In this guide

1. How much is a massage in Bali?

2. Spa, massage or pijat: what is the difference?

3. What happens at a Balinese massage?

4. Is Balinese massage deep tissue?

5. How much to tip for a massage in Bali?

6. Do massage places in Bali take eftpos?

7. How to find a good massage in Bali

8. Best local massage in Bali

9. Niche spas in Bali

10. Best luxury spas in Bali

11. If you only read one thing

12. Spa and massage in Bali FAQ

How much is a massage in Bali?

A Balinese massage at a local, everyday place in Bali costs about Rp150,000 to Rp200,000 for 60 minutes and Rp200,000 to Rp300,000 for 90 minutes. That is roughly AUD 12 to 24.

We checked the menus of our (and the internet’s) favourite places. Shambala in Ubud charges Rp155,000 for an hour of Balinese and Rp195,000 for 90 minutes, with tax and service already inside the price. The Sister Spa in Sanur charges Rp149,000 and Rp219,000, and Win Spa in Uluwatu Rp190,000 and Rp275,000. At the top of the band, HOYA in Berawa charges Rp280,000 and Luna in Pererenan Rp270,000 for an hour.

Above that are the places built around one very niche massage style, like a sports massage studio, a Turkish hammam or a Japanese head spa, along with the polished day spas. Expect Rp300,000 to Rp800,000 a session there. Muscle Works in Canggu charges Rp450,000 for an hour of deep tissue, and Bodyworks in Seminyak charges Rp650,000 for 70 minutes before tax and service, about Rp780,000 by the time you pay.

Resort spas start near Rp1 million. An hour of Balinese at Spa at Maya Sanur is Rp968,000, and a Balinese massage at the Four Seasons in Sayan is Rp3.1 million to Rp3.5 million, both before 21% tax and service.

That 21% is the same two plus signs you see on restaurant menus, and we wrote about how the ++ works in September. Every hotel spa we checked that gives a figure adds 10% service and 11% tax. Day spas vary, so Bodyworks adds 15% tax and 5% service, and Hesa in Ubud adds 10%. But most local places quote one price and do not say whether tax is in it.

Spa, massage or pijat: what is the difference?

Pijat is just the Indonesian word for massage. In Bali, though, people use the three words for three kinds of places, and knowing which one you are walking into tells you a lot about the price.

A pijat or massage place is the local, everyday kind. It is small, often family run, with a few rooms or curtained beds, and a 90 minute massage costs Rp300,000 or less. This is where people who live on the island go every week. You will also see urut, a deeper Indonesian traditional massage for aches and sprains that is often painful and often done by someone with decades of practice, and refleksi, which is reflexology, mostly on the feet.

A spa is often the same massage with a building around it. You get a pool or a steam room, a robe, a ritual before and after, and more time. The price goes up with the “aesthetic”ness of the massage room. Fun fact, even Indonesia’s tax law puts massage parlours and spas in different categories, so the difference is not only in your head.

What happens at a Balinese massage? Oil, a full body massage, and you stay covered!

A Balinese massage is a full body oil massage that mixes long strokes, kneading, skin rolling and firm pressure on points along the muscles, usually for 60 or 90 minutes. It comes from usada, the Balinese healing knowledge written on lontar palm leaf manuscripts, which also describes the warm spice paste called boreh, according to a study from Universitas Hindu Indonesia.

At most places it goes like this. Someone washes your feet, you choose an oil, and you are shown to a room to undress. Usually you’ll be provided with disposable underwear as well. You lie under a sarong or a towel, and the therapist uncovers one part of you at a time, from limbs to back to head. The good places ask how strong you want it before they start, and some hand you a short form where you mark the areas to focus on and the areas you do not want touched. After the massage, there is usually a cup of ginger or lemongrass tea.

At a proper spa your chest and private areas stay covered the whole time. If anything makes you uncomfortable, say stop, and leave. And one thing worth knowing because the search bar mixes them up: in Bali, “plus plus” in a massage ad does not mean tax! Plus plus massage means happy ending massage. None of those places are in this guide.

Is Balinese massage deep tissue?

Balinese massage is not deep tissue. It is a relaxing oil massage with some firm pressure, while deep tissue is a separate treatment that works slowly into tight muscles and knots. Spas price them separately for that reason. At Shambala, an hour of Balinese is Rp155,000 and an hour of deep tissue is Rp185,000.

If you like it strong, you do not have to switch treatments. Say “lebih keras” for harder, and “pelan-pelan” for gentler. A Balinese massage should not hurt, but strong pressure can leave you sore or even bruised, so speak up early rather than at the end.

How much to tip for a massage in Bali?

Tipping for a massage in Bali is not required, but it matters more than you might think. On a local massage, Rp20,000 to Rp50,000 in cash, handed straight to the therapist, is a kind tip.

Therapist jobs in Bali are advertised as a basic wage plus commission plus tips. One Sanur spa’s job listing on Indeed says it plainly, “plus tip dari tamu”, plus tips from guests. So the tip is part of how the job is meant to pay. Wherever you are, give it in rupiah, to the person who did the massage.

Do massage places in Bali take eftpos?

Eftpos will not work in Bali, because eftpos is Australia’s own debit network. Most Australian debit cards also carry Visa or Mastercard, about 85% to 90% of them according to Wise and Stripe, and that part of the card works anywhere with a card machine.

The bigger problem is that plenty of local massage places do not have a card machine. Many take cash or bank transfer only, so carry rupiah! Hotel spas take cards. If somewhere adds 3% for paying by card, another fun fact, that surcharge is against Bank Indonesia rules, even though you will still see it.

If your bank app is from Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea or China, you can also scan QRIS, the national QR code you will see on counters across Bali. Apps from Australia, the UK, Europe and the US cannot use it yet.

How to find a good massage in Bali: find the therapist, not the place

A place (especially local massage places) can have 4.9 stars and thousands of reviews and still give you a bad massage, because a massage is one person’s hands, and does not represent the whole establishment. I have found some of the best masseuses I know at places that looked mediocre online, and mediocre ones at places people rave about. If you are not happy, keep exploring.

The reviews say the same thing when you read them closely. At almost every busy spa, the good reviews name a therapist. My favourite masseuse works at Macadamia in Kerobokan, and on the same Google page there is a review calling a massage there a complete disaster. The stars also barely separate anyone. Of the 78 busy massage places we looked at on Google Maps, 55 sit at 4.8 or higher.

So when a massage is good, ask the therapist’s name at the end, and next time book that specific person by WhatsApp. When it is not, try a different therapist before you give up on the place, or try the place next door. If you would rather have a woman or a man, say so when you book, not when you arrive. And before you go somewhere new, sort its Google reviews by “Lowest” and read 3 of them. Complaints about street noise are fine (at least for me). Complaints about the massage itself, or about boundaries, are not.

Hold on to the good ones, too. Therapists move, and a lot of them move abroad.

Best local massage in Bali: the one you’ll go to every week

These are local places where 90 minutes of Balinese costs Rp300,000 or less, the kind you can go back to every week without thinking about it. Three of them are our favourites. Seminyak is thin on local places that publish a price, which is why Kerobokan stands in for it here. Of the rest, Khonó Spa on Jalan Batu Belig, which describes itself as woman owned on Fresha, lists Balinese massage from Rp90,000 and has 4.9 stars from nearly 300 reviews.

Macadamia Massage Studio, Kerobokan: where my favourite masseuse works

My favourite masseuse in Bali works here. I would not promise that everyone on the team is as good as she is, and that is the whole point of this guide. I won’t name her for my sake lol!

You choose your oil, and reviewers list floral, green tea and chocolate. Because the studio sits right on busy Jalan Raya Kerobokan, they give you headphones to block out the traffic. Tea and something sweet come after.

Get: 90 minutes of Balinese. Price: Rp200,000 for 90 minutes. Macadamia does not publish a menu online, so confirm when you book. Address: Jl. Raya Kerobokan No. 47, Kerobokan Kelod Book: WhatsApp +62 813-3089-1448. Daily, 10am to 9pm.

HOYA Spa Berawa, Canggu: walk-ins until 11pm

HOYA is open from 8am to 11pm and takes walk-ins, and reviewers like that its prices are clearly listed. People who get massaged every week say to ask for the strong pressure option. It has 4.9 stars from about 1,000 reviews.

On price, HOYA sits at the top of this list. If it is full, Marissa Spa, also in Berawa, has 4.8 stars from more than 3,000 reviews, and reviewers call it affordable. Ask for its menu on WhatsApp.

Get: Balinese, 60 or 90 minutes, strong pressure if you like it firm. Price: From Rp280,000 for 60 minutes on its own Fresha page. Ask for the 90 minute price. Address: Jl. Pantai Berawa, Banjar Tegal Gundul, Tibubeneng Book: Fresha, or walk in. Daily, 8am to 11pm.

Shambala Massage, Ubud: attention to detail, down a quiet lane

We love Shambala for its attention to detail and the atmosphere. It sits down a lane behind the Blue Door, away from the street noise, with a water fountain, and one reviewer has been coming back for 10 years.

The menu is long, from Balinese and Lomi Lomi to Thai, deep tissue and 10 minute sound healing sessions, and every price includes tax and service, which is rare.

Get: Balinese oil massage, 90 minutes. Add Tibetan singing bowls for Rp50,000 if you are curious. Price: Rp155,000 for 60 minutes, Rp195,000 for 90, tax and service included. Address: Jl. Monkey Forest, behind the Blue Door, at Rahayu Bungalow opposite Three Monkeys restaurant Book: WhatsApp +62 878-6014-9200. Daily, 11am to 9pm.

Nani Spa, Ubud: hot oil and your own room

Nani does a hot oil massage in individual rooms, and when I went it was about Rp250,000 for 90 minutes, which is a great deal for central Ubud.

It is easy to miss, so follow the sign into the alley opposite Pertiwi Resort. Reviewers mention a small garden, cold lime water after the massage and no noise from the street, though one heard building work on site.

Get: The 90 minute hot oil massage. Price: About Rp250,000 for 90 minutes of hot oil when I went. A reviewer paid Rp120,000 for 60 minutes of Balinese. No menu online, so confirm when you book. Address: Alley off Jl. Monkey Forest, opposite Pertiwi Resort, next to Sri Bungalows, Ubud Book: WhatsApp +62 813-3849-0924. Daily, 1pm to 9pm.

Win Spa, Uluwatu: no deposit, pay after

Win Spa has 4.9 stars from more than 2,300 reviews. If it is full, Rika Spa further along the same road in Ungasan charges Rp200,000 for 60 minutes and Rp290,000 for 90, though most of its reviews are about nails rather than massage.

Get: Balinese, 90 minutes. Price: Rp190,000 for 60 minutes, Rp275,000 for 90, Rp370,000 for 2 hours. The site does not say whether tax is included. Address: Jl. Raya Uluwatu No. 108, Ungasan Book: WhatsApp +62 881-0376-28233.

Bali Mahasadu Massage, Sanur: blind therapists and a strong pijat

Pijat tunanetra, massage by blind therapists, is a familiar trade across Indonesia, and the government still trains blind people for it at a social affairs centre in Tabanan. Mahasadu’s founder, Ida Bagus Aditya Putra Pidada, went through the Bali social affairs office’s blind therapist programme and works with freelance therapists, according to NusaBali.

Reviewers describe a deep, strong pijat urat, a short prayer at the end, and coming back year after year. It has 4.9 stars from more than 400 reviews.

Get: 90 minutes of traditional massage. Say how strong you want it. Price: About Rp200,000 for 90 minutes, on a price list the clinic sent a Japanese travel blog in January 2025. Ask when you book. Address: Jl. Pantai Sindhu No. 5, Sanur Book: +62 878-6261-8675, the number on its Google listing. Daily, 9am to 10pm.

The Sister Spa, Sanur: Rp149,000 for an hour, a few doors from Mahasadu

The Sister Spa has the cheapest hour of Balinese we found on a spa’s own booking page. The reviews are the kind that name the person, like Puspa, and a therapist reviewers call Ms. Sayang. One couple asked for firm in some places and soft in others and got exactly that. Lemon and ginger tea comes after.

Good Massage, around the corner on Jalan Danau Toba, is the other Sanur name. It charges Rp180,000 for an hour and Rp270,000 for 90, and one reviewer who has lived in Bali for 3 years calls it the best massage they have had.

Get: Balinese, 60 or 90 minutes. Price: Rp149,000 for 60 minutes, Rp219,000 for 90, on its own Fresha page. Address: Jl. Pantai Sindhu No. 2, Sanur Book: Fresha, or +62 813-3941-4977. Daily, 9am to 9pm.

Niche spas in Bali: sports massage, four hands, hammam and head spa

These are proper spas built around one thing they do better than anyone else. They cost more than a local massage, and you go for that one thing. If even deep tissue is too gentle for you, Ki Ashiatsu on Sunset Road massages with the therapists’ feet, and its reviewers agree it is not for everyone.

Muscle Works, Canggu: sports and deep tissue massage

Muscle Works treats a massage like fixing a problem rather than a treat. Its therapeutic session starts with questions about your history and some physical testing before the trigger point work, and the therapists were trained by a co-owner the studio describes as an experienced Australian myotherapist. Regulars call it their body mechanic.

Two smaller names come up again and again among long-term Canggu residents. Aji Masaji in Tibubeneng is essentially one therapist, Putu, doing slow, strong sports massage, and Muscle Moving is in Pererenan. Neither publishes prices. And if it is an injury rather than tight muscles, see a physio. Hydro Medical Clinic in Berawa charges Rp350,000 a session.

Get: Deep tissue, 60 or 90 minutes. The 60 minute therapeutic treatment if one area hurts. Price: Rp450,000 for 60 minutes, Rp600,000 for 90. A pack of 11 hours is Rp4,500,000, about Rp409,000 each. The site does not say whether tax is included. Address: Jl. Pantai Batu Bolong No. 37, Canggu Book: Fresha, or WhatsApp +62 812-2665-7986.

Jari Menari, Seminyak: four hands from an all-male team

Jari Menari means dancing fingers. It opened in 2001 with an all-male team, and the four hands massage, with two therapists working in rhythm, is what people come back for.

For groups of 6 or more, it also sends therapists to villas, with a travel charge of Rp200,000 per person in Seminyak, Canggu and Kerobokan, up to Rp300,000 in Jimbaran, Nusa Dua, Uluwatu and Sanur, plus 12.5% tax, paid in advance.

Get: The four hands massage. Price: Studio prices are not readable on its website. Ask when you book. Address: Jl. Raya Basangkasa No. 21, Seminyak Book: Through jarimenari.com.

Hesa Wellness, Ubud: boreh and a hammam

Hesa is where to try boreh, the warm paste of turmeric, ginger and clove from Balinese healing tradition. Every 90 minute treatment includes 30 minutes in the pool and steam room, so a Balinese massage there is 60 minutes of massage and half an hour of sitting in the steam. There is also a 3 hour hammam inspired by Turkish bathhouses, and you can book the pool and steam on their own. It has a 5.0 rating from almost 4,800 reviews.

Get: Boreh, 90 minutes. The 3 hour Hammam Adventure if you have a free afternoon. Price: Rp600,000 plus 10% for 90 minutes. Hammam Rp1,200,000 plus 10%. Pool and steam only, 2 hours, Rp300,000 plus 10%. Its site says cancellation is free. Address: 2 locations in central Ubud, on Jalan Sandat and on Jalan Monkey Forest Book: hesaspa.com, or WhatsApp +62 878 3600 2121.

Aspya, Seminyak: Japanese head spa

A Japanese head spa is a long scalp cleanse and massage at a basin, closer to a hair salon treatment than a spa one, and it is not cheap. Aspya’s 90 minute Halo Waterfall Head Spa is Rp790,000. In Pererenan, Shosan does an Ayurvedic head spa ritual for Rp1,700,000 for 90 minutes, tax and service included.

