Where to Eat Incredible Balinese Food — Bali's Best Restaurants and Bars - Travel + Leisure

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Eating well in Bali has never been difficult. The island has excellent French, Italian, and Japanese restaurants. But finding real-deal Balinese food outside of the ramshackle warung (small roadside stalls) has long been a different story. Today, as Balinese chefs resurrect heritage recipes and find creative ways to incorporate traditional ingredients, that’s slowly changing. 

“Many cooks have become more comfortable making pasta and beef bourguignon than the dishes they grew up eating,” says Wayan Kresna Yasa, a chef and the co-author of Paon: Real Balinese Cooking. In 2021, he opened Home by Chef Wayan, a modern Balinese restaurant in the up-and-coming beach town of Pererenan. Favorite dishes include ledok nusa, a porridge with tuna, sambal, and sweet corn, and ayam srosop, or roasted chicken in a spiced coconut broth. “My menu tells the story of what we Balinese eat on a daily basis,” Yasa says. 

Prawns at Ijen; a cocktail made with arak liquor, tomato sambal, lemongrass, and coriander at Kawi, a bar in Ubud.

Chris Schalkx

In Les, a village on the island’s northern coast, the chef and village priest Jero Mangku Dalem Suci Gede Yudiawan also returned to his roots in 2022 with Dapur Bali Mula, a donation-based restaurant he opened in his backyard. He serves spicy dishes like octopus lawar (with shredded coconut and vegetables) and sate lilit (minced fish satay), preparing them the way his ancestors have for generations: cooked over a fire of coconut husks and seasoned with salt harvested from the sea. Even the cooking oil is hand-pressed from coconuts grown in his garden. 

“Many cooks have become more comfortable making pasta and beef bourguignon than the dishes they grew up eating. My menu tells the story of what we Balinese eat on a daily basis." 

Yudiawan also distills a potent liquor, arak, using fermented palm sap and sells bottles to bars like Kawi, in Ubud, which makes arak-based cocktails with coconut water, tomato sambal, and turmeric.

Arak also plays a starring role at Telu, the newest cocktail spot at Four Seasons Resort Bali at Jimbaran Bay. Set in an herb-fringed garden, the open-air bar has a cellar stocked with arak distilled around the island. More than 80 percent of the menu’s ingredients are sourced from within Indonesia (including the resort’s beehives).

The garden at Desa Potato Head; Telu, the bar at Four Seasons Resort Bali at Jimbaran Bay.

Chris Schalkx

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Another example is Ijen, at Desa Potato Head, a popular resort and beach club in Seminyak. Ijen was one of the first restaurants in Bali to champion a closed-loop approach, with initiatives like using only line-caught fish and flavoring rice-flour crackers with ground-up leftover fish scales. Even the tableware is made of repurposed materials, including broken glass and compressed plastic bottle caps. 

Sunset at Desa Potato Head resort; the pool at Desa Potato Head.

Chris Schalkx

Taking hyperlocal cooking to even greater heights is the ambitious fine-dining restaurant Locavore NXT, which opened in Ubud in December. It grows many of its ingredients in a subterranean mushroom chamber and in the “food forest” on the roof. The team also turns local fruits (bananas, mangoes) into punchy vinegars and kitchen leftovers, such as babi guling (roasted pig), into fermented condiments. 

A rice field outside Locavore NXT, a restaurant in Ubud, Bali.

Chris Schalkx

A version of this story first appeared in the April 2024 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline "Roots of Reinvention."

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Where to Eat Incredible Balinese Food — Bali's Best Restaurants and Bars - Travel + Leisure
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