This article highlights the understudied role of local knowledge in contributing to the resilience of small-scale entrepreneurial tourism businesses in touristically-unpredictable times. Drawing on a micro-case study of a South Sulawesi (Indonesia) tourist-oriented restaurant-hotel that has thrived despite tourism’s ebbs and flows of tourism, we suggest that greater attention to the ways in which successful small-scale tourism entrepreneurs draw on local wisdom can help identify additional foundations for building resilience strategies. In spotlighting local knowledge as an under-recognized resource, this article also speaks to recent calls for the decolonization of tourism studies.