The Indonesian cousin is the creambath, a scalp massage with cream and steam that most local salons do. It costs about Rp300,000 for an hour at Bali Botanica in Ubud.

Get: Halo Waterfall Head Spa, 90 minutes. Price: Rp790,000 for 90 minutes, Rp990,000 for the 2 hour Signature Japanese Halo, on its own Fresha page. Tax not stated. Address: Jl. Drupadi No. 23, Seminyak Book: Fresha.

Best luxury spas in Bali: for a special day

Resort spas start near Rp1 million for an hour, and 21% tax and service goes on top. What the money buys is the setting, and time. AYANA’s Spa on the Rocks in Jimbaran is the famous one, but AYANA does not publish its spa prices, so you will need to message them. Sundari Wellness in Petitenget sits between the tiers at Rp650,000 for 90 minutes, tax included.

COMO Shambhala, Ubud: a resort spa at COMO Uma Ubud

COMO’s Indonesian Massage is Rp1,075,000 for 75 minutes before tax and service, which comes to about Rp1.3 million. That is less than you might expect for a resort of this level. The one rule to remember is cancellation. Cancel less than 4 hours ahead and you pay half.

Get: Indonesian Massage, 75 or 90 minutes. Price: Rp1,075,000++ for 75 minutes, Rp1,280,000++ for 90. About Rp1.3 million and Rp1.55 million with 10% service and 11% tax (2026 menu). Address: COMO Uma Ubud, Jl. Raya Sanggingan, Ubud Book: WhatsApp +62 812-4640-8512. Cancel at least 4 hours ahead or pay 50%.

Sacred River Spa at Four Seasons Sayan, Ubud: the most expensive massage we found

This is the most expensive massage we found in Bali. A Balinese massage of 75 to 90 minutes is Rp3.1 million to Rp3.5 million, and with tax and service the bill comes to between Rp3.75 million and Rp4.24 million. You are paying for the place and the whole afternoon, so give it one.

Get: Balinese, 75 to 90 minutes. Price: Rp3,100,000 to Rp3,500,000, plus 10% service and 11% tax. Address: Four Seasons Resort Bali at Sayan, Jl. Raya Sayan, Ubud Book: +62 361 977577.

The Bulgari Spa, Uluwatu: on the cliffs

Bulgari’s 90 minute Traditional Massage is Rp3,000,000, and its menu says tax and service are added without giving the percentage. The cancellation rule is strict. Change or cancel less than 24 hours ahead and you are charged in full.

Get: Traditional Massage, 90 minutes. Price: Rp3,000,000 plus tax and service (spa menu). Address: Bulgari Resort Bali, Jl. Goa Lempeh, Banjar Dinas Kangin, Uluwatu Book: Through the resort’s spa reservations team. Cancel 24 hours ahead or pay 100%.

Spa at Maya, Sanur: a resort spa at happy hour

Maya does something the other resort spas do not. It discounts. Treatments are 30% off from 10am to noon and 35% off from 5:30pm to 7pm, every day. An hour of Balinese is Rp968,000 before tax and service, and at the evening happy hour that drops to about Rp630,000 before the 21%.

Get: Balinese, 60 minutes, at 5:30pm. Price: Rp968,000++ for 60 minutes, about Rp1.17 million with tax and service. 35% less from 5:30pm to 7pm. Address: Maya Sanur, Jl. Danau Tamblingan, Sanur Book: WhatsApp +62 821-4511-1135. Daily, 10am to 8pm.

Bodyworks, Seminyak: the original day spa

Bodyworks calls itself Bali’s original day spa, and says it has been family owned since 1994. The 70 minute full body Balinese comes with a shower after. Its Google rating, 4.4 from about 2,700 reviews, is lower than most newer spas nearby, so read a few of the lowest reviews before you go.

Get: Full Body Balinese, 70 minutes. Price: Rp650,000++ for 70 minutes, plus 15% tax and 5% service, about Rp780,000. Address: Jl. Lebak Sari No. 3, Petitenget Book: WhatsApp +62 8781 5299 000, or bookings@bodyworksbali.com. Daily, 9am to 10pm.

If you only read one thing

For an everyday massage in Bali, expect to pay Rp150,000 to Rp200,000 for an hour and Rp200,000 to Rp300,000 for 90 minutes at a local place. Book by WhatsApp and ask whether tax is included. Bring cash. Tell your therapist how strong you want it before they start. When you find a good one, ask their name and book them again, and if you do not, try someone else. Tip Rp20,000 to Rp50,000 in cash. Save the resort spa, from about Rp1 million plus 21%, for a special day, and go at happy hour if the spa has one.

Spa and massage in Bali Frequently Asked Questions

How much is a massage in Bali?

A massage in Bali costs about Rp150,000 to Rp200,000 for 60 minutes and Rp200,000 to Rp300,000 for 90 minutes at a local place, roughly AUD 12 to 24. Specialist and day spas charge Rp300,000 to Rp800,000, and resort spas start near Rp1 million plus 21% tax and service.

How much to tip for a massage in Bali?

A tip for a massage in Bali is usually Rp20,000 to Rp50,000 at a local place, given in cash to the therapist. Tipping is not required, but therapists’ pay is built around it. Hotel spas already add a 10% service charge.

Do massage places in Bali take eftpos?

Massage places in Bali do not take eftpos, because eftpos only works in Australia. Most Australian cards also carry Visa or Mastercard, which works where there is a card machine. Many local places are cash or bank transfer only, so carry rupiah.

Is Balinese massage deep tissue?

Balinese massage is not deep tissue. It is a relaxing full body oil massage with some firm pressure. Ask for “lebih keras” if you want it harder, or book deep tissue as a separate treatment.

Does Balinese massage hurt?

Balinese massage should not hurt. Strong pressure can leave you sore, so tell the therapist early if it is too much, and say “pelan-pelan” for gentler.

What is the best spa in Bali?

The best spa in Bali depends on what you want. For a weekly massage, local places like Shambala in Ubud and The Sister Spa in Sanur charge under Rp300,000 for 90 minutes. For a special day, resort spas like COMO Shambhala in Ubud and Spa at Maya in Sanur start near Rp1 million.

Where can I get a sports massage in Canggu?

Muscle Works on Jalan Batu Bolong does sports and deep tissue massage in Canggu from Rp450,000 for 60 minutes. Aji Masaji in Tibubeneng and Muscle Moving in Pererenan are smaller studios that long-term residents recommend.

How much is a head spa in Bali?

A Japanese head spa in Bali costs about Rp750,000 to Rp1.7 million for 60 to 90 minutes. The local version, a creambath, costs about Rp300,000 for an hour.

Can I get a massage at my villa in Bali?

You can get a massage at your villa in Bali through a home service therapist or a spa that travels. Jari Menari, for groups of 6 or more, charges a travel fee of Rp200,000 to Rp300,000 per person on top of the treatment. Book through a business with reviews you can read.

In this guide

1. How much does it cost to live in Bali per month?

2. Where do expats live in Bali?

3. Where do locals live in Bali?

4. Best area to live in Bali for families

5. Best area to live in Bali for digital nomads

6. Canggu vs Uluwatu vs Ubud: which is better to live in?

7. Living in Canggu, Pererenan and Seseh

8. Living in Seminyak and Kerobokan

9. Living in Uluwatu, Jimbaran and Nusa Dua

10. Living in Ubud

11. Living in Sanur and Denpasar

12. Living in north and east Bali: Amed, Lovina and Sidemen

13. If you only read one thing

14. Where to live in Bali FAQ

How much does it cost to live in Bali per month?

Rent is the big number, and the lifestyle adds more than you expect. A 2-bedroom house in Canggu asks a median of Rp15 million a month, about USD 840. In Pererenan it is Rp24.6 million, and in Jimbaran it is Rp7.4 million.

We had to count those ourselves. Nobody publishes a neutral rent number by area in Bali, and almost every rent table you will find in English comes from a property agent or a villa company. So on 24 September 2026 we pulled up to 100 house rental listings per area from Rumah123, Indonesia’s biggest property portal, removed the duplicates, turned yearly prices into monthly ones and took the middle price for 2-bedroom houses. These are asking prices, not what people end up paying, and they mix furnished villas with ordinary local houses.

Pererenan surprised us most. It now costs more than Canggu to live there because its listings are mostly brand new villas. Jimbaran and Nusa Dua look cheap because most of what is listed there is ordinary housing for people who work in the hotels and at the university. Uluwatu barely shows up at all, 21 listings in total, because the clifftop villas rent through agents and Airbnb, not through local housing websites.

The thing that shocks people most is not the price. It is that long-term rent in Bali is usually paid a year up front. 76 of the 85 Canggu listings we counted were priced per year. Ubud is the exception, with more listings by the month than anywhere else, which is perfect for people to start there.

Then there is the lifestyle, and this is where Canggu really costs you. A month at Obsidian gym in Pererenan is Rp2,799,000 and a month of unlimited coworking at BWork in Canggu is Rp3,850,000. That is about Rp6.6 million before your morning coffees. In Sanur, a local gym and a coworking month can come to under Rp3 million. If you have children, school is the biggest line of all, from about Rp6 million to Rp28 million a month per child at the international schools in this guide.

Where do expats live in Bali? Everywhere now, but each area attracts a different kind

Canggu, Uluwatu, Ubud and Sanur are the areas people search most when they plan a move, according to our search data. From living here, I think the better question is which kind of expat lives where.

Pererenan and Seseh are for the glamorous ones, people who pay rent close to what they paid in their home countries and do not mind spending the same on lifestyle, as long as it feels like luxury. Canggu is for people who have just arrived and want friends quickly. Seminyak mixes foreigners with a lot more locals, and beaches for long walks. Uluwatu is for surfers and beach people, Ubud for nature and yoga, and Sanur for families.

One thing we can say about the north part: when immigration in Singaraja widened its checks to rental houses in July 2026, it named Lovina and Amed as areas with a high concentration of foreigners.

Where do locals live in Bali? All over the island, and often in rooms that cost a fraction of a villa

For Indonesians who move to Bali for work, the usual first home is a kos, a single rented room with a bathroom. A basic unfurnished kos in Denpasar rents for Rp600,000 to Rp900,000 a month, according to detikBali. A kos with a pool in Jimbaran, aimed at foreigners, rents for Rp3.3 million to Rp3.7 million.

The minimum wage in Badung, the regency that includes Canggu and Uluwatu, is Rp3,791,003 a month in 2026 (ANTARA Bali). A 2-bedroom house in Canggu asks about 4 times that, every month.

Local life is easiest to see in Denpasar, especially in Renon. You will also find more Indonesian neighbours in Jimbaran, Sanur and Seminyak than in Canggu or Pererenan.

Best area to live in Bali for families: Sanur and Denpasar, then Ubud or Canggu depending on the school

Sanur and Denpasar are where a lot of families settle. There are more international schools to choose from, supermarkets that locals actually shop in, and wide roads. Bali Island School in Sanur teaches from preschool to grade 12, and fees run from Rp76.9 million to Rp330.3 million a year (fee schedule). A 3-bedroom house in Sanur costs Rp20.8 million a month, less than one in Canggu or Pererenan.

Ubud has the widest spread of school prices. Pelangi School in Mas charges Rp86.5 million a year for primary (fee schedule), while Green School charges Rp240.4 million for the same years (fee schedule). Canggu Community School runs from Rp117 million to Rp272 million (fees).

Best area to live in Bali for digital nomads: Canggu for a base, Ubud for a month

For remote workers who want people around them, Canggu is the easiest place to start. There are so many coworking spaces, full of people building things, and people work from the cafes too. Between the events and the coworking, you will not struggle to make friends.

Ubud is the other common choice, especially for a month or two. It has the most monthly rentals, coworking from Rp130,000 a day according to Honeycombers, and it is, we think, the most walkable place in Bali.

Canggu vs Uluwatu vs Ubud: which is better to live in? Canggu for friends, Uluwatu for the ocean, Ubud for nature

These three could not feel more different, and where they are alike is the traffic. Canggu and Ubud both have small roads carrying far more traffic than they were built for, and Uluwatu has one big main road, winding and hilly, that you share with trucks.. carrying water.. sand.. and rocks..

On price, a 2-bedroom in Canggu costs about Rp15 million a month and one in Ubud Rp15.4 million. Uluwatu is harder to pin down because so few houses are listed publicly, so renting there usually means going through an agent.

For the beach, Canggu has black sand and beach breaks, and Uluwatu has white sand, clear blue water and reef breaks under the cliffs. Ubud has no beach at all, which is the one thing even people we knew, who love the area, wish were different.

Google Maps is not much help on distance either. Someone I know moved to Bali and went straight to Canggu, because that is where everyone recommends. The map showed a few kilometres from the airport, but it took him an hour and a half to get there, cause of the traffic lol.

Living in Canggu, Pererenan and Seseh

Where it’s most social, busy and expensive, with a few rice fields still hanging on in Pererenan and Seseh.

Canggu is where most people choose first, because it is where everyone recommends. Pererenan and Seseh, just to the west, are where the glamorous expats live now, in the beautiful new villas.

Pros: Canggu is the easiest place in Bali to make friends. If it is your first time here and you are on your own, you will find other solo travellers quickly. There is an abundance of everything: events, cafes, coworking spaces full of people building things, places to live, things to do at night. It is a very high-energy place. Pererenan and Seseh have the most glamorous gyms on the island, like Obsidian and Rite, the newest villas, and you still see a little bit of rice field, a little bit of nature.

Cons: To live in long term, we think it is chaotic. The area now holds far more people than its roads were built for, and the main road is small, just one route going everywhere. A car is hopeless for daily life, and it is not very walkable either, so you sit in traffic in the sun, breathing the fumes of the bikes in front of you, to reach somewhere 20 minutes away on foot. Some streets flood in rainy season. So many people are only passing through that it can feel transient. Someone I know loved it for a month, then moved to Seminyak.

Pererenan is the most expensive area in our count, Rp24.6 million a month for a 2-bedroom house, more than Canggu itself, and for that price some people feel cut off from Bali and Indonesia, living inside a culture of its own. There is construction everywhere, and nobody knows when Pererenan and Seseh will simply become Canggu. And sometimes the water in Pererenan smells bad when you shower or flush.. I do not know why. What I do know is that in September 2026 Badung’s regional secretary named Canggu and Pererenan, along with Pecatu and Ungasan, as villages short of water in the long dry season (Bali Post).

Living in Seminyak and Kerobokan

The older, walkable heart of South Bali, with a beach you can walk for kilometres for a date.

Seminyak and Kerobokan were the original Canggu of Bali. Some of the cafes and restaurants here have been open for 10-15 years.

Pros: It is the centre of South Bali life, and Canggu, Uluwatu and Denpasar are all easy to reach from here. The roads are so much better, because Seminyak and Kuta grew with plenty of big roads. If one route is jammed you take another, and being close to Sunset Road makes a huge difference. And the beach. From Double Six to Seminyak, Petitenget and up towards Berawa, it is one long, wide beach where you can walk for kilometres, or from the top of Seminyak down to Beachwalk in Kuta, an hour to an hour and a half each way. The sand is white compared to Canggu’s black, the sunsets are beautiful, and in the evening there are restaurants on the sand with music playing. There are actual sidewalks and many more locals, so it feels like living inside Indonesia, with plenty of foreigners around too. It is tidier than Kuta, and the cafes are as good as Canggu’s.

Cons: Seminyak itself is not cheap. A 2-bedroom house asks Rp21.4 million a month, though Kerobokan, right next door, asks Rp12.5 million. There is still traffic here, just much less of it.

Living in Uluwatu, Jimbaran and Nusa Dua

Where we think the best beaches in the south are.

Uluwatu is probably my favourite area in all of South Bali (Nadila speaking here). But when I first came here, I chose to live in Jimbaran. If you compare them, Uluwatu is the Canggu and Pererenan of the Bukit, and Jimbaran is its Seminyak and Kerobokan.

