Cuca, an agent of change.

Every month a rotating team from Cuca joins efforts with our friends from SungaiWatch to tackle the critical situation our water ways face. Led by one our senior managers, staff and interns spend the morning cleaning Bali’s mangroves and the afternoon sharing a well-deserved lunch while reflecting on plastic pollution and on what each of us can do to make a change. These are our team’s thoughts and wishes for a brighter future, one where the rivers flow clear and free. 

The happier the chicken, the better the egg. The better the egg, the tastier the food.

Oh, we love eggs! But not all eggs. We love really good eggs, and it has kind of become an obsession. Actually, they are quite possibly our favorite ingredient. But sadly, we have come to learn that not all eggs are created equal.

Essential to a great kitchen, eggs are a staple in baking, fundamental for a good old fashion breakfast and the easiest solution to a quick meal. They can be found in all sorts of food, and maybe that’s the problem. High demand always encourages speed and production over health, and the quality of the eggs we consume today is very different from that of the good old times.

You can basically separate eggs into two categories: one is packed with protein, full of healthy omega 3 fatty acids and nutrients, and the other is basically an imposter containing less than half of the nutritional value and full of things that we probably should not be eating. Now, it’s nice to pass by a farm and see a sign “EGGS FOR SALE”, grab a dozen and problem solved, but that is not practical for a business going through a few hundred a week. So, what’s the solution? That was the same question we were wondering until we recently began talking to the fantastic people from the NGO Animals Don't Speak Human, who opened our eyes to the extraordinary contrast between battery-caged and cage-free chickens. Hens raised in battery cages spend their whole lives in tight, terrible circumstances, unable to spread their wings and walk freely and we couldn’t let that be part of Cuca’s food story—so with this NGO’s guidance, we scrambled to make a change.

We learned that unlike batter-caged chickens, cage-free hens have the space to walk around and behave naturally like birds, laying in nests as well as selecting the food they prefer like wild flowers, grass, seeds and insects. This transforms the yolk into a rich, creamy custard, the white into a magical firm protein-packed jelly, and the shell into a hard impenetrable force unlike its opposition.

We have always believed that the food we serve in Cuca must be primarily nutritious, so much so that we did not serve eggs in any form for the first few years, just because, quite simply, they were trash. The result of treating chickens as machinery, their food as performance fuel and the product as a commercial good focused not on flavor or nutrition but volume and uniformity, is unsurprisingly a smelly, dirty, unthinkable food source in the shape of an egg.

If we are not willing to eat them ourselves, we would never serve them to a customer. With that said, Cuca is excited to announce we are using only cage-free eggs in all our dishes. Here’s to happier chickens, better eggs, and tastier food!🥂 🐥🥚😋

Adventure Awaits!

We grew up with the most incredible playgrounds as kids in Canada and Spain. Giant timber castles to climb and run through encouraging creativity, imagination and personality. Today, sadly, that has all changed and what you normally get are colorful plastic molds that are merely copied and pasted with the same boring stuff: a slide… a swing… a tick-the-box and “we are done” approach to fulfilling the obligation to kids.

Well… that’s not our style in Cuca and we wanted something that would make kids lose their minds. Something that was a throwback to the good old days of fun and excitement, where the ideas and obstacles are limited only based on your imagination.

The problem is that that requires thought, time and work, and nobody was interested to help us do something different. The proposals we received were so boring and so pathetic that we ended up losing 3 different deposits to avoid settling for mediocracy. Through the years, we continued to push forward to find incredible. We wanted a structure that felt part of the tropical forest, something that blended into the beautiful environment we are in and gave the feeling of camping, adventure and nature.

After 13 months and too many idiots to count, finally we are days away from revealing our new playground in Cuca. Now… there will be a few kids who hit the deck, a few who scratch a knee, a few who bang an elbow, but all will run mentally towards it, drawn to the raw natural excitement and unbeatable adventure that awaits!