Eating within a walk of the villa

The three ways

The first is the strip. The villa sits in a garden lane off Jalan Kayu Aya — the Oberoi strip — where a large share of the island’s best-known restaurants are lined up within a few minutes’ walk of each other. You can leave the house without a plan and be eating within ten minutes of deciding to.

The second is the warung on the corner, for the nights when the walk to the strip is one walk too many. Small, local, quick.

The third is the one people underestimate: a private chef in the villa’s own kitchen, and the long table beside the pool.

Why we do not publish a restaurant list

Because it would be wrong within a season. Places on the strip change hands, change chefs and change nights they open, and a villa website that recommends a restaurant it last visited two years ago is doing you no favours at all.

What we do instead is better: ask the villa attendant. They live here, they eat here, and they know which kitchen has been good this month rather than in 2023. Tell them the sort of evening you want — a long one, a quick one, a table the children can be children at — and they will book it. In high season a good table needs booking a day or two ahead, and that is exactly the sort of thing they are here for.

The chef, and what to expect

A private chef can cook in the villa kitchen. A day’s notice is what they need. They shop the morning market, cook in the house, serve at the long table by the pool, and leave the kitchen cleaner than they found it.

The menu is built with you rather than handed to you — Indonesian, or whatever you are homesick for. Say the allergies, the vegetarians and the child who will only eat plain rice when you book, not on the night.

Breakfast

The kitchen is yours from the moment you arrive, and the attendant will bring back coffee and market fruit if you ask the night before. Whether a cooked breakfast is part of the rate you book depends on the rate you book — your written quote says so exactly, and we would rather you read it there than take a web page’s word for it.

Groceries, and cooking for yourselves

Shops, a supermarket and the morning market are all within a short walk of the lane, and the staff will happily send someone with a list. Self-catering families tend to do a first shop on the arrival evening and then never quite need a second one, because the chef ends up cooking twice and the strip absorbs the rest.

The walk home

Dinner on the strip is a walk that needs no taxi and no plan, and the lane back to the villa is quiet enough that the loudest thing in it is the pond. That is the argument for eating close to home in Bali: not the food, which is good everywhere, but the twenty minutes at the end of the night you do not spend in traffic.