Pros: Uluwatu has the best beaches: white sand, crystal blue water, and limestone hills everywhere that make it feel luxurious. You can have a date dinner on top of a cliff looking out over the sea at sunset. It is great for surfing, and there is a real tanning-at-the-beach culture. Dreamland Beach feels a bit like Australia, with people sunbathing and playing volleyball on the sand. And it is not as trashy as Canggu, I think.

Jimbaran has more Indonesians living in it, and the rent makes sense: Rp7.4 million a month for a 2-bedroom house, the second cheapest in this guide. It is easier to live from, too. The toll road takes you to Nusa Dua and Sanur, and Kuta and Seminyak are much closer. Nusa Dua, which I do not know well, has calmer beaches for water sports, and it is where most of the sea and beach events on the island seem to happen.

Cons: Uluwatu has one big main road, winding and hilly, that you share with trucks, and a lot of traffic on it. The expensive life is concentrated down in Uluwatu and Pecatu, and so few houses there are listed publicly, 21 in our count, that you will likely rent through an agent. Then there is water. Villages here have long bought water from tanker trucks, and Ungasan residents pay about Rp60,000 per cubic metre for it (Bali Post).

Living in Ubud

Jungle, rice fields and beautiful houses, but a long way from the beach.

Ubud sits further north and higher up than the rest of South Bali, and it is hillier.

Pros: It feels more like raw, nature-filled Bali. There are waterfalls and jungle, and in some places you wake up and there are monkeys outside. The centre is the most walkable place in Bali, with little cafes, shops and alleyways to explore on foot, and plenty of yoga and meditation centres. There are a lot of good cafes, so you get nature and a bit of town. And the houses. The architecture feels like a cabin, with lots of windows and so much light.

For the quality, the design and the artsiness you get, I think Ubud and the rest of Gianyar are the best rent-to-value on the island. On paper a 2-bedroom asks about the same as in Canggu, Rp15.4 million against Rp15 million, but the listings cannot show you what you get for it. Go 10 or 15 minutes outside the centre and there are rice fields, gardens and big houses with room to breathe. Ubud also has more monthly rentals than anywhere else.

Cons: There is no beach. The traffic, I think, is the worst in Bali, like Canggu but worse, and a car is hopeless there. And the spirituality. If you want a palm reader, a shaman or an energy cleansing, Ubud is where people go. Maybe it used to be Balinese spirituality. Now a lot of it is fusion, and some of it is gimmicky: chakra sprays, aura perfumes. The rainy season may also be gloomier up here than on the coast.

Living in Sanur and Denpasar

Family life, sunrise beaches, and the Balinese city at its warmest.

I have not lived in Sanur myself, so I will not pretend to know it street by street. But I love Renon, in Denpasar.

Pros: This is where a lot of families build their life in South Bali. There are more international schools and more choice, more locals living around you, and supermarkets made for locals rather than tourists. Sanur had 529 house listings when we counted, more than Canggu, and a 3-bedroom house asks less there than in Canggu. Denpasar’s 2-bedroom figure, Rp12.5 million, is pulled up by the smart streets of Renon, and most of the city rents for far less.

In Denpasar the roads are big, and when I drive through it I feel like I am in Jakarta. Anything you want, you can find there, and it is not overpriced. And there is Renon. Every Sunday morning there is car-free day around the park, and it gets so lively. People walk, there is a flea market, teenagers hang out, couples go on dates, families come together, and sometimes there is a concert happening in the park. Any day around sunset, there are families on the grass having picnics and eating street food. It is such a warm place to be.

Cons: Sanur’s beach faces east, so it is a sunrise beach, not a sunset one. And parts of Denpasar flood: 10 of the 16 people who died in Bali’s September 2025 floods were in Denpasar (CNN Indonesia).

Living in north and east Bali: Amed, Lovina and Sidemen

The village side of Bali, for slow living.

Pros: Amed, Lovina and Sidemen are still the village side of Bali. Most of it still feels untouched, with locals just doing their thing, and the nature is amazing. It is a way to live off-grid, quote unquote, inside real Balinese culture with Balinese neighbours, and to live slowly.

Cons: If you need a coworking space, great espressos, and a gym in your daily routine, I do not think it is for you.

Very few people search for these places as somewhere to live. Search data shows almost nothing for Amed and Lovina, and zero searches for living in Sidemen. But people are moving there anyway. Immigration counts Lovina and Amed among its high-concentration areas for foreigners, and Karangasem lost 440 hectares of rice fields to houses and villas between 2021 and 2025, most of them in Sidemen, according to the regency’s agriculture office (detikBali).

If you only read one thing

The best area to live in Bali depends on how you spend a normal Tuesday. Families with school-age children tend to end up in Sanur, because it has more international schools to choose from, including Bali Island School, which runs all the way to grade 12, and rent is lower than Canggu for a bigger house. Remote workers who want coworking, gyms and people around them usually start in Canggu, or in Ubud for a month or two. Surfers and anyone who wants the cliffs gravitate to Uluwatu and live with the drive. When rent matters most, Jimbaran and Nusa Dua ask about half of what Canggu does for a 2-bedroom house, and Kerobokan is cheaper than its neighbours.

Two more, from living here. Seminyak is where you can walk everywhere and feel like you live in Indonesia rather than next to it. And for people who do not need a gym or a coworking desk and want a slower life among Balinese neighbours, there is Amed, in the east.

Where to live in Bali Frequently Asked Questions

Where is the best place to live in Bali?

The best place to live in Bali depends on your life. Sanur suits families, Canggu suits people who want to make friends fast, Seminyak suits walkers, Uluwatu and Jimbaran suit ocean lovers, Ubud suits nature lovers, and Amed suits slow living.

How much does it cost to live in Bali per month?

Rent for a 2-bedroom house in Bali costs about Rp15 million to Rp25 million a month in Canggu, Pererenan, Seminyak, Ubud and Sanur, and about Rp6 million to Rp7.5 million in Jimbaran and Nusa Dua. Most long-term leases are paid a year up front.

What is the cheapest area to live in Bali?

Nusa Dua and Jimbaran are the cheapest areas in this guide, with 2-bedroom houses asking about Rp6.3 million and Rp7.4 million a month. Kerobokan, next to Seminyak and Canggu, asks about Rp12.5 million.

Is Canggu a good place to live?

Canggu is a good place to live for a short time, especially if you are new to Bali and want to make friends. For the long term, its traffic and small roads make daily life hard.

What is the best area in Bali for families?

Sanur and Denpasar are the best areas in Bali for families, because they have the most international schools, including Bali Island School up to grade 12, and 3-bedroom houses cost less than in Canggu.

Is Ubud a good place to live?

Ubud is a good place to live if you love nature and walking and can live without a beach. Its traffic is heavy, so get around on foot or by bike.

Do you have to pay rent a year in advance in Bali?

Most long-term rentals in Bali are paid a year in advance. Monthly rentals are easiest to find in Ubud.

Who is Georgia Bateman? The restaurant publicist from London to Bali

Georgia Bateman does restaurant PR. In her words, “restaurant marketing and PR, more PR.” She is from London, has been at it for about 15 years, and has worked across the UK, Australia, Spain and Bali.

Food came before the job. Her father was Michael Bateman, a British food writer who wrote for The Sunday Times and later The Independent on Sunday. She told us stories that PR companies sent food to the house every single day. Once, for a story on ice cream, the family had to buy a brand new freezer just to hold the samples. She only noticed how much that shaped her at university, when friends made curry from a jar of paste. She had grown up grinding spices.

She tried fashion PR first, when she said “it didn’t suit me at all”. Then she tried a gastropub kitchen, also where she finds herself producing just one sausage roll after a very long day. She was about to start at a cookery school in London when she saw a restaurant PR job advertised on Twitter. She applied, and got it. Every client was two Michelin stars or above. She calls it Michelin starred training in a tiny office.

Australia came next. She spent six months with a Sydney PR agency, then a visa change pushed her to a regional client, Harvest in Newrybar, near Byron Bay. Harvest worked with a local forager and ran guest chef dinners before most restaurants were doing them. The menu changed every few weeks around whatever was in season.

Then Bali. Before Covid, she wrote “I’d like a client in Bali” on a piece of paper. She swears that within an hour a journalist friend writing for Delicious magazine called and offered her one.

What does restaurant PR actually do for a restaurant

In short, a restaurant PR person finds the stories behind a venue and gets them in front of journalists and the right diners. The job also covers the venue’s reputation when things go wrong. That’s where it differs from marketing. As the US Chamber of Commerce puts it, marketing promotes your products while PR manages your image, mostly through coverage you didn’t pay for.

A PR person sits just outside the team. Staff can talk to her about things they wouldn’t raise internally. She reads what customers, journalists and reviews are saying, looks at the bigger picture, and gives constructive criticism. The other half of the job is digging out stories nobody thought to tell.

Her example is a hummus. A chef spends thirty years in kitchens and then decides this particular hummus goes on the menu. “This isn’t just hummus, this is 30 years of love,” she said. Her job is working out how to show that on camera and in writing, so diners know why it matters.

For owners, the useful part is this. Before you pay anyone to amplify your restaurant, find the dish with a story that nobody has told yet.

How to market a new restaurant in 30 days

I gave her a scenario. Best venue, best location, best team, opening in 30 days. What should the owner do?

Most guides on how to promote a new restaurant online jump straight to how to market a restaurant on social media. Georgia mentioned content first, but her real answer was local community. Get to know your neighbours and the restaurants next door. Do soft launches. Invite people to taste the menu before you open, ask for feedback, and actually listen to it, so the community feels part of the decision. Then make sure your staff make every guest feel at home. “And build from that.”

In Bali, where so much restaurant marketing chases tourists before they even land, this is a useful correction. Your first regulars live around the corner.

Should restaurants pay influencers, or hire PR

She refused to be mean about influencers. “There is value in it 100%,” she said. Her issue is shelf life. An influencer post often disappears within 24 hours. A feature in a publication stays online and helps your SEO. A mention in Vogue sits at the top of the pyramid, with a global circulation in the millions.

Plenty of restaurants pay influencers. Whether restaurants should pay influencers is where she gets careful. I asked about a venue paying 50 of them in a month, and she said it depends on the venue. A chef who has spent years building a restaurant probably wants an honest review and real feedback. A music venue trying to fill a room might sometimes need to pay for a crowd.

Does influencer marketing actually turn into sales? “I think that we have no idea. I think you can get more followers.” The people who influence her are chefs, food writers and travel writers. She would never put a beauty influencer in a restaurant. She also pointed out that some food creators in Asia have become serious voices and now vote for World’s 50 Best. Her verdict is case by case.

How to grow restaurant social media without sounding like ChatGPT

Most advice on how to grow restaurant social media starts with a schedule, and one question in particular: how often should a restaurant post on social media. Georgia didn’t talk about frequency at all. She talked about personality, and she loves silly. Her reason is sharper than you’d expect. ChatGPT, she said, has made everything uniform, with the same words everywhere: “deeply rooted, cuisine, gastronomy.” People want real personalities, bloopers included!

There are two conditions. The staff have to want to be in the videos, not be forced into them. And the content has to match who you are. “If the owner is silly, let them be silly.”

When I asked if silly content sells better than beautiful content, she wouldn’t pick. They reach completely different customers. If you post something silly, you still need to show how stunning the room is and how good the food looks.

How to respond to a bad restaurant review, with an example

Take it offline. Don’t be rude back. If you want an example of how to respond to a bad restaurant review, hers is short enough to copy: “I’m sorry you had this experience, we’d love to talk to you directly, can you please contact us.” Then leave it.

Arguing in public only escalates. Tripadvisor’s own guidance makes a similar case: keep it brief and professional, and don’t make excuses.

Is bad publicity still good publicity? She hesitated. Technically it’s still publicity, she said, but “it can make or break,” and she would rather never have any.. (which is relatable. Me too!)

How to increase restaurant sales with menu storytelling

Family recipes and a grandmother’s story are lovely, but the business still has to sell. Her advice is to point the story at your signature dishes and your more expensive dishes. People will spend more on a plate when they know its history, especially if they’ve seen it talked about in a few places.

Then there are snacks and sides, which used to be overlooked. People order one, then another, share, then order a few more. In Bali, where people eat out constantly and stay late, that slow build adds up.

Common restaurant marketing mistakes owners make

The first is stubbornness. Stick to who you are, but if something isn’t working, adapt. Listen to constructive criticism. The customer is always right, “but also sometimes they’re not.” And some customers, she added, “are actually evil.”

The second is following trends. Her Bali example is an ice cream shop opening and someone opening a gelato shop right next door. Do something different instead.

She also explained why chefs can come across as big egos. A chef puts their work on the table thousands of times a day, and diners can be flippant about it. Chefs are sensitive people. The ego is what lets them keep presenting the food and hearing complaints about the tiniest things.

Staying yourself pays off. She pointed to Cervejaria Ramiro in Lisbon, which still has queues around the block. She guessed it had been open 20 or 30 years. It has actually been going since the 1950s, which proves her point better. It never changed. And for any business, the real enemy isn’t controversy. It’s being forgettable.

Why the best restaurant marketing starts with the people

Georgia’s clients tend to be the venues people want to be seen in. When I asked if that was down to her, she joked that it was all her. Then she gave the real answer: she only works with people she loves. They are passionate about what they do, and nearly all of them have a sustainability side to the business. “If something comes from love, it exists as love. If something is just there as money making, it gets lost.”

This is a different picture of restaurant PR than most owners have. The job isn’t making a venue look good. It’s finding what’s already good about it and making sure people hear about it.

In simpler answer, restaurant marketing and PR is the work of getting the right people to hear about a venue, and making sure what they hear is true. Marketing is the part you pay for, like ads and promotions. PR is the part you earn, like press coverage and the reputation a venue builds over time.

You can find Georgia on Instagram at @georgiabateman and at georgiabateman.com.

Watch the full Prep Talk episode with Georgia Bateman on YouTube. [LINK]

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a restaurant PR person actually do?

A restaurant publicist sits just outside the team, reads what customers, journalists and reviews are saying, and gives honest feedback the staff might not raise internally. The other half of the job is finding stories nobody has told yet, like the hummus a chef spent thirty years arriving at, and working out how to show that on camera and in writing.

How do you market a new restaurant?

Georgia Bateman’s advice is to start local rather than chasing tourists. Get to know your neighbours and the restaurants next door, run soft launches where people taste the menu before you open, and actually listen to the feedback so the community feels part of it. Then build from your staff and how they make a guest feel at home.

Should restaurants pay influencers?

It depends on the venue, and Georgia won’t be dismissive about it. A chef who has spent years building a restaurant usually wants an honest review and real feedback, while a music venue trying to fill a room might sometimes need to pay for a crowd. Her bigger doubt is shelf life, since an influencer post can disappear in 24 hours while a published feature stays online and helps your SEO.

How should a restaurant respond to a bad review?

Take it offline and don’t be rude back. Georgia’s template is short: say you’re sorry they had this experience, that you’d love to talk directly, and ask them to contact you, then leave it. Arguing in public escalates, and those replies get screenshotted, so brief and professional beats making excuses.

Should restaurant social media be silly?

It can be, on two conditions: the staff have to actually want to be in the videos, and the content has to match who the venue is. Georgia likes silly because it cuts against the uniform, AI-flat language everywhere now, but a serious venue will attract serious diners, and even silly content still needs to show how good the room and the food look.

Eating out in Bali has become a culture of its own. I believe we can broadly separate restaurants into two categories: places you can go to multiple times a week, whether for lunch or dinner, where you can ease the decision fatigue and simply grab a plate and a coffee, perhaps; and places you go for a special occasion, a special night, or when someone special is visiting.

And with that special whatever comes a few special things you need to pay extra attention to.

Let’s break down fine dining culture in Bali, our favorite places in each area, and what you can expect to spend per person. The last thing you want is to show up in flip-flops expecting a plate to cost IDR 20k.

In this guide..

