Akshat Bhatnagar

The way you experience Bali depends almost entirely on where you stay. Stay in Seminyak and Bali is beach clubs, fashion, sunset cocktails. Stay in Ubud and Bali is rice paddies, art, yoga, and quiet evenings. Stay in Jimbaran and Bali is luxury resorts, candlelit seafood on the sand, and high-end calm. The food you eat changes with the geography. The Chowk operates three Indian restaurants across three of Bali's most distinct neighbourhoods. Same brand, same chef teams, same menu, same...

Ubud has dozens of restaurants. It has perhaps three or four that you remember a week after leaving Bali. The Chowk Ubud is one of them, and the reason is mostly that you are not eating in a restaurant. You are eating inside Museum Puri Lukisan, the oldest art museum in Bali, surrounded by paintings and sculptures by some of the most important Balinese artists of the twentieth century. The dinner happens to be excellent. The setting is what you describe to friends. This post is for travellers...

Most people, when they think of Indian food in Bali, picture a butter chicken and a garlic naan. That dish exists, and it is excellent, but it is also less than one percent of what Indian cuisine actually contains. India is a country of 28 states and 1.4 billion people. Every state has its own grain, its own spice profile, its own techniques, its own definition of breakfast. The cuisines of Kerala and Kashmir, separated by 3,000 kilometres, share almost nothing in common except the word...