Sama Sama, All the Time-a

Weeks before my departure from LA, my lunch buddy Seth and I decided to try a new Indonesian restaurant in West LA. Curries, rice dishes, banana leaf wrapped meats, the options were endless and I found myself even more excited for my trip to Indonesia in the coming months.

Flash forward 2 months…  I’m sitting at a restaurant in Bali, unenthusiastically eating my sixth meal of mashed potatoes in five days.  I haven’t been to the bathroom in almost a week. Once a favorite pastime, eating is now merely a chore to fill my stomach. I'm becoming increasingly sure that the Indonesian restaurant in LA was serving food from another country. Every time I ask to see the local menu or what the local dishes are, I’m met with the same answer:

Nasi Goreng, Nasi Campur. Fried Noodles, Fried Rice.  

I’ve come to realize Bali is where morbidly obese tourists and 19 year old hooligans with no taste buds come to get trashed on cheap booze and eat from the likes of Burger King, McDonald’s and other artery clogging North American chains. If you want good authentic South East Asian cuisine go somewhere else, it’s slim pickings here.

That being said, I realize we did only visit two out of Indonesia's 14,000 islands, and there were a few good meals during the trip. The first being a steamed vegetable dish called Gado Gado dressed in a peanut sauce, served not in a restaurant, but at our cab driver's home in Senaru, Lombok. The second was a delicious Babi Guling, a slow roasted suckling in Ubud where we met a wonderful Malaysian woman who assured us that there would be many more edible delights in her home country. And the third, well that was Sushi, clearly not an Indonesian dish. Needless to say, after one month in Indonesia and only 3 poops in 4 weeks, we were ready to enter Malaysia and experience what the country had to offer our taste buds.

Our host/cab driver and some of the local kids in Senaru.

Warung Ibu Oka's Special Meat Platter
Counter clockwise from top: Pig Ear Chips, Spicy Pork Salad,
 Blood Sausage,  Shredded Pork with Spicy Chili Sauce.

She started our love for Malaysia and we don't even remember her name.
We fondly recall our lunch with Mama Malaysia months later.
Photo courtesy of the Michael Slatkin Bali Archives. © 2010