1. How much is fine dining in Bali?

2. What is considered fine dining?

3. Is fine dining in Bali worth it?

4. How to book fine dining in Bali

5. What to wear to fine dining in Bali

6. Fine dining etiquette in Bali

7. How to plan a fine dining night in Bali

8. Best fine dining restaurants in Ubud

9. Best fine dining restaurants in Seminyak

10. Best fine dining restaurants in Canggu

11. Best fine dining restaurants in Uluwatu and Jimbaran

12. Fine dining in Bali FAQ

How much is fine dining in Bali?

About Rp1.2 million to Rp3.1 million per person. That range is for food. Drinks pairing usually adds another Rp700,000 to Rp1.75 million.

The number you see on the menu is almost never the number you pay. Nearly every restaurant in this guide quotes prices with two plus signs (++) after them, which means a 10% regional restaurant tax and a service charge still have to be added. At most of these places the two together come to 21%. We wrote a whole piece on how Bali menu prices work if you want the long answer.

Here is what that looks like for the tasting menus we could verify, with the menu price and the tax and service stacked on top of it.

A few places in this guide do not publish their prices at all. Where that is the case we say so, and the fix is one WhatsApp message before you book.

By Bali standards that is expensive, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. For many visitors it is still less than a tasting menu costs where they live, and that gap is a big part of why they book.

What is considered fine dining in Bali? A tasting menu, a booking and a dress code

There is no official definition. The most useful one we found comes from Glion, the Swiss hospitality school, which puts it down to serious cooking in a room built for an occasion, and above all to hospitality, meaning staff trained to notice what you need before you ask.

In Bali, we particularly go by this meter: you usually do not order dishes. You pick a menu length and the chef decides the rest. You have to book. There is a named chef that leads the kitchen, a dress code, and a meal that runs two to three hours. The menu changes every few months with the season, so the dish someone raved about on Instagram in March may be gone by September.

Is fine dining in Bali worth it? Yes, for dishes you will not taste anywhere else

The best reason is that the good rooms here cook with things you will not taste anywhere else. Locavore NXT does not use a single imported ingredient. Syrco BASÈ talks about traceability like other kitchens talk about truffles. Sangsaka takes regional Indonesian cooking seriously enough to name its dishes after the places they come from. Even the Italian room at Bvlgari cooks with vanilla from Kintamani and tomatoes from Plaga.

The second reason is the room. You can eat under the stalactites of a limestone cave, at a 24-seat Italian room on the Bvlgari cliffs, or at an 11-seat sushi counter in a Japanese garden in Jimbaran. The setting is half the memory.

And the honest third reason is price. If you have always wanted to try a tasting menu and could never justify it at home, this is the island (and maybe the special occasion) to do it!

How to book fine dining in Bali: do you pay a deposit first?

There is no island rule. Some places want nothing up front, and some want most of the bill.

The Cave asks for a 75% deposit when you book, and it is not refundable. Arrive more than 30 minutes late and you lose the table too. Honzen asks for a down payment on its omakase and holds your table for 15 minutes. Locavore NXT takes your card instead of your money, then charges USD 100 per person if you cancel or change inside 48 hours.

Some resort restaurants work on minimum spend rather than a menu price. At Akasa, the clifftop restaurant at Jumeirah Bali, the minimum runs from Rp500,000++ a person indoors to Rp6,000,000++ for the premium seats on the edge. You are paying for the view, and it helps to know that before you sit down.

Book early. In July, August and December, Locavore NXT fills four to six weeks ahead, according to its booking platform, and once a service is full there is no waiting list. Tell the restaurant about allergies when you book, not when you arrive, because many kitchens here prep each service to the exact number of plates. Some even cannot help your specific needs at all. The Cave says plainly it cannot cook around dairy, soy, egg, gluten or vegan diets.

What to wear to fine dining in Bali: smart casual, and no flip-flops

Please do not wear your Bintang muscle tanks. Save them for the next day’s morning beach walks!

Bvlgari asks for resort smart casual, a collared shirt for men, and no singlets, t-shirts or flip-flops. The Cave bans thongs (we think they meant flip-flops?), singlets, swimwear, beach shorts and anything with an alcohol brand on it, though tailored shorts are fine.

Plenty of these rooms are open to the garden or the sea, so dress for heat. Merah Putih’s own dress code explainer says the sensible answer is linen, and we agree. Long trousers or a dress, with proper shoes or clean sneakers, in something that breathes.

If you are bringing children, check first. Bvlgari does not seat children aged 5 and under. Mozaic welcomes children from 6. The Cave has a kids menu.

Fine dining etiquette in Bali: what happens at the table and how long it takes

You are welcomed by the staff who ask about your booking. You sit, someone explains the menu, and you choose a length and whether to add a drinks pairing. After that the kitchen takes over. Dishes arrive small and often, and someone will usually tell you what is on the plate and where it came from. Listen to that part. That is one of the things that makes your dinner special.

Portions are small because there are a lot of them. Ten or twenty courses of full plates would be a punishment!

Pace yourself on bread, ask questions freely, and do not worry about which fork. If you want to take photos, take them quickly and put the phone down. A service charge is already on the bill, so an extra tip is your choice rather than an obligation. One cultural tip as someone who grew up in Indonesia, it’s always better to give your waiter a cash tip directly to them instead of adding tip to your restaurant bill. They’ll be so happy!

How to plan a fine dining night in Bali

Pick the area you are already staying in, then pick the restaurant by the kind of night you want. Book two to four weeks ahead, and ask whether a deposit is taken and whether it is refundable. Multiply the menu price by 1.21 so the bill does not surprise you. Tell the kitchen about allergies when you book. Wear linen, not flip-flops. And when someone at the table starts explaining where your food came from, put your phone down and listen, because that is one of the reasons you are paying extra.

Best fine dining restaurants in Ubud

Ubud is where Bali’s fine dining actually lives. Four of the rooms below would be the best restaurant in most cities in the world!

Locavore NXT, Ubud: Bali’s Asia’s 50 Best restaurant

In March, Locavore NXT went from 92 to 44 on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants, one of only two Indonesian restaurants on the list. Chefs Eelke Plasmeijer and Ray Adriansyah cook with nothing imported, and the default menu is gluten free and dairy free without announcing itself as such. The building is concrete and rice field views, with a food forest on the roof and a lab downstairs where they grow their own mushrooms and koji. They set up that grow room with a supplier because, as Ray has said, most mushrooms in Indonesia are imported.

Order: The Source 2.0 tasting menu. Add the non-alcoholic pairing if you want to taste what they do with ferments and garden botanicals.

Price: Rp2,250,000++ per person. Pairings from Rp750,000++. Wine pairing Rp1,750,000++.

Address: Jl. A.A. Gede Rai, Gang Pura Panti Bija, Lodtunduh, Ubud

Book: Revasi. Card held, USD 100 per person charged for changes inside 48 hours.

Mozaic, Ubud: French tasting menu in a tropical garden

Mozaic is the Ubud institution. It cooks French technique on whatever the market has that week, and you eat it in an open-air tropical garden. The current seasonal menu, dated August 2026, runs to A5 wagyu with yabbie and tropical fruit, and a dessert built on toasted rice ice cream. There is a separate Botanical menu for plant eaters.

If you want your first tasting menu to feel generous rather than intimidating, start in Mozaic.

Order: The 8-course seasonal menu if you have the appetite, 6 if you do not. Vegetarians should ask for the Botanical.

Price: 6 courses Rp1,450,000++, 8 courses Rp1,800,000++.

Address: Jl. Raya Sanggingan, Ubud

Book: mozaic-bali.com or WhatsApp +62 821 4723 5550. Dinner daily, 6pm to 10pm.

Syrco BASÈ, Ubud: Indonesian heritage tasting menu and chef’s counter

Syrco Bakker built his name in the Netherlands and came to Ubud to cook from his Indonesian side, with a kitchen that talks a lot about traceability and fair deals with the farmers it buys from. There are two ways in: the main restaurant runs tasting menus at dinner. KU Culinary Atelier is a 12-seat counter where you watch the kitchen work in front of you.

In high season they serve only the Journey menu, so check which one is running when you book.

Order: The KU counter if you can get a seat. The dinner tasting menu if you cannot.

Price: Dinner menus from about Rp1,500,000 to Rp1,750,000, premium experiences Rp3,200,000 to Rp4,500,000.

Address: Jl. Sri Wedari No. 72, Ubud

Book: WhatsApp +62 822 2712 2250 or enjoy@syrcobase.com. Tuesday to Saturday.

Gajah Putih, Ubud: fine dining dinner theatre

Gajah Putih serves an 11-course Balinese-inspired tasting menu with a live performance of dance, music and storytelling woven between the plates. There are two shows, each with its own menu. Lingkaran follows the arc of a sunrise and the cycle of a life. Malam is about the night. About 30 guests a night, 2.5 to 3 hours.

This is the one for an anniversary, or for parents visiting who would enjoy a show more than a lecture about fermentation. It sits in the same village as Locavore NXT, which tells you something about Lodtunduh.

Order: Either show. Pick by mood. Sunrise for gentle, night for drama.

Price: Rp1,200,000++ per person. Alcohol pairing Rp1,850,000 nett. Non-alcoholic pairing Rp700,000++.

Address: Jl. Raya Mawang No. 88, Lodtunduh, Ubud

Book: gajahputihbali.com or WhatsApp +62 878 1440 3575. Wednesday to Sunday, from 6:30pm.

Best fine dining restaurants in Seminyak

Seminyak does fine dining the way it does everything, with a bit more swagger and a later finish. Strictly speaking all three of these sit on the Petitenget and Kerobokan edge, but everyone calls it Seminyak.

Mauri, Seminyak: Italian tasting menu

Chef Maurizio Bombini cooks contemporary Italian with his Puglian roots showing, on custom ceramics, with a menu that changes daily. There are 40 seats downstairs and five at the chef’s counter. Take the counter if you can. Watching a pasta kitchen that knows what it is doing is its own kind of dinner show.

Order: The Signature Tasting Menu, 5 courses. From the à la carte, Honeycombers singles out the scallop tartare and the parmigiano ravioli.

Price: Rp2,328,480 for two, which works out at about Rp1.16 million each. With wine, Rp4,110,480 for two.

Address: Jl. Petitenget No. 100, Seminyak

Book: reservations@mauri-restaurant.com or +62 817 776 177.

Merah Putih, Seminyak: Indonesian fine dining

The name means red and white, the colours of the flag, and the room is often described as cathedral-like. The menu treats Indonesian cooking as something to celebrate rather than simplify. Chef Wiwik moves between traditional recipes and experiments with regional spices. The dinner tasting menu runs to nine dishes, and there are vegan and wine pairing versions.

Bring the friend who thinks Indonesian food just means nasi goreng.

Order: The Tasting Menu for Everyone at dinner. At lunch, order the nasi campur!

Price: Tasting menu price not published, so ask when you book. Mains from Rp180,000++.

Address: Jl. Petitenget No. 100x, Kerobokan

Book: merahputihbali.com/booking. Tables are held for two hours.

Sangsaka, Seminyak: modern Indonesian from a wood-fired oven

Sangsaka belongs to Kieran and Yunika Morland, and a lot of what comes out of the wood-fired oven started as Yunika’s family recipes from Java, specifically Surabaya. Dishes are named after the regions they come from. It is warmer and less formal than the others here, closer to a very good dinner party, and it is the only restaurant in this guide that puts tax and service inside the price. What you read is what you pay.

Order: Ikan pesmol and the sate kelapa, per Honeycombers, plus whatever has come out of the wood oven that night. Ask whether the seasonal tasting menu is running.

Price: À la carte from Rp25,000 for coconut rice to Rp650,000 for wagyu rib eye, tax and service included.

Address: Jl. Raya Pangkung Sari 100X, Kerobokan

Book: +62 812 3695 9895. Daily from 5:30pm.

Best fine dining restaurants in Canggu

Here is the honest truth about Canggu. It has great restaurants and very few that cook a proper tasting menu. The fine dining that exists is either an intimate counter or the new Regent resort on the beach.

SHUN Omakase Counter, Canggu: Japanese omakase for 11

Omakase means leaving it to the chef, and at SHUN that is the whole deal. Chef Mark Jeremie Oliver serves 13 or 18 courses of Edomae-style sushi and grilled dishes to 11 people at a time, at 6:30pm and 8:30pm. Everything is made in front of you, piece by piece. You can just sit down and eat what arrives in front of you.

Order: 18 courses if you are hungry and want to live the full experience, 13 if you are not.

Price: Not published on its own site. Ask on WhatsApp.

Address: The Komu, Jl. Pantai Berawa No. 99, Tibubeneng, Canggu

Book: +62 823 2254 4642 or info@shunomakase.com.

CURE, Canggu: a Michelin-starred chef at Regent Bali

Andrew Walsh’s CURE in Singapore won a Michelin star in 2021. The Bali version opened this year at Regent Bali Canggu, mixing European technique with Asian flavour on plates built for sharing. Two dishes tell you the idea: a giant river prawn with tom yum relish, and a Hokkaido scallop cooked in the style of mangut, the coconut stew from Yogyakarta. A 12-seat omakase room called The Curing Room is on the way.

Order: The prawn and the scallop. Then share everything.

Price: Romantic set menus from Rp1,000,000++ per person. The regular menu is priced by dish.

Address: Regent Bali Canggu, Jl. Munduk Catu, Canggu

Book: curebali.com. Tuesday to Saturday from 5pm, lunch and dinner on Sunday.

Taru, Canggu: Indonesian heritage dinner at Regent Bali

Taru is Regent’s signature restaurant, and it cooks Indonesia region by region, naming each dish for the town it comes from. It is not a tasting menu restaurant, and it also serves breakfast around the clock, so treat it as a very good Indonesian dinner in a five-star setting rather than a formal fine dining night. For a group, the makan patita sharing set is the move. Patita is the Maluku tradition of eating together from one long table.

Order: Beef rendang in the Payakumbuh style, or the prawns with sambal pete Medan style. For two or more, the makan patita.

Price: Rendang Rp500,000. Makan patita for two from Rp1,100,000. Tax and service extra.

Address: Regent Bali Canggu, Jl. Munduk Catu, Canggu

Book: Through Regent Bali Canggu.

Best fine dining restaurants in Uluwatu and Jimbaran

Last but not least, our favorite area for sunsets and white-sand beaches. Go to Uluwatu for those over-the-cliff dinners and background sound of waves that just screams Bali.

The Cave by Chef Ryan Clift, Uluwatu: a tasting menu inside a cave

In 2013, builders digging foundations for a villa broke into a natural cave. It now seats 22 people for dinner under real stalactites, with projections running across the curved walls between courses. Ryan Clift, the chef behind Tippling Club in Singapore, rewrites the menu every four months. It sounds like a stunt, which is exactly why the cooking has to carry it.

Order: 7 courses at the early seating. 10 courses at lunch or the 9pm seating, if you want the full version.

Price: 7 courses Rp2,150,000++, 10 courses Rp2,600,000++. With wine or cocktail pairing, Rp3,900,000++ to Rp4,350,000++.

Address: The Edge Bali, Jl. Pura Goa Lempeh, Banjar Dinas Kangin, Pecatu

Book: cave@theedgebali.com. 75% non-refundable deposit. Closed Mondays.

Il Ristorante Niko Romito, Uluwatu: Italian fine dining at Bvlgari

In May 2025 Bvlgari handed its signature restaurant to Niko Romito, one of Italy’s most celebrated chefs. A lot of guides online still list the old chef, so if a website tells you it is Luca Fantin, it is out of date. There are only 24 seats, and eight dishes on the menu exist only in Bali. They include cold tagliolini with sea urchin, risotto with oysters, snapper tartare and wagyu fillet with black summer truffle. The kitchen uses Kintamani vanilla and Plaga tomatoes from the island’s own hills.

Order: La Degustazione, 7 courses, for the full experience. I Classici, 4 courses, if you just want the famous dishes.

