One of many popular Balinese dishes is nasi ayam (or chicken rice), a dish that gains just more fans these days. As most Balinese are Hindus, which allows them to eat pork, you will find so many Balinese dishes that contains pork. This makes Bali as one of very few places in whole Indonesia that serves non-halal food publicly.
Nasi ayam, however is one of the halal dish that can also be easily found in Bali and is definitely attracts many people, especially those who loves spicy food. One serving of nasi ayam Bali usually contains rice, spicy chicken, sate lilit, sayur urap, egg, roasted/fried peanuts, some crispy fried chicken pieces (may include skin or intestines), and of course the spicy sambal. Urap sayur is a mixed vegetables (typically long beans and bean sprouts) with shredded coconut side dish. Some also serve their nasi ayam with a bowl of spicy chicken broth. By the description above, I hope you get the point that this dish is truly hot and spicy! Nevertheless it is still a very tasty and delicious dish, one that hubby and I crave for.
After our Gianyar night market experience, we decided we wanted to go to other night markets just for comparison of what’s on offer (especially in term of food, of course!). So we went to three more night markets during our stay in Bali: Sanur, Kereneng, and Nakula. Keep reading below for our review of each night market! Essentially, pricing and serving size are fairly the same in all these night markets; the differences that we can tell were on the size of the markets, the crowds, and type of things/food on offer.
Pasar Sindu, Sanur
It is located on Jalan Danau Toba, Sindu, Sanur. Apparently during morning and day time, they sell groceries and what not; then at night (around 6 pm) turn to mostly food stalls. There are so many food options available here, but there are all halal food (no pork) – we walked around and could not find pork satay or balinese pork rice aka babi guling.
Still, it is a very live market, a lot of vendors to choose from and definitely many tourists in here as many as local residents. We bought sweet martabak, chicken satay, and some mixed fried goodies (tofu, tempe, mixed vegetables). All of them were priced reasonably, in fact we got some bonus pieces of those deep fried stuffs as the seller came from the same hometown as my hubby (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･: *ヽ(◕ヮ◕ヽ)
Pasar Kereneng, Denpasar
We came here based on recommendations from villa staffs and Sundari Spa staffs. It is said to be the largest night market in Bali and is located on Jalan Kamboja, East Denpasar, which is geographically closer to Sanur area than Seminyak. I think it took us almost one hour from Petitenget to this market with traffic. And it is true, this place is so huge that we didn’t get to explore the whole area. In the front section was clothing stalls then towards the back you’ll find toys and house hold kind of things and more and more of the food sellers up to the very end of the market. On its side street, there are more fruit and food sellers – and we ended our adventure about there. Truth was I was bursting to find a toilet and whilst they do have toilet at the back of the market but it’s the unisex kind of toilet and there are a lot of guys surrounding it so kind of putting me off.
You can find halal and non halal food in here and after walking a while I got confused as because there are so many people and felt a bit cramped on each aisles. That’s another reason we didn’t explore the whole area, but we did some take away food – the almost same selections as we did in Pasar Sindu. Hubby was going to get the babi guling but we just had babi guling for lunch, therefore we skipped that for dinner. We added plecing kangkung here as well, for more vegies intake 🙂 By the way, I only realized we had no pictures of the front part of the market, where there were a lot of clothing stalls. I think we walked past through those stalls towards the food stalls at the back 😀
Nakula Night Market, Legian
The last night market we went to while in Bali is Nakula night market, which is located on Jalan Nakula, Legian. Unfortunately, being the last night of our holiday trip, we have totally forgotten to take pictures. It has similar vibe as Pasar Sindu, Sanur; only food stalls and all halal food on offer. Size wise, this is the smallest one of all four night markets that we went to and has a lot less vendors in the market.
We tried grilled seafood here and they were not too bad, but a little too salty to our liking; also well priced. Also bought some sweet martabaks, very yummy. We tried the chicken satay stall which located slightly outside the market, it’s on the same side of the street – there were many people waiting/eating there, so we assumed that must be good and they were delicious!
Night market adventure in Bali has been exciting for us, eye candies, belly filler for sure, and it feels really nice to blend in with the locals. We are looking forward much to be back to those night markets again, especially Gianyar Night Market.
If you are an Indonesian or at least have been to Indonesia, you would know that Hoka Hoka Bento is no strangers in the fast food chain industry. They have so many outlets these days, especially in the big cities of Java Island.
It happens to be one of many of hubby’s favorite, whenever he is back to Indonesia, he would make sure to have some of Hoka Hoka Bento’s dishes. And Ekkado is definitely always one that make to the list aside from few others dishes. For his birthday this year, I decided to make him some Ekkado. Ekkado is basically a deep fried quail egg-wrapped in mixed of minced shrimp and chicken-wrapped in tofu skin.
First of all, please do not take this post as me trying to show off or bragging or anything, I just wanted to share our honest opinions and experiences on our flight in business class with Garuda Indonesia. Although we have pretty much always flown with Garuda Indonesia whenever we went back to Indonesia or within Indonesia domestically, this is the very first time we flew on Business Class ticket. It started with a promotion and one thing led to another, hubby suggested that we tried this, maybe even for once in a life time hehehe
I think we paid about almost half the normal cost with the promotion, so that really was great saving. But at the same time also made it affordable to us, because without the promotion I really doubted we would have gone for these tickets! By the way, the luggage allowance for each business class ticket is 40 kg; it is usually 30 kg for economy class ticket.
