Beyond the unorthodox style of dining, there’s so much more than meets the eye to Bambuddha – symbology and meaning is found every which way you look. The restaurant’s instantly recognisable logo depicts three ‘pirate buddhas’: a female, a transsexual and a male who, according to John Moon, show the diversity of human sexuality and represent tolerance, freedom and respect. Each buddha is a different colour, an homage to ‘God’s multitude of races and spiritual beliefs’, and they sit together at a bar – a visual rumination on the possibilities of where life could lead while individuals strive to reach peace and love – silently meditating on what John Moon dubbed ‘the White Light of Consciousness’: that is, the buddha that each of us once was when we were born and could be again.

Another important part of the Bambuddha story is family and John Moon had always dreamed of passing his cherished temple onto his son Jonjon Moon – who had worked at the restaurant since he was a teenager – when the time was right. In 2018, Jonjon, who holds a business degree from Oxford University, stepped into the role of ‘carer and guardian of the Bambuddha Grove Temple and her philosophy’, as John Moon wrote in the Black Sheep Tribe Bible. ‘I will remain present as ‘Chief’, ‘Spiritual Guide’ and an ‘Elder of the Black Sheep Tribe’, trusting my son to consult with me whenever the need may arise on his journey,’ his wise words continue.

The new custodian of Bambuddha sees his role as bringing a sustainable thread to the restaurant’s more hedonistic past. “My dad spent half of his life creating Bambuddha and making it beautiful,” Jonjon explains. “I’ve turned it into somewhere that retained all of the beauty, but continues to grow and endure.” The two men are both stubborn, Jonjon admits, and there have been periods of friction between them while the torch was passed from father to son, but there is no question that the legacy they have created is all the richer for it.

It was Jonjon who implemented the sharing-style menu at Bambuddha, partly inspired by an increase in culinary competition on the island but with a practical consideration too. “I noticed there was always a bottleneck between starters and mains,” he says. “That was limiting our covers, so we met with the chef and immediately came up with the sharing concept.” The results were instant – a tapas-inspired way of eating, where food became a social event, the chance to try something new or share a few of your staunch favourites with the rest of the table. “It really suited our cuisine,” says Jonjon. “Now, you can explore the whole menu – it’s a revelation for some people.”

The Bambuddha menu can easily accommodate a table of eight, each with radically different palates. There is the luminously light for the raw-food devotee; precise, silky sushi for the purist; richly spiced curries – from Indonesian to Malaysian and Thai – for those who want a little heat and for plant-based diners, the choice is delightfully vast. Steaming bao buns, bite-sized dim sum, sticky gyoza, delicate carpaccios, refreshing salads – the culinary journey, just like John Moon’s famous world travels, is seemingly never-ending. The shared table is also, in its own way, an expression of the restaurant’s founding philosophy: bringing people together, opening them up to new experiences and dissolving the distance between them.

In a full circle moment in 2019, Jonjon revived Bambuddha Ibiza’s once-famous, all-you-can-eat winter buffet, but one pandemic later, the concept became simply impossible (at that time, it was even illegal). Quick thinking, Jonjon came up with the idea of Miso Hungry. “I thought: why don’t we bring the buffet to the people?” he explains. What began as a crisis solution became one of the restaurant’s most popular concepts – a curated menu of beloved Bambuddha dishes that delivers all the variety of a buffet but is made to order all night long (on Wednesdays on each cusp of the summer season) and served directly to the table. “The food is never sitting around,” Jonjon continues. “It’s all freshly made, and guests get to spend more time with their group.”

Almost three decades in, Bambuddha sits in a very different landscape than the one that gave it life. Jonjon’s philosophy for the future is both simple and ambitious. “Our goal is to be better than yesterday, but not better than tomorrow,” he says. Looking at every season as a new stage in the restaurant’s evolution, the team use the experiences of the previous year – along with inspirations taken from their flavour-scouting global travels in winter – to improve and enhance the next. For a restaurant built on the idea that the journey is everything, this seems exactly right.

‘It has been a tumultuous journey, from inception, as a spiritual social centre for friends, to a Temple Restaurant,’ concludes John Moon in the Black Sheep Tribe Bible. ‘We have enjoyed and tolerated Bambuddha through her growing pains, tantrums and chaos, disorderly conduct, infancy and terrible twos, preschool years, junior high school, teens and middle age. She has survived each test thrown at her, overcoming all obstacles. She is now grown up and is blossoming into her most beautiful, mature form, her heart open to harmonious evolution.’ One thing however, has never, and will never change: Bambuddha remains a spiritual home on the island for all the black sheep of the world who flock here.