Price: Not published. Ask when you book.

Address: Bvlgari Resort Bali, Jl. Goa Lempeh, Banjar Dinas Kangin, Uluwatu

Book: Through Bvlgari or +62 361 847 1000. Dinner only, 6pm to 10pm. No children aged 5 and under.

Honzen, Jimbaran: sushi omakase at AYANA Bali

Honzen sits in its own compound of Japanese-style pavilions inside AYANA, connected by little bridges over zen gardens, next door to its yakiniku sister Sumizen. The heart of it is an 11-seat sushi counter. The dinner omakase still carries the name of Chef Takumi Kimura, who led the relaunch in 2023. The lunch omakase is the cheapest way into serious Japanese cooking anywhere in this guide.

Order: Sushi Kimura Omakase at dinner. The Sushi Luncheon Omakase if you want the counter for less.

Price: Dinner omakase Rp2,500,000++. Lunch omakase Rp1,000,000++.

Address: AYANA Resort Bali, Jl. Karang Mas Sejahtera, Jimbaran

Book: TableCheck. Down payment required for omakase. Book dinner at least a day ahead.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much is fine dining in Bali?

A fine dining tasting menu in Bali usually costs Rp1.2 million to Rp3.1 million per person for food, after 21% tax and service is added. A drinks pairing adds Rp700,000 to Rp1.75 million.

Is food expensive in Bali?

Everyday food in Bali is relatively cheap(er), and fine dining is expensive by local standards. A tasting menu usually costs Rp1.2 million to Rp3.1 million per person after tax and service.

What does ++ mean on a Bali menu?

The ++ on a Bali menu means tax and service charge will be added to the price. At most fine dining restaurants the total is 21%, so a Rp2,000,000++ menu costs about Rp2,420,000.

Do you have to pay a deposit for fine dining in Bali?

Some Bali restaurants require a deposit and others only hold your card. The Cave takes 75% up front, non-refundable, while Locavore NXT charges USD 100 per person for late cancellation.

What should I wear to fine dining in Bali?

Smart casual is the standard for fine dining in Bali. Wear long trousers or a dress, closed shoes or clean sneakers, and a collared shirt for men at hotel restaurants. Flip-flops, singlets and beachwear are banned almost everywhere.

How long does a fine dining dinner take?

A fine dining dinner in Bali takes two to three hours. Longer tasting menus and theatre dinners can run past three.

How far ahead should I book?

Book fine dining in Bali two to four weeks ahead, and four to six weeks ahead in July, August and December for the most popular rooms.

Where is the best fine dining in Bali?

Ubud has the most fine dining in Bali, including Locavore NXT, which ranked 44 on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2026. Uluwatu and Jimbaran have strong resort restaurants, and Canggu has a few intimate counters.

Diners never see the chain between a Bedugul field and a Canggu plate. The clearest picture of it came when it broke. In March 2020 the hotels in Kuta and Sanur stopped ordering, and Wayan Mustika, a vegetable farmer in Baturiti, had a field full of crops grown for buyers who had vanished. He had been growing paprika, basil, Japanese cucumber, baby romaine and arugula, because that was what the hotels asked for. “Karena permintaan ke hotel jadi yang kami tanam yang sesuai permintaan dan standar hotel,” he told IDN Times Bali. We planted to hotel demand and hotel standard. That March they cut the crop down and fed it to the cows.

A Baturiti farmer planting arugula to a Kuta hotel’s standard is the whole story in one field. The kitchen decides what grows on the mountain, and between the two is a layer of people nobody writes about. People are searching for it anyway. Type “where do restaurants buy their food” or “how do food distributors make money” into Google and it finishes the sentence for you. Here is the answer for this island.

Where do restaurants buy their food in Bali? From Bedugul farmers and Denpasar food distributors

The first chain carries anything fresh and green. It starts in the highland belt around Candikuning and Baturiti in Tabanan, which people shorthand as Bedugul. Farmers sell to pengepul, collectors who buy at the field. Collectors sell to small suppliers, usually registered as a CV or UD, who grade the produce and deliver to kitchens in the south. Sometimes the collector sells to the hotel directly. Between the two there is a wholesale vegetable market, Pasar Induk Sayur Mayur in Banjar Baturiti Kaja, which the governor said in 2022 he would hand to the desa adat because it was underperforming. I could not find out whether that happened, or what the market looks like before dawn.. (sounds like I need to do some more field research!)

This chain is fast. A team at Universitas Udayana measured the vegetable supply from Bedugul farmers to Bali hotels across cabbage, carrot, caisim, broccoli and white mustard. Lead time from order to delivery was 0.67 days, and 98.2% of orders arrived complete, on time and to spec. The researchers graded it superior. What you order at dinner is picked, bought, sorted and trucked down the mountain before lunch the next day.

The second chain carries everything cold, dry or imported. Beef, cheese, butter, frozen fries, flour, cooking oil and salmon come through distributors based mostly in Denpasar, and much of it starts outside Bali. The US agriculture department’s attaché in Jakarta writes that Indonesia’s food service sector relies on imports for beef because of constant domestic shortages, with Australia supplying beef and dairy and New Zealand supplying cheese.

Some of it is less obvious. The garlic in your sambal is very likely Chinese, because 90% to 95% of Indonesia’s garlic is imported, mainly from China, according to Nawandaru Dwi Putra of the trade ministry in January 2026. Governor Wayan Koster admits Bali’s own garlic loses on price and clove size, and offered a tasting note while he was at it: “yang bawang putih China hambar. Kalau bawang putih Bali nyengat.” Chinese garlic is bland, Bali garlic bites. Eggs and frozen chicken for the government’s free school meals (MBG) in Bali come from Banyuwangi in East Java because they are cheaper, per the provincial agriculture department. That is a public programme rather than a restaurant, and I have not confirmed that restaurant suppliers follow the same price gap, though nothing obvious would stop them.

Most of that crosses the Bali Strait by truck on the Ketapang to Gilimanuk ferry. After the KMP Tunu Pratama Jaya sank in July 2025 and cargo loads were capped, trucks queued 26 km back from Ketapang. This month, with dock repairs and trucker protests, the queue reached 15 km and drivers waited one to two days to cross. “Logistik menjadi urat nadi dari perekonomian,” said A.A. Bgs Bayu Joni Saputra, who chairs ALFI Bali, the logistics association, on 5 September. Logistics is the artery. I could not find a Bali restaurant or distributor on record saying a particular ingredient ran out because of the queue, so I will not tell you one did.

Who supplies restaurant food in Bali? Local vegetable suppliers and food distributors in Denpasar

The cold and dry side of Bali runs on a handful of distributors that were here long before Canggu became a restaurant district. Everything below comes from the companies describing themselves.. (they have less glamorous names)

PT Sukanda Djaya, the cold chain arm of Diamond Food Indonesia, opened its first branch outside Java in Denpasar in 1983, according to its Indonesian Wikipedia entry, which I would want to check against the company’s own history. PT Puri Pangan Utama in Denpasar was established in 1985, calls itself the pioneer of frozen food supply in Bali, and runs more than 25 refrigerated trucks to all nine regencies and across to Mataram. PT Alamboga Internusa started in 1990 with 8 people and 2 refrigerated trucks and now employs more than 120, importing from more than 20 countries. Cahaya Boga Utama says it carries more than 9,000 products with 24 hour delivery. Around them sits a long tail of meat, seafood and frozen specialists.

The fresh side is harder to name because it is mostly small operators, but it has at least one founding story. In 1993 Made Gunada, an economics graduate farming in Candikuning against his family’s wishes, took homegrown lemons to McDonald’s in Bali on a friend’s suggestion. He started at 40 kg a day. By 2020, NusaBali reported, he was supplying lettuce, tomatoes, carrots and pickles to McDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks, A&W and others across Indonesia, with growing operations from Batu to Manado and 60 tonnes of pickles a month fermenting in Bedugul. That report is six years old and I have not reached him. It is still the best example I found of a farmer who stopped selling to the middle and became it.

How do food distributors make money? A small margin on big volume, plus credit to restaurants

The biggest foodservice distributor in the world is Sysco. In its 2025 financial year it sold US$81.4 billion of food to about 730,000 customer locations, with a gross margin of 18.4% and an operating margin of 3.8%. Put simply, of every US$100 a restaurant pays, about US$18 is markup over what Sysco paid, and after trucks, cold rooms, drivers and bad debts, under US$4 is left.

Indonesia looks similar. Diamond Food Indonesia, Sukanda Djaya’s parent and the one Bali relevant distributor with public accounts, reported a gross margin of 19.9% and an operating margin of 2.1% in the first quarter of 2025, according to an analysis of its filing. Diamond also makes its own products, so that is not a pure distribution number, and I took it from an analyst’s summary rather than the filing itself. The direction still holds. Big distribution is a volume game that keeps a few cents on the dollar and loses them fast when fuel or a ferry queue pushes costs up.

Lower down the markup looks fatter. Udayana researchers tracked strawberries from Baturiti in 2022. Farmers sold at Rp12,000 a kilo. On the route from farmer to collector to hotel or restaurant, the marketing margin was Rp13,000 a kilo, and the collector kept Rp8,875 of that after costs. If I add the margin to the farm price, the hotel paid about Rp25,000 and the farmer got a little under half. That last step is my arithmetic on the paper’s summary, not a figure the researchers printed. Across Bali more broadly, BPS measured the combined trade and transport margin on chicken eggs at 20.44% and on rice at 15.74% in 2020. Those are household chains, not restaurant ones, but they land almost exactly on Sysco’s number.

The part the margin hides is credit. Hotels and restaurants rarely pay on delivery. The Udayana hotel study measured a cash to cash cycle of 13.8 days, meaning someone waits about two weeks between paying for vegetables and being paid for them, and it is not the hotel. In 2019 Nengah Suarsana, a red rice farmer in Tabanan, told NusaBali that hotels and supermarkets ngebon, buy on tab, which strangles a farmer who has already paid for seed and labour. The collector steps into that gap with cash. Alvius A. Ahmad, a former bank analyst who now farms, wrote in Mojok that “margin bukan sekadar keuntungan bersih; ia adalah bantalan risiko.” Margin is not just profit, it is a risk cushion. It pays for rotten crates, empty trucks, harvest gluts and the buyer who pays late. That is how the small middle makes money. It is partly a vegetable business and partly a lending business.

People have tried to cut it out. TaniHub, the best funded Indonesian startup built to connect farmers directly with buyers, raised US$65.5 million in 2021 and then closed its warehouses in Bandung and Bali in February 2022. The company’s later troubles involved its lending arm and a criminal case over investor money, so its collapse is not proof that middlemen cannot be beaten. The Bali warehouse closing does show the shortcut was harder here than the pitch.

What buyers actually complain about is price, not supply. A 2025 survey of hotels, restaurants and cafés across Bali, Lombok and North Sulawesi, published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, found 93.2% had consistent access to supply and only 11% trusted prices to stay stable. A Bali restaurant owner told the researchers, “Even if I get the vegetables I need, I have no idea if next week the price will triple.” Only 32.4% bought directly from smallholder farmers.

How do restaurants find suppliers in Bali? Hotels run monthly supplier tenders

The most detailed look at a Bali hotel’s buying is a 2026 study of a five star property the researchers call Hotel A. Every day the kitchen builds a Daily Market List from occupancy, the menu, what is in stock and its food cost target. The Executive Chef signs it. Purchasing turns it into purchase orders. Suppliers deliver, and receiving checks quantity, quality, packaging, expiry dates and, for meat, temperature, before anything reaches the kitchen.

Hotel A works with about 96 food suppliers and picks them through a monthly tender that compares offers. The problems the researchers found will sound familiar to anyone running a kitchen: the chef signing off late and holding everything up, suppliers out of stock, prices moving, late trucks, and deliveries that do not match the order. The purchasing manager does not decide what the hotel eats. The chef does. Purchasing decides who supplies it and at what price, and it keeps several suppliers per category so one missing truck does not empty the cold room.

A standalone café in Canggu has none of that department, and the people trying to sell to it know where the friction is. I Made Suana, who chairs Koperasi Ngardi Rahayu, a cooperative helping small Bali producers into hotels, said in July that “tantangan terbesar kita sebenarnya ada pada kualitas dan kontinuitas”. The biggest challenge is quality and continuity, not financing. Gede Sedana, rector of Universitas Dwijendra, put the farming side of it plainly: off season the buyers want local produce and the farmers cannot grow it, and at harvest the reverse happens and prices crash.

Do Bali restaurants have to buy local produce? Yes, Pergub Bali 99/2018 requires 30%

Here is the part that changes the question. Peraturan Gubernur Bali Nomor 99 Tahun 2018 covers the marketing and use of local agricultural, fishery and industrial products, and Koster signed it on 28 December 2018. I read the text.

Pasal 13 requires hotels, restaurants and caterers to use at least 30% local food crops and horticulture, at least 30% local livestock products, at least 30% local fish, and at least 20% locally made industrial products. Pasal 16 says local farm produce must be bought at no less than 20% above production cost. Pasal 18 says buying direct from farmers must be paid in cash, and buying on credit must go through a provincially owned company instead. Pasal 1 defines local as grown or raised in Bali, so Australian beef from a Denpasar distributor does not count, and neither does a Banyuwangi egg bought from a Bali supplier. The sanction in Pasal 29 is “sanksi administratif” with no amount and no named inspector.

Read Pasal 18 again. It goes straight at ngebon. It tries to take the collector’s credit role away and hand it to a state company. Seven years on, I found no sign that any provincial company is carrying that credit at scale, and no record of a single hotel or restaurant being sanctioned.

The two sides do not agree on whether it matters. In 2019 Ida Bagus Purwa Sidemen, then executive director of PHRI Bali, told the Jakarta Post that “more than 90 percent of our needs are fulfilled by local products”, with imports limited to things like kiwi fruit. In February 2026 Koster said hotels need to be “lebih militan” about using Bali products. Both cannot be true under the regulation’s definition. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that the hotels count anything bought from a Bali supplier as local and the regulation counts only what was grown here.

It may get teeth. In August, Agung Bagus Pratiksa Linggih, who chairs the agriculture commission at DPRD Bali, said the council is drafting a perda to replace the governor’s rule, with tiered local buying quotas of 40% to 80% for hotels and restaurants, a regional food aggregator and an enforcement task force, aiming to finish by the end of 2026. That comes from one small outlet and I have not confirmed the percentages with the council. Separately, a Badung legislature committee is working on a regional bill that would require hotels, restaurants and supermarkets to source local products, with sanctions running from a verbal warning up to a recommendation to revoke the business licence. Badung is Canggu, Seminyak, Kuta and Uluwatu.

How can a Bali restaurant manage its food suppliers? 4 simple steps

A Bali restaurant should treat its suppliers as lenders, not only as delivery services. The reporting above points to four fixes, in order of how cheap they are.

1. Pay your fresh supplier on time.

The supplier who drops vegetables at 7 am and invoices at the end of the month is financing your food cost, and a collector behind them is doing the same for a farmer in Baturiti. The Udayana hotel study put that wait at about two weeks. Late payment is the thing the whole chain is built to absorb, and the 2018 regulation was written to stop it. Paying on time costs you nothing extra.

2. Write a par list and check every delivery against it.

Hotel A’s Daily Market List works at any size. A written list, even a short one, gives a supplier something to quote against and gives you something to check the crate against when it arrives. Receiving is the cheapest control in the kitchen. It does not need a purchasing manager. It needs someone whose job it is.

3. Keep a second distributor for anything that crosses the Bali Strait.

Imported and frozen goods come over on a ferry that queued for 15 km this month and 26 km last July. A second supplier for your core cold and dry items turns a stuck truck into an annoyance instead of a missing dish. Fresh produce has a different risk, which is price, because Bedugul prices move with hotel occupancy.

4. Ask your suppliers where each product is grown.

Pergub 99/2018 counts only food grown or raised in Bali as local, and a supplier’s address in Denpasar does not make its stock Balinese. If DPRD Bali passes the perda it is drafting, restaurants may have to prove a local share of 40% or more. Knowing the origin of your top 20 ingredients now is a spreadsheet, not a crisis.

Bali restaurants buy vegetables from local suppliers who buy from Bedugul farmers. Bali restaurants buy meat, dairy and imported food from distributors in Denpasar. If you run a restaurant in Bali, start with four easy habits this week. Pay your vegetable supplier on time. Use two suppliers for meat, dairy and imported food. Write down every order and check each delivery against it. Ask each supplier where the food was grown.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where do restaurants buy their food in Bali?

Bali restaurants buy through two chains. Fresh vegetables come from farmers in the Bedugul highlands, sold through collectors and small suppliers who grade and deliver to kitchens the next morning. Meat, dairy, frozen and imported food come from distributors based mostly in Denpasar, much of it arriving by ferry from Java.

Who supplies restaurant food in Bali?

The cold and dry side runs on a handful of long-established distributors in Denpasar, such as Sukanda Djaya, Puri Pangan Utama and Alamboga Internusa, some operating since the 1980s. The fresh side is mostly small local suppliers and collectors buying direct from Bedugul farmers, which makes them harder to name but central to how kitchens get their produce.

How do food distributors make money?

On a small margin over big volume, plus credit. Sysco, the world’s largest foodservice distributor, keeps about 3.8% of sales as operating profit. Distributors also lend to restaurants in effect, because kitchens rarely pay on delivery, so the margin doubles as a cushion for spoilage, empty trucks and late payment.

Do Bali restaurants have to buy local produce?

Yes, on paper. Governor’s Regulation 99/2018 requires hotels, restaurants and caterers to use at least 30% local food crops, 30% local livestock and fish, and 20% locally made goods, with local defined as grown or raised in Bali. Enforcement is weak, though, and the council is now drafting a stronger regulation with higher quotas.

How can a Bali restaurant manage its food suppliers?

Treat suppliers as lenders, not just delivery services. Pay your fresh supplier on time, write a par list and check every delivery against it, keep a second distributor for anything that crosses the Bali Strait by ferry, and ask each supplier where the food was actually grown so you know your real local share.

Start with the fact that people are asking. Type “how to read menu prices” into Google and it will offer to finish the sentence for you with “in bali”. That is a real autocomplete suggestion, which means it is a phrase enough people type that the machine has learned to expect it. Nobody is asking how to read menu prices in Lisbon.

They have been asking for a while and nobody has answered properly. On the Bali board at Tripadvisor, a diner once posted about a Canggu restaurant charging what the bill called a 12.5% tax, and wrote: “I don’t want to support businesses that ‘invent’ a fake tax, if that money isn’t really going wherever Indonesian taxes are supposed to go.” The replies agreed 12.5% was a strange number. One suggested the venue had hidden a bigger service charge inside a line labelled tax. Nobody could say for certain. That thread is from 2019 and it closed without a conclusion, which is roughly the state of the English-language literature on the subject.

What is the 10% tax on a Bali restaurant bill? PBJT, the local restaurant tax, and it is not VAT

The line your bill calls tax, or government tax, or PB1, is a regional tax. It used to be called pajak restoran. Since Undang-Undang Nomor 1 Tahun 2022, the law on financial relations between central and regional government, it has been folded into a category called Pajak Barang dan Jasa Tertentu, PBJT, and the relevant slice is PBJT atas makanan dan/atau minuman. Everyone in the industry still says PB1. The receipts still say PB1. Legally it is a dead name.

The law does not set the rate. It sets a ceiling of 10% and lets each regency or city fix its own by local regulation. For the parts of Bali most people eat in, the answer is the same three times. Badung, which covers Canggu, Seminyak, Kuta and Uluwatu, sets it at 10% under Perda Kabupaten Badung Nomor 7 Tahun 2023. Denpasar sets it at 10% under Perda Kota Denpasar Nomor 5 Tahun 2023. Gianyar, which covers Ubud, writes it into Perda Nomor 7 Tahun 2023 in a single line at Pasal 27: “Tarif PBJT ditetapkan sebesar 10% (sepuluh persen).”

One caveat on that, and I would rather give it to you than tidy it away. Badung passed Perda Nomor 8 Tahun 2025 amending the 2023 rules, in force since 1 January 2026, on the stated grounds that the old regulation no longer matched current conditions. The tariff table sits in an attachment I could not obtain. The rate is very probably still 10%, because 10% is the legal maximum and Badung was already at it, but I have not seen the document and I am not going to tell you I have.

What the tax is not, and this matters because half of Bali gets it wrong, is VAT. Food and drink served in a restaurant is expressly excluded from PPN, Indonesia’s national value added tax, precisely because PBJT already covers it. The Directorate General of Taxes published this plainly when the VAT rate changed and the public assumed restaurant bills would rise. The two do not stack. If someone tells you the 10% is VAT, they are guessing.

Where it goes afterwards is more interesting than people expect. Badung, Denpasar and Gianyar hand 10% of their hotel and restaurant tax to the six regencies with no tourism to speak of, Bangli, Buleleng, Jembrana, Karangasem, Klungkung and Tabanan, through a transfer called Bantuan Keuangan Khusus. The regents signed the arrangement in April 2025 and Governor I Wayan Koster framed it as making development even rather than southern. So a tenth of the tax on your Canggu brunch leaves the district. The scale is not small. Bali’s hotel and restaurant tax ran to Rp2.89 trillion between 1 January and 27 May 2026, against Rp2.62 trillion in the same window of 2025, with the restaurant portion alone rising from Rp885 billion to Rp1.039 trillion.

That is the clean half. The 10% is a real tax at a verifiable rate, it is legally borne by you and merely collected by the restaurant, and a slice of it builds a road in Karangasem.

Who actually gets the service charge in Bali? Outside a hotel, nobody can tell you

Service charge is not a tax. It is not owed to any government, it does not appear in any tax statute, and no law requires you to pay it. In January 2026, Intan Nur Rahmawati of BPKN, the national consumer protection agency, said exactly that, and added the observation that “tidak semua konsumen memahami perbedaan mendasar dari kedua komponen biaya tersebut”, not all consumers understand the basic difference between the two charges. She put the tax at 10% to 11% and the service charge at 5% to 10% or more, and asked for the rules to be reviewed.

The only regulation governing service charge in Indonesia is Peraturan Menteri Ketenagakerjaan Nomor 7 Tahun 2016. Read the full title before anything else: Uang Servis pada Usaha Hotel dan Usaha Restoran di Hotel. Service charge at hotel businesses, and at restaurants inside hotels.

Where it applies, it is detailed and it is good. Of the service charge collected, 95% goes to workers, 3% is held against breakage and loss, and 2% funds staff training. Of that 95%, half is split evenly among everyone eligible and half is weighted by seniority and performance. It is distributed monthly. Contract staff and outsourced staff are eligible, and anyone who leaves partway through a period is paid out proportionally. It is also, in its own words, optional. The regulation says employers dapat apply a service charge. May, not must.

Now the part nobody has written in English. A restaurant that is not inside a hotel is outside the regulation entirely. Hukumonline states the scope limitation directly, and CNN Indonesia’s explainer repeats the same boundary and goes no further. Which means the beach club in Canggu and the cafe in Ubud can both add 5% to your bill under a heading that sounds official, and there is no rule at all about the split, no rule about timing, no reporting duty and no inspector. Whether the staff see any of it is a matter of the owner’s conscience and whatever is written in the employment contract.

One thing the law does settle. Under PP Nomor 36 Tahun 2021 on wages, service charge is pendapatan non-upah, non-wage income, which means a venue cannot pay below the minimum wage and make up the shortfall with service charge. Badung’s 2026 minimum is Rp3,791,002.57 a month, Denpasar’s is Rp3,499,878.78 and Gianyar’s is Rp3,316,798.48. Service charge sits on top of those numbers or it is being used illegally.

Do restaurant staff in Bali really receive the service charge? Ask the 159 workers at a hotel in Kuta

In late 2025, staff at Holiday Inn Resort Baruna in Tuban, Kuta, went to local media alleging their service charge had been held back. According to barometerbali, around Rp6 billion was outstanding across 159 workers for the period from March to October 2025, with staff having received only 46.25% of what they were owed.

Treat those figures as the shape of the thing rather than the measurement of it. The reported numbers do not reconcile with each other, 159 people at the per-head figure quoted comes to about Rp5.09 billion rather than Rp6 billion, and the reports do not make clear whether the Rp6 billion is the total entitlement or the unpaid balance. What is not in doubt is that a large sum was missing for eight months.

I Nyoman Graha Wicaksana, who chairs Komisi IV at the Badung legislature, said: “Kalau itu memang hak karyawan, ya wajib dibayar.” If it really is the employees’ right, it has to be paid. An unnamed worker put it closer to the ground: “Kami cuma ingin service charge kami segera dicairkan. Bahkan teman-teman yang sudah resign empat bulan juga belum terima.” We just want our service charge released. Even the friends who resigned four months ago have not received theirs. I Putu Eka Merthawan, who heads the Badung labour office, said his people were following up on the media reports even before a formal complaint arrived. Management said nothing at the time of publication, and I have not been able to establish how the case ended.

Hold that case up against the rest of the island. This was a hotel, so the 95/3/2 split was legally binding, and there was a named labour office and a named legislator with jurisdiction, and staff still needed eight months and a media campaign. Every venue in Bali that is not a hotel has none of that machinery, because the regulation stops at the hotel door.

How are tax and service charge calculated in Bali? Two different sums are in circulation

This is the small question with the annoying answer. If a venue adds 5% service and 10% tax, you might reasonably expect 15%. Whether it is 15% or 15.5% depends on whether the tax is calculated on the menu price or on the menu price plus the service charge.

Jakarta settled it. Pergub Nomor 35 Tahun 2024 says at Pasal 8 that if a business charges a service charge, that amount is already inside the PBJT base. Tax on top of service. 100 becomes 105 becomes 115.5.

Bali has not said so in the same words. The Badung, Denpasar and Gianyar regulations define the base as jumlah yang dibayarkan oleh konsumen, the amount paid by the consumer, which reads the same way, but none of them uses the phrase service charge. Meanwhile Indonesian point of sale vendors are publishing the other method, applying both percentages to the same base and arriving at a flat 15%. Two methods, one island, and the software is what actually decides it for most venues. I asked and I could not get a Bali specific ruling, so the honest answer is that a sliver of every plus plus bill on this island is being calculated two different ways.

What does nett mean on a Bali menu? The price you see is the price you pay, and nothing forces a venue to offer it

Nett means the price on the menu is the price you pay. Plus plus (++) means it is not.

There is no rule compelling either. Undang-Undang Nomor 8 Tahun 1999 on consumer protection requires businesses to give information that is correct, clear and honest, and forbids misleading statements about price, which is a general duty rather than a menu design instruction. There is a trade ministry regulation on displaying prices, Permendag 35/M-DAG/PER/7/2013, which is cited in the Indonesian academic literature as the operative rule for restaurants. I could not obtain its text. So I cannot tell you whether Indonesian law requires a displayed price to include tax already, and that gap is the difference between plus plus being merely irritating and plus plus being non-compliant.

What is left is commercial. A menu that quotes nett looks more expensive than the one next door and reads honestly at the table. A menu that quotes plus plus looks cheaper on Instagram and produces a worse moment when the bill lands. Smaller warungs often quote nett because they are below the turnover thresholds that make a business liable in the first place, though I could not confirm where those thresholds sit in Badung or Denpasar. The choice is a positioning decision dressed up as an accounting one.

There may be pressure coming. One outlet reports that YLKI, the Indonesian consumers’ foundation, filed a judicial review at the Supreme Court in April 2026 seeking to have service charge declared contrary to consumer protection law and made voluntary and disclosed upfront. I have one source for that and it is not a publication I can vouch for, so treat it as a thing to watch rather than a thing that happened.

How to read menu prices in Bali: assume the number is not the number

Add 15% to 21% in your head and you will rarely be surprised. Look for nett on the menu or at the foot of it, and if it says nett, believe it. If a bill calls something tax at a rate above 10% in Badung, Denpasar or Gianyar, that is not the government’s rate, and the venue is either mislabelling a service charge or making one up.

The useful distinction is not between cheap and expensive. It is between the two lines. One is a real tax at a published rate going to a named authority, with a tenth of it crossing the island to a regency that sees no tourists. The other is a charge nobody is legally obliged to pay, unregulated everywhere except inside hotels, sitting on top of a minimum wage it is not allowed to replace.

Bali’s accommodation and food sector added 59,790 workers in a single year, and tax from that sector cleared Rp4.13 trillion in the first half of 2026. An industry that large is running one of its two standard charges on nothing but the good faith of individual owners. Some of them are scrupulous and their staff will tell you so. There is no way for you to know which is which from the table, and that, not the arithmetic, is the actual problem with the ++.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the 10% tax on a Bali restaurant bill?
It’s a regional tax, still commonly called PB1 or pajak restoran, now legally part of a category called PBJT under Indonesia’s 2022 law on central and regional finances. Badung, Denpasar and Gianyar all set it at 10%, the national maximum, and it is not the same as VAT, which restaurant food and drink is specifically excluded from.

Is the service charge on a Bali menu a tax?
No. Service charge is not a tax, is not owed to any government, and no law requires you to pay it. The only regulation covering how it is split, Permenaker 7/2016, applies solely to hotels and to restaurants inside hotels, so anywhere else the split is governed by nothing.

Who actually gets the service charge in Bali?
Inside a hotel, the law requires 95% to go to staff, with 3% held for breakage and 2% for training. Outside a hotel there is no rule at all on the split, timing or reporting, so whether staff receive any of it depends entirely on the owner and the employment contract.

How is tax and service charge calculated on a Bali bill?
A 5% service charge plus 10% tax usually reaches about 15.5%, not 15%, because the tax is typically charged on the menu price plus the service charge. So Rp100,000 becomes Rp105,000, then the 10% tax applies to that, giving Rp115,500. Some venues’ software instead applies both percentages to the base for a flat 15%.

What does nett mean on a Bali menu?
Nett means the price shown is the price you pay, with tax and service already included. Plus plus, or ++, means tax and service will be added on top. No law forces a venue to offer nett pricing, so a safe habit is to assume the menu number isn’t final and mentally add 15% to 21%.

A restaurant room is full on a Friday, the reviews are good, they have their own website since two years ago, and still my friends arriving from Jakarta type the obvious question into ChatGPT and get five other restaurants recommended to them. The list that comes back takes about two seconds to make, it is made by something that has never eaten anything in the area before.

So I went and looked at what the list actually is. One day I sat in Canggu and asked four AI systems the same question a visitor would ask. “Where should I eat dinner in Canggu? Give me specific restaurants.” Same wording every time.

Google’s AI Mode answered in Indonesian, because of where the laptop was standing, and sorted five restaurants by occasion. Luma and Santanera for a date, Penny Lane and 12 Kitchen and Wine for a dinner that turns into a different kind of night, Dolan for something calmer. All five had a website. Every citation at the foot of the answer said the same word, Google, which means Google’s AI was reading Google’s own business listings rather than the web.

ChatGPT gave me eight and cited two travel listicles, The Urban List and Honeycombers. Santanera again, then Sa’Mesa, SIA, Ulekan Berawa, Lulu Bistrot, Hippie Fish, Warung Sika, Cantina Classe.

Gemini and Perplexity would not answer without a login, so I have two answers rather than four.

Santanera is the only name on both lists.

Plain Google search for the identical question produced a third Canggu. Ten results and not one of them was a restaurant. Travel blogs, TripAdvisor, a guide last updated in 2022, all of them people writing about restaurants rather than the restaurants themselves. The same company, in the same session, was running two different answers to the same question and they did not overlap.

Then I opened TripAdvisor’s best dinner restaurants in Canggu that afternoon. Top was Eskqbar at 4.9 from 481 reviews, third of 590 restaurants, with its own website. Then Taru at a flat 5.0, the dining room at Regent Bali Canggu, a five star hotel with a booking engine and a marketing department behind it. Then Ketela Eatery at 4.9 from 747 reviews, then Vore, then Seabird.

Neither AI named any of them.

Why is my restaurant not showing up on Google? Because it has not been written down enough

Not because it is not good enough. Rating is not the filter and it is not close to being the filter.

In August 2026 a researcher named Vladimir Pitenin published Invisible to the Machine, the first study of this that used a complete market rather than a sample, and the market it used was ours. He enumerated every food business in Greater Canggu and Greater Ubud, 4,776 of them, warungs and bakeries included, then put 2,208 questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity across eight traveller personas and counted every venue any of them named.

At least 85.6% were never named by anything, in any run. Not rarely. Never. The obvious objection is that the missing ones must be the tiny places nobody has heard of, so take only the venues carrying 50 or more reviews, which is a real business with real customers, and 72.6% of those are still invisible.

The useful finding sits underneath that one. Showing up at all and ranking well once you are there are two different problems, and they answer to different things. Once you see that, most of the advice being sold to restaurants falls apart. Having your own website nearly doubled the odds of appearing at all. After that came how many people had reviewed you, then whether your prices were listed, then whether other sites mentioned you. Star rating, the number every operator watches, came in at 0.89, which is no effect at all. It only starts to matter once you are already in the answer, at which point it decides where you sit in it.

Pitenin’s own summary of it is the line to keep. Be documented before you are excellent. A 4.9 café with thin documentation is, to these systems, indistinguishable from a café that does not exist.

The study is observational, so these are associations under controls rather than proof of cause, it ran in English over seven days in one region, and it was funded by Norly, which sells hospitality marketing tools and says so in the paper. I am telling you that because almost nobody else in this conversation tells you who paid.

One more number from it. The systems recommended 14 permanently closed venues, 93 times. Only 0.08% of all mentions looked like invention, so the machines are not making restaurants up. They are reading a map that is out of date, confidently, to somebody who then drives there.

Why is my restaurant not showing up on Google Maps? Distance, and a profile you never finished

Maps runs on different rules from an AI answer and the two get treated as one thing constantly.

Google says openly, in English and in Indonesian, that local results come down to relevansi, jarak, keterlihatan. Relevance, distance, prominence. Distance you cannot do anything about. Prominence is how well known you are, which Google ties to links and review count. Relevance is whether you filled the profile in, and Google’s own line on that is blunt: bisnis dengan info yang lengkap dan akurat lebih berpotensi muncul di hasil penelusuran lokal. The same page also says you cannot ask or pay for a better local ranking, which is worth remembering the next time somebody offers to sell you one.

You can watch the two systems disagree. The map pack in my search put up Penny Lane, Ketela Eatery and Alchemy, all three well reviewed and all three inside walking distance of the laptop. Google’s AI, running in the same second, kept Penny Lane and replaced the other two with restaurants further away. So a restaurant can own the map for everyone standing near it and never be mentioned to the person deciding from Sydney where to eat on Thursday. Those are two different customers and they are won differently.

How to rank in AI search: the fixes, in the order the evidence supports

Nine things, none of which cost money. The first four are your own website, which the audit found matters more than anything else. The rest is your Google profile and your reviews.

1. Get a website you own. Not an Instagram account, an actual website, even a single page. It was the strongest single predictor of appearing at all, and it is the only description of your restaurant that you control. Warung Sika is the honest exception, named by ChatGPT with no website I can find, only an Instagram and a lot of other people writing about it.

2. Put the menu on it as text. Not a PDF, not a photograph of a chalkboard. Google’s structured data documentation asks for the menu as a proper URL, and nothing reading your site can see inside a JPEG, so if your dishes live only in an image they do not exist. This is the most common failure I see on restaurant sites here and it is almost always a design decision nobody went back to.

3. Put your prices on it. Another of the top predictors, costs nothing, and it happens to be what people are actually asking, since a good share of these questions carry a budget inside them.

4. Mark the page up. LocalBusiness structured data requires two fields, name and address, and everything else is optional. The optional list reads almost exactly like the audit’s findings: URL, phone, coordinates, opening hours, price range, cuisine, menu. That is twenty minutes of work for whoever built your site, and anyone quoting you a project rate for it is charging you for twenty minutes.

5. Ask everybody for a review, and reply to them. Review volume was the second strongest predictor after a website, and score was not, which means 100 reviews at 4.4 is a stronger position than 15 at 5.0 and the average you have been protecting is not the number doing the work. Google allows asking by link or QR code and strictly prohibits offering anything in exchange, naming free or discounted food directly, so the dessert-for-five-stars arrangement is the thing the policy was written about rather than a grey area. Reply to them as well, partly because Google asks businesses to answer the ones where they can say something useful, and partly because every reply is another sentence of text about your restaurant on a page these systems read constantly.

6. Finish your Google profile. Completely. It is the one thing Google states outright affects whether you appear, and most profiles I open are about 60% done.

7. Fix your categories. Few and specific, following Google’s own guidance to pick the ones that finish the sentence “this business is a” rather than “this business has a”, which means a restaurant with a bar is not a bar.

8. Keep your hours honest, including the days you close. Nyepi shuts the island and Galungan moves every year. A locked door on an open profile earns you a review from somebody standing outside in the heat that will outlive the holiday by years.

9. Spell yourself the same way everywhere. One name, one address format, one phone number. These systems have to work out that the warung on Instagram and the warung on TripAdvisor are the same restaurant, and there is no reason to make that hard.

Two things not to spend money on. The audit tested Foursquare presence and found nothing at either margin, which is worth knowing because directory bundles are still sold here on the promise that more listings means more visibility. And be careful with anyone selling ChatGPT optimisation specifically, since ChatGPT’s share of AI traffic fell from 76% to 53% in a year while Gemini climbed past 27%, which is a faster moving target than any retainer.

Who is paying for the numbers you are reading

Almost every statistic in this field is published by a company that sells the fix, mine included at one remove.

The 83% figure you will see everywhere comes from Uberall’s May report on quick service chains, and Uberall sells location marketing. Yext, whose citation research everyone quotes, sells listings management. None of that makes the numbers false. It does mean noticing who is holding the clipboard, particularly when the same report ends with a 90 day plan and a URL. It also means the two datasets can contradict each other in public without anyone minding, which they do. Uberall reports rating floors of roughly 4.3 for ChatGPT and 3.9 for Gemini, while Pitenin found rating does nothing at entry. Both could be true if well documented restaurants also tend to be well rated, and I do not know which reading is right.

You also cannot check your own fix by asking once. Miriam Ellis at Whitespark tested Google’s AI Mode in May and found that two people asking the identical question from the identical place get different answers, because the system fans one question out into several behind the scenes. Give it weeks and judge it on covers.

And there is a hole in the middle of the whole subject. DoorDash’s March survey of 3,001 consumers found 22% have used an AI tool to choose a restaurant, and BrightLocal puts the broader figure at 45% asking AI for local recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier. Nobody has published a figure connecting an appearance in an AI answer to an actual booking. Everyone measures visibility because visibility is easy to measure.

BrightLocal did find one thing that cuts against the panic. 88% of people who use AI this way check what it told them and 42% always cross reference against real reviews before going anywhere, so the line about there being no second page is only half right. There is no second page but there is a second step, which makes the review section you have been ignoring the second gate rather than the first.

What this is worth

The short version is that your restaurant is probably not missing because the food is not good enough. It is missing because not enough has been written about it in the places these systems read. So open your own website tonight and check three things: that the menu is text and not a picture, that the prices are on it, and that your Google profile is finished rather than mostly finished. That is one afternoon, it costs nothing, and it closes most of the gap between being good and being found.

If you run a restaurant in Bali and you have worked on these things and watched something change, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my restaurant not showing up on Google?
Usually because it hasn’t been documented enough, not because it isn’t good. Research across nearly 4,776 Canggu and Ubud venues found that having your own website, a high review count, and listed prices predict whether you appear, while star rating had almost no effect on getting into a result at all.

Why is my restaurant not showing up on Google Maps?
Google Maps ranks local results on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. Distance you can’t change, but relevance depends on how completely you’ve filled in your Google Business Profile, and Google states outright that businesses with complete, accurate information are more likely to appear.

How do I get my restaurant recommended by AI like ChatGPT?
Start with a website you own, since it was the single strongest predictor of appearing in AI answers. Then put your menu and prices on that page as real text rather than a PDF or photo, add LocalBusiness structured data, and build up your review count. Documentation matters more than a high rating.

Does my star rating affect whether AI recommends my restaurant?
Not for getting into the answer in the first place. A study found rating had essentially no effect on whether a venue appeared at all. Rating only starts to matter once you’re already in the result, where it helps decide your position, so review volume beats a protected average.

Should I pay for directory listings or ChatGPT optimisation services?
Be cautious. The same research found Foursquare presence made no measurable difference, and ChatGPT’s share of AI search fell from 76% to 53% in a year while Gemini rose, so optimising for one tool is a fast-moving target. Most of what works, a website, a complete profile, menu text, reviews, costs nothing.

Search for somewhere good to eat in a city the Michelin Guide has never visited and you will meet a phrase that has quietly colonised the internet. Michelin star level. Michelin-starred quality. Michelin standard. It appears on travel blogs, hotel listings, booking platforms and restaurant menus in countries where no inspector has ever booked a table, which is most countries. And it works, even when almost nobody knows how the institution decides where to show up in the first place.

I went looking for the mechanism. Who pays whom, for what, and what a restaurant actually receives when a star lands on it. The answer is more interesting than the version the fans tell and more defensible than the version the cynics tell, and the numbers at the end of it are not what an ambitious operator would hope.

Michelin Guide vs Michelin Star vs Bib Gourmand: what the words mean

The confusion is not the reader’s fault. The guide has four distinctions and they get used interchangeably.

A restaurant “in the Michelin Guide” usually has no star at all. It has been visited and listed. The listing is a real endorsement and it is not the same thing as the award, and the gap between those two facts is where most of the internet’s Michelin content lives.

Do restaurants apply for Michelin stars? No, and they cannot opt out

There is no application. There is no fee. Michelin’s spokesperson Carly Grieff has stated it plainly: there is no annual fee for any restaurant or hotel to be included, and the selection process is independent. Inspectors book under false names, eat alone, pay their own bills, and file. Michelin’s international director Gwendal Poullennec says inspectors come from more than 25 nationalities and eat out up to 300 times a year. The company has never confirmed how many of them exist.

The corollary of not applying is that you cannot withdraw. In September 2017 Sébastien Bras asked to be taken out of the guide. Le Suquet in Laguiole had held three stars for 18 years, won under his father. He said he wanted to cook without asking himself whether his creations would please the inspectors. Michelin agreed for the 2018 edition, the first time it had ever done that. Then in January 2019 it put him back in at two stars, without being asked.

Michelin’s position, stated when Bras made his request, is that the guide exists for diners rather than for restaurateurs, so a restaurant has no standing in the matter. That is internally consistent. It also means the most powerful evaluator in the industry answers to nobody it evaluates. A Seoul chef, Eo Yun-gwon, tested this from the other direction in 2019, filing a criminal complaint under Korean insult law because Michelin had listed his restaurant after he refused. His phrasing was that restaurants are wasting away their soul chasing a mirage. A Korean lawyer quoted in the same reporting thought the charge unlikely to stand.

Marc Veyrat tried something narrower and lost anyway. Demoted from three stars to two in 2019, he sued for the right to see the inspection notes, asking one euro in damages. His complaint was that an inspector had apparently mistaken saffron for cheddar in a soufflé. His lawyer framed the ask carefully, saying they were not trying to forbid criticism but to check that criteria existed and had been applied. In December 2019 a court in Nanterre rejected the case on the grounds that Veyrat had not documented any loss. The court did not examine whether the criteria had been applied correctly. Most coverage read the ruling as a vindication of Michelin’s process. It was not one.

How the Michelin Guide makes money: someone pays for it to arrive

Michelin does not simply expand into a country because the cooking has become good enough. A guide arrives when a government or a private partner pays for it to arrive.

This is not a rumour. It is in tourism board budgets, and American local reporters have spent the last two years pulling the numbers out.

Texas committed $2.7 million over three years, structured as $450,000 a year from the state travel office plus $90,000 a year each from Fort Worth, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin. Fort Worth’s mayor Mattie Parker explained the logic without embarrassment: one in every three tourism dollars spent in her city goes on food and drink, more than $760 million last year, so joining was a no-brainer.

South Carolina’s share of the American South guide runs to more than $1 million over three years. The state parks and tourism department pays $100,000 a year, Explore Charleston $62,000, Visit Greenville $61,000, Visit Myrtle Beach $58,500, Experience Columbia $42,250, Visit Hilton Head $26,250. Those amounts are pro-rated by how many restaurants each destination has, so the price of being judged scales with how much there is to judge. Poullennec is on the record that the money funds communication, digital and marketing campaigns to promote the selections. The Post and Courier also reports that if the payments stop, Michelin could drop the guide.

Visit California paid a reported $600,000 in 2019. Florida put up $1.5 million, and at launch only restaurants in Miami, Orlando and Tampa were eligible for consideration, a boundary that has since widened to Pinellas, Broward and Palm Beach as the commercial footprint grew rather than because the cooking in St Petersburg changed.

And Virginia looked at the invoice and said no. Michelin quoted the state $360,000, or $120,000 a year for three years. Virginia Tourism Corp declined, citing cost and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars. One state government publicly refusing to buy a restaurant guide, and saying why, tells you more about the arrangement than any amount of speculation.

Much of this money comes from hotel occupancy taxes and, in some cities, food and beverage taxes. So in North Carolina, where five tourism bodies pay $345,000 a year between them, people staying in Charlotte hotels and eating in Charlotte restaurants are helping to fund the guide that grades Charlotte restaurants. That is not corruption. It is just worth saying out loud, because nobody involved says it.

Do restaurants pay for a Michelin star? What the money actually buys

This is the part where most commentary goes wrong in one direction or the other, so it is worth being exact.

Payment does not buy stars. There is no evidence that it does, and the people who claim otherwise are guessing. Michelin says restaurants pay nothing, and no reporting I found contradicts that.

What payment buys is arrival. It determines whether inspectors come to your country at all, and in Florida’s case it determined which cities were eligible. A restaurant in a state that did not pay is not being judged and found wanting. It is not being judged.

Then there is a third thing, documented once, that sits between the two. Reporting by Axios found that ahead of the American South guide, state tourism agencies from six states submitted lists of restaurants for Michelin’s consideration, coordinated through the regional marketing agency Travel South USA and due about six weeks before the public announcement. Travel South’s chief executive Liz Bittner told the agencies to think beyond the white tablecloth and to consider chefs already recognised by major lists or the James Beard awards, and chefs working with local agriculture and sustainable seafood.

Bittner is equally on record that the agencies had no control over the selection, that no preferential treatment or guarantees were given, and that they found out the results at the October ceremony alongside the press and the chefs.

Both of those things can be true, and I think they are. Payment does not buy a star, and it does buy the guide’s presence, the eligibility map, and at least once, an invitation to suggest where the inspectors might start looking. That is a more precise claim than “the guide can be bought”, and it has the advantage of being defensible line by line.

What the Philippines got for its money: the Manila and Cebu selection

The Philippines is the cleanest recent test. Michelin announced its arrival in February 2025 and revealed the first selectionon 30 October that year: one two-star restaurant, eight one-star, 25 Bib Gourmands, 108 restaurants in the guide altogether, across Manila and Cebu. In July 2026 the Department of Tourism confirmed it is extending the partnership to at least 2028.

