Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [19]
Two of the most characteristic local dishes we help to prepare, opor ayam (a chicken curry) and sate lilit (kebabs of ground meat, poultry, or fish), start with the base gede, and all the others involve similar flavoring in abbreviated forms. The spice paste tastes especially good to us in a pork sate lilit, where Kutut mixes it into bowls of the minced meat before coaxing Bill and another student to come forward and squeeze small handfuls of the pork onto lemongrass stalks to grill. Unlike in the conventional Indonesian sate, the base gede provides the zest rather than a spicy peanut dipping sauce. If you want a sauce as well, Kutut notes, you would opt for a sambal, chiles with various other ingredients such as oil, garlic, shallots, tomatoes, lime, and salt.
All the class dishes taste better than the menu versions of the same things at Bumbu Bali and most other Ubud restaurants, mainly because the seasonings are freshly prepared. Many of the popular establishments in town put more emphasis on atmosphere and décor than on exemplary food. This is the case at Cafe Lotus, which enjoys a fabulous location overlooking a quarter-acre lotus pond and temple; at the expat favorite Batan Waru; and at the sleekly contemporary Ary’s Warung, where only the fresh greens on the side of the plate salvage the mediocrity of two different Asian-style fish choices.
When we ask at the hotel about where to try bebek bengil, crispy fried duck, the staff, so warmly sage in most respects, encourages us to go to the Dirty Duck, set in lovely candlelit jungle surroundings. The beloved local dish, basically a simplified riff on the Peking duck theme, has great potential, but all we get are crispy fried bones. In the end, our waitress delights us much more than the food. After being reserved and retiring most of the meal, when she brings us the receipt for our American credit-card charge, she stiffens her back to reach a fully erect five feet and says, “I think your president did a very bad job in dealing with Hurricane Katrina,” still current news at the time. Like scores of other people we meet everywhere on the trip, she’s more up-to-date on world events than most Americans, and she clearly separates the actions of a national government from the people of the country, able to denounce the one while respecting the other. It’s a relief to us to avoid guilt by association and also an embarrassment that many of our compatriots don’t make the same simple distinction.
A few pretty places deliver better on the local cooking. The restaurant of the grand Four Seasons Hotel, several miles outside town, provides us, along with lunch salads, an outstanding off-the-menu sampling of their sambals. The waitress brings a platter of five different types to nibble with crispy breads: tiny rounds of fiercely hot yellow-green chiles and shallots fried briefly in oil; a subtle blend of shrimp paste with green chile; a more typical tomato and red chile combo; a buttery ground candlenut and red chile sauce; and a lemongrass variation—our favorite—with lots of the tender inner stalks of the herb in oil with a generous quantity of shallots and kaffir lime leaves.
The dining room at the ultra-luxe Amandari hotel offers two tasting menus in the evening, one Western and the other Indonesian. The predominantly Japanese guests pick the former, which leaves us as the only patrons who order the latter. Most of the banquet comes on one huge platter lined with banana leaves. The array of dishes includes a succulent lamb sate with piquant peanut sauce, pork loin fried with savory little vegetables, gorgeous prawns farm-raised in Bali, mahimahi poached in galangal and lemongrass broth, tofu with potatoes, spinach and carrot salad, wonderful cucumbers with vinegar and ginger, and an assertive sambal of tomatoes and chile. Our dessert is spectacular, a superb rendition of the local favorite known as bubur injin, a pudding made with black and sticky rice, palm sugar, and coconut milk. The meal probably approaches the summits of Indonesian