Saturday, November 03, 2018

Asian Spice Asian Urban Cuisine (Legian Bali) 11/2018

This, like lots of other areas in Bali is packed with tourists, and restaurants. We were looking for a Rijsttafel, literally 'rice table'. This Dutch word refers to an Indonesian meal made up of a large number of small dishes served with rice. There may be 40 or more but we only got eight plus sauces and rice.
Indian Spice is a barn like restaurant on the main street of Legian. It is simply decorated 

with a long bar overlooked by a mural of five attractive ladies.
There's nothing elaborate here with simple table settings and menus offering photographs of all their dishes.
It's a very friendly place, as most of Bali is.

Our meal started with a peculiar (to us) soup with some small pieces of chicken, some baby pumpkin, which tasted a little like cucumber and something like very small pieces of dumpling. It was mild in taste but I have no idea how to describe it!
Next came the Rijsttafel. We were served BBQ'd prawns, saté chicken, calamari curry, fish cooked in banana leaf, battered fish, sambal, some sort of shallot salad, some tomato, a sweet sauce, a hot sauce and rice.
A meal that went very well with beer rather than wine.
The meal finished with a dessert - banana fritters with ice cream. 
Thick over fried batter did nothing to improve our feeling about this meal. There was nothing elegant  about this meal. Each dish had it's distinct taste and everything was tender but there was no delicacy about anything either. Certainly not a place I would ever consider returning to.
Score: 10/20

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