Whether that moved covers, room rates or arrivals is the question every operator in the region should be asking, and the honest answer is that nobody has published it yet. The best peer-reviewed evidence comes from Spain, where Castillo-Manzano and colleagues analysed 50 Spanish regions from 2000 to 2016 in Tourism Economics and found that starred restaurants do pull foreign tourists specifically, and that quality matters more than quantity. Tourism boards cite a 2019 Ernst & Young study for the stronger version of this claim. I could not find the study itself, so treat that one as an industry assertion rather than evidence.

Do Michelin star restaurants make money?

This is the question that matters if you run a restaurant rather than a tourism board, and the numbers are colder than the mythology suggests.

Enigma analysed card transaction data from 936 Michelin-recognised restaurants in the United States over the twelve months to July 2025. Median annual revenue came in at $3.5 million for three stars, $1.9 million for two, $1.4 million for one, and $1.2 million for a Bib Gourmand. The finding worth sitting with is that one-star restaurants ran only about 15 to 25 per cent above comparable restaurants with no star at all. Enigma is careful to say this is a snapshot rather than a before-and-after, so it cannot prove the star caused anything.

Prices move more than revenue does. Research using a hedonic pricing model on 486 New York restaurants, controlling for neighbourhood and cuisine, found premiums of roughly 15 per cent for one star, 55 for two and 80 for three. That is student work published on a university platform rather than a peer-reviewed paper, so treat it as an indication.

Then the finding that ought to be better known. Daniel Sands at University College London tracked New York restaurants through to 2019 and published in the Strategic Management Journal that starred restaurants were more likely to close than comparable unstarred ones. The mechanisms he identifies are unglamorous and familiar to anyone who has run a room. Landlords and suppliers reopen negotiations. Staff use the star as leverage and leave for better offers. The regulars who built the place get displaced by people who came for the accolade and will not return. Sands is careful that outcomes vary and plenty of starred restaurants do fine.

Put those three together and the shape is clear enough. The star raises what you can charge, raises what everyone expects of you, and raises your costs, and the revenue gap it opens over your unstarred neighbour is smaller than almost anyone assumes. The prize is real. It is also an obligation that arrives without a budget attached, which is why chefs occasionally hand it back.

Michelin demonstrated its own version of this in May 2026, when it retired the Green Star after six years, replacing it with a platform called Mindful Voices. More than 600 restaurants held one. Some had reorganised parts of their operation around it. A Philadelphia chef whose restaurant had won one two months earlier said the award had been flawed from the start but that a little more effort could have fixed the criteria rather than abandoning them. The precedent now exists that a Michelin distinction can simply stop.

How do Michelin stars work, and who decides them?

Five criteria, which Michelin repeats consistently in every market: quality of the ingredients, mastery of cooking and flavour, harmony of flavours, the personality of the chef expressed in the food, and consistency, both across the menu and between visits. Stars follow the restaurant rather than the chef. They can be removed. Restaurants gaining or losing one are typically visited more than once.

The inspectors are anonymous and stay that way. A hospitality manager quoted by the Irish Times earlier this year said they used to identify themselves after the meal and no longer do. Michelin will not say how many there are; industry estimates in that piece put it somewhere between 150 and 200 worldwide, which is an estimate rather than a disclosure. The oldest and best-sourced challenge to Michelin’s coverage came from a former inspector, Pascal Rémy, whose 2004 book claimed France was covered by a handful of full-time inspectors working through the country in zones. Michelin’s then-director Derek Brown disputed his numbers but conceded the underlying point, that the guide has never visited everything every year.

And no, they do not drop a fork on the floor to see what happens. That one has no source anywhere, which has not slowed it down.

Why a tyre company rates restaurants

The guide began in 1900 as a tyre marketing scheme. André and Édouard Michelin gave away about 35,000 free copies to a French public that barely owned cars, listing mechanics and hotels and places to eat, on the reasoning that people who drive further wear out more tyres. Stars came in 1926. The criteria were published in 1936 and the wording has barely moved since.

The logic has not changed as much as the scale suggests. Michelin turned over €26 billion in 2025 and the guide remains a marketing asset inside a tyre company, now sold to tourism boards instead of subsidised for drivers. The customer changed. The product is the same one it always was, which is a reason to go somewhere.

That is not a scandal and it does not make the assessments dishonest. The inspectors are real, the criteria are consistent, and the restaurants that win are usually very good. But an operator deciding what to chase deserves to know that the map of where stars exist was drawn partly by cooking and partly by which tourism ministries had budget, and that the accolade at the end of it correlates with a revenue difference of 15 to 25 per cent and a higher chance of closing.

Worth wanting, probably. Worth reorganising your entire business around, that is a different question, and it is one nobody at the ceremony is going to ask on your behalf.

It’s been a few days and I keep going back to the moment in the parking lot where we almost turned around. So. Toraja..

Can tourists attend a Rambu Solo’ funeral in Toraja?

We were at our hotel and someone mentioned, casually, that there was a Rambu Solo’ happening in a village not far from us. A funeral. Come if you want, they said.

And I want to be honest about the next ten minutes of my life, because I think this is the part people don’t talk about. I felt weird about it. Somebody’s mother or father or grandfather had died, their family was burying them, and I was going to turn up as a stranger that got invited by a fellow invitee. Nobody in that family had asked for me.

Then the road made it worse.

It was maybe ten minutes of what was essentially off-roading. Not a road with potholes. The potholes had a road situation. We’re getting thrown around inside the car.

We got there and there were cars everywhere. Proper parking chaos. And we sat in it, not getting out, having the same conversation on loop. Do we go in? Should we not? Is this okay?

The guy directing cars looked at us, read the whole thing off our faces in about a second, and as we ask is it actually okay if we get inside, he said of course, just go in, there are a lot of foreigners there.

What a Rambu Solo’ funeral actually looks like: the rante, the lantang and a church PA

You walk in and it does not feel like a funeral. Not in the way my body understood funerals.

It felt like a village get-together. Thousands of people. And the shape of it is an arena, an open field with structures built up around the edges, maybe ten different sections all facing in.

Those sections have a name, I looked it up after. They’re called lantang, temporary pavilions built out of bamboo and wood specifically for the ceremony, where guests sit and where families who’ve travelled in actually sleep for the duration. The field itself is the rante, the ceremonial ground. Somebody built all of that. Somebody will take it all down. Hold that thought, we’re coming back to it.

We arrived in the middle of a church service and just stood there, in the open, not knowing where to put ourselves.

As we walk inside, people started moving us with their faces. Eyes, eyebrows, a tilt of the head, mouthing go there, go there, that section, all of it silent because there was a priest preaching going on. A whole crowd quietly running air traffic control for two strangers who clearly had no idea what they were doing.

We sat down. The prayers kept going. And it was a full church setup, the pastor, the whole church crew, singing, on microphones, through big speakers. Which surprised me and shouldn’t have. Most Toraja are Protestant, and the funeral you’re watching is a genuine negotiation between the church and aluk to dolo, the ancestral way, which is the older system all of this comes from. There’s an entire body of research on how those two things share a field. Then the prayer finished and the family came out.

They’re the ones in all white. That’s how you find them. And they came around and greeted people, greeted us, held our hands, smiling, telling us to eat after this.

I don’t want to over-read a stranger’s face at their own family’s funeral. But I’ll say what it looked like to me, which is that they seemed genuinely glad the room was full. As the family members greet and host the guests they met and talked to along the way.

What they feed you at a Toraja funeral, and why they will not let you say no

Twenty, thirty people carrying rice and dishes out from the kitchen in a steady line, and I felt awful all over again, because I hadn’t been invited, I’d come unannounced, and now I was going to eat their food.

I’d made peace with it. If we don’t get fed, fine, completely fair, we shouldn’t be fed.

And then a Torajan auntie looked at me and said “sudah makan belum?” Have you eaten yet.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Sit down, sit down, I’ll bring you rice.”

And then it was everyone. Food appearing in front of us, people telling us to eat, eat, eat, that specific Indonesian insistence where declining is not really an available option. Fish. Eggs. A vegetable dish. Rice. Buffalo. Pork.

And ballo. Which is Torajan palm wine, tapped from the sugar palm they call inru, fermented with tree bark until the sweetness turns, sitting somewhere around 4 to 5 percent alcohol, so about a beer. Cold, sour, weirdly refreshing. They’d brought it in jerrycans. Litres and litres of it.

I sat there with a plate I hadn’t earned, drinking palm wine at a stranger’s funeral, being told off gently for not refilling my plate fast enough.

Here’s the thing I only understood later.

Indan: why the meat at a Toraja funeral gets written down as a debt

The meat handed out at a Rambu Solo’ is not catering. It’s accounting.

Buffalo and pigs arrive at these ceremonies as contributions from guests, from extended family, from neighbours. And every single one of those contributions gets written down by adat officials, because it’s a debt. There’s a word for it. Indan.And there’s a word for settling it, umbaya’ indan, which happens years later when the person who gave you a buffalo has their own death in the family and you send one back.

The debt cannot be called in. Nobody chases you. And it gets repaid anyway, basically always, on trust.

The distribution itself happens in public and on purpose. There’s a structure built for it called a bala’kayan, a raised platform near the tower where the coffin sits, and the meat is divided up there in full view of everyone, deliberately, so that the whole village can watch who gets what. Transparency as architecture.

Then it goes out through the saroan, which is the village grouping, roughly the scale of an RT or RW, each one with a coordinator. Names get called out one by one. Half a kilo to a kilo per household.

Overseeing all of it is the tominaa, the ritual specialist, who recites the family genealogy, decides when each stage of the ceremony happens, and leads the division of the meat. He is, functionally, the auditor.

And it matters that much. In one case in Toraja, a disagreement over meat division ended with a man stabbing his neighbour. People do not get stabbed over catering. They get stabbed over ledgers.

So the room I walked into, thinking it was a party, was a settlement day. Hundreds of accounts opened, closed, rolled forward, in meat, out loud, in front of everyone.

How much does a Rambu Solo’ cost? The tiers, from dasilli’ to rapasan

Rambu Solo’ comes in levels. Dasilli’ is the smallest. Dipasangbongi runs a single night and is the ceremony for commoners, historically the tana’ karurung. Then it climbs, more nights, more animals, up to rapasan, which is for high nobility and is not funded by one household at all, it’s funded by an extended family network. That stratification is old and it’s still legible in how many nights you get and how many buffalo die.

Numbers you’ll see quoted: eight to ten buffalo plus a large number of pigs for a middle-class family, and anywhere from 24 to well over 100 for the top tier.

The ceremony also has a rhythm with names for each part. Ma’badong, where men form a circle and chant for the dead with no instruments at all, just voices. Ma’pasonglo’, the procession that carries the deceased to the lakkian, the tower on the ceremonial ground. Ma’tinggoro tedong, the buffalo slaughter, done in a single stroke, which is a specific and prized skill.

Pasar Bolu buffalo market prices: what a tedong saleko actually costs

Also, Toraja has the largest livestock market in Indonesia, Pasar Bolu in Rantepao. It runs on a six day cycle. Roughly 90% of the buffalo traded there are bought to be killed at ceremonies, not for farming and not for meat.

Prices, as reported by Tribun Toraja in July 2025, start around 10 million rupiah and run to a billion. At the top sits tedong saleko, the fully patterned buffalo, going for IDR 500 to 700 million that month, with historical spikes past a billion.

I love that the Indonesian coverage doesn’t bother converting that to dollars. It just says: a Pajero Sport. That’s the unit. A car with a spotted hide, walked into a field, killed in one stroke.

Pigs run 1.2 to 1.5 million for a piglet, from 4 million for a full-grown ceremonial pig, and 10 to 30 million for the big ones.

Bolu turns over somewhere between 600 and 800 million rupiah a day, more in ceremony season.

And my favourite number in this entire piece, because it’s the only one that shows you an actual person’s ledger: a study of pig traders at Bolu out of Universitas Bosowa found an average monthly cost of Rp161,792,918 and an average monthly profit of Rp28,046,476. About seventeen percent. Somebody is running a real business in the middle of all that grief, and running it thin.

Where Toraja’s buffalo actually come from, and it isn’t Toraja

This is the fact that reframed the whole trip for me.

Toraja cannot breed enough buffalo to bury its own dead.

According to field research archived at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the animals come in from Enrekang, Pangkep, Makassar, Mamasa, Kendari, Palopo, and above all from Kupang in East Nusa Tenggara. Kupang is the big one. They go by sea to Takalar and then get trucked up into the highlands. More arrive from Sumba, Kalimantan, Sumatra. At points, from Thailand and Vietnam.

So the most rooted ritual I have ever personally stood inside, a ceremony that is entirely about belonging to one specific piece of mountain, is fed by boats.

The money doesn’t stay either. It leaves for Kupang.

Layer one: Toraja’s slaughter fee, and the buffalo nobody counts

Both regencies charge a slaughter fee at these ceremonies, a retribusi pemotongan hewan. Rates run roughly 100,000 to 1 million rupiah per animal depending on the animal.

In 2025 Tana Toraja collected about 3.5 billion rupiah against a target of 4.7.

Then in hearings on 29 and 30 April 2026, the regional council went at the revenue office about it. The head of the revenue division, Aritini, admitted on the record that money is leaking and said she could not tell them how much. She blamed weak supervision at village level, where collectors work directly at ceremony sites. The council rejected that and said the collectors and the supervisors are working together. The figure attached to the story in the headline is 30 billion rupiah a year.

I want to be careful here because that 30 billion is a council allegation, not an audited number, and I’d be a hypocrite to repeat it as fact.

But here’s what gets me, and it’s the same feeling I had standing in Paotere doing bad maths about tonnage. Nobody knows how many buffalo die in Toraja in a year. I looked. It isn’t published. Not by the statistics agency, not by the regencies, not in any of the academic literature I could find.

And yet the state charges a fee per animal. Which means somewhere, in a drawer, in a village office, there are receipts. There is a number. It’s just not a number anyone has assembled or wants to.

Every “the Toraja funeral economy is worth X” claim you’ll find online, and there are many, and some of them are in US dollars with confident-looking ranges, traces back to nothing. I chased them. There’s no survey underneath. There’s no source. People made them up.

Layer two: why Toraja’s buffalo are stuck at the port in 2026

On 3 August 2026, Frederik Kalalembang, a member of the national parliament, publicly asked the South Sulawesi provincial government to review a governor’s circular restricting livestock movement, brought in over foot and mouth disease.

His complaint was specific. Buffalo have arrived at port and are being sent back to where they came from, because the circular is still being applied.

And his argument was purely economic. More supply means lower prices for families who have a body waiting at home. He also made the tourism argument outright: people come here to see this, and the buffalo are part of what they come to see.

Sit with the shape of that for a second. A ritual that exists to settle debts between families, dependent on a supply chain from another island, now gated by a provincial disease circular. Three completely different systems, and the one that gives way is the family with a coffin in the living room.

Layer three: how a Japanese company trademarked the word Toraja in 1974

On 18 February 2025, Indonesia’s Ministry of Law issued a certificate registering tedong bonga, the piebald buffalo, as Communal Intellectual Property under the genetic resources category. Number SDG732025000073. Filed by the agriculture departments of both Toraja regencies.

The head of the regional law office, Andi Basmal, framed it plainly: protect the culture, raise the economic value of these two districts, support tourism.

Good. Genuinely good. A community registering its own distinctiveness as an asset.

Now hold that next to this.

Toraja coffee is one of the great coffees on earth. In April 1973, a Japanese company sent an executive to Sulawesi to find out what had happened to it, because it had been prized before the war and then vanished off the world market. By 1976 there was a joint venture, PT Toarco Jaya, between Key Coffee and Toshoku. First beans shipped to Japan in 1979. They built roads and schools and processing stations. That part is real and it matters.

But on 22 July 1974, before any of that, Key Coffee filed to trademark the word Toraja with the Japanese patent authority. “Toarco Toraja” was registered there in 1977. In 1997 there was litigation in a Japanese court over who got to use the Toraja name, after another company registered its own Toraja mark in 1992.

Indonesia did not register Kopi Arabika Toraja as a