, porridges, and household techniques shaped by the region’s overlapping Serbian, Romanian, Hungarian, Slovak, and other influences.
The sarmale, stuffed cabbage rolls that sit alongside mici as one of Romania’s most recognisable home dishes, are made entirely with imported New Zealand beef. No smoked costiță de porc and no pork lard, the kind of fat that kept generations of Balkan families alive through four months of winter darkness.
Marius explains, “In the Balkans and Romania, it’s a very tricky country because in the wintertime, there are no vegetables available in the country. The only way the people survived was with lard, pork lard, beef tallow. Nothing else.”
Indonesia’s Halal Product Assurance regime requires halal certification for food and beverage products, but enforcement is staged. Medium and large F&B businesses have been required to hold halal certification since October 18, 2024, while micro and small enterprises were given until October 17, 2026. Certification is processed through BPJPH’s SIHALAL system, with inspection by an LPH and halal determination involving the MUI. So then, Marius had to learn to adapt the menu.
The pljeskavica, or the Serbian burger, is organised around the meat where a thick, well-spiced beef patty is the whole point of the thing. “The VIP in our burger is the meat,” he says. “Let the meat be the VIP.” Type 00 flour for the bun, kept simple so it does not compete.
There are some dishes that he simply will not touch. The papanași, fried Romanian doughnuts served with sour cream and jam, are made the way his mother made them. Same with the palačinka, the thin crêpes he grew up calling clătite, carrying the fingerprint of the Austro-Hungarian table that shaped food across Transylvania, Croatia, and beyond. “Those things you cannot find anywhere,” he says.
Six years of deciding where to hold and where to give ground. He is impatient with chefs who refuse to meet their market. According to Andrew Ryan Sinaga, CEO of Foodizz, Foodizz’s research found that around 90 percent of beginner culinary entrepreneurs fail, often because they lack business knowledge rather than capital or networks.
During the pandemic, restaurant operators across Indonesia faced repeated restrictions, collapsed dine-in traffic, and severe pressure on cash flow. Media reports citing PHRI (Indonesian Hotel and Restaurant Association) officials put the number of permanently closed restaurants in Jabodetabek at around 1,500 during the pandemic.
“I am authentic as far as I decide and as far as I’m accepted,” he says. “I don’t want to be authentic at the price of firing my 155 employees right now.”
Becoming an Indonesian
Marius mentions his citizenship application the way someone might mention getting a haircut. He is in the process and he expects it to come through.
Under Law No. 12 of 2006 on Indonesian citizenship, a foreign citizen legally married to an Indonesian may obtain Indonesian citizenship by declaration under Article 19 after residing in Indonesia for at least five consecutive years or ten non-consecutive years, provided the acquisition does not result in dual citizenship.
Separately, Article 9 sets the ordinary naturalization requirements, including Indonesian-language ability, acceptance of Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution, lawful income, good health, and no serious criminal conviction. Government fees also differ by route: the listed fee is IDR 1,000,000 for citizenship based on marriage and IDR 50,000,000 for ordinary foreign-national naturalization.
Because Indonesian law generally does not permit adult dual citizenship, Marius would need to resolve his European citizenships as part of the process.
Marius, who has been in the country for roughly a decade, speaks Indonesian with the ease of someone who stopped translating in their head a long time ago, slipping between English and Indonesian mid-sentence the way a person does when a language has fully settled in them. “Terima kasih,” he says again at one point, without breaking stride. Earlier in the conversation he had called himself a *korban, *a victim, of Indonesia, laughing as he said it.
He has processed all his own immigration documents throughout his time here, every KITAS and KITAP renewal, without an agent. “I find it very easy, very fair,” he says. “I could easily argue with anyone if they think otherwise.”
The public response to his citizenship announcement surprised him. He posted about it online with an Australian friend and the reaction from Indonesians was largely negative. “Jangan,” people wrote and told him not to give his passport away. He found it genuinely sad. “I’m going to become Indonesian just to prove a point to all these Indonesians that it’s always a privilege to have a new passport and a new life in a new country."”
There is a practical dimension too. Balkan Shawarma currently runs as a PT PMA, a Foreign Investment Limited Liability Company, structured under Law No. 25 of 2007 on Investment, which defines foreign investment as capital placed by foreign investors to operate a business within Indonesian territory. A PT PMA can carry additional compliance requirements and operating restrictions compared to a fully local company.
As a soon-to-be Indonesian citizen, Marius says he expects he could eventually simplify parts of the corporate structure, although any restructuring would still depend on licensing, ownership, tax, and investment rules. “Things are going to be way much easier in business as an Indonesian,” he says.
Beyond that, there is the IPO. He wants to take PT Balkan Gourmet Group public on the IDX, the Indonesia Stock Exchange, by 2028 or 2029.
As of mid-2025, the IDX had 956 listed companies and ranked second in ASEAN by number of listed companies. A company going public must submit a registration statement to the OJK and a listing application to the IDX, and the IPO process typically takes several months. Recent F&B-related listings include Fore Coffee, which debuted on the IDX in April 2025.
“I’m trying to build my first IPO in Indonesia with a foreign investment company,” he says. “This is the most challenging and the hardest thing I’m building right now.”
He grew up in a Romanian city where the electricity went off at six in the evening, moved to Italy as a teenager, met his wife in a hostel in Rome, and has been building something in Indonesia ever since. Citizenship is the next step in a long sequence of windows opening and people walking through them.
“It's not about giving away my Italian or my Romanian passport,” he says. “It's about embracing a new change, a new challenge, a new part of my new life.”
And he’s excited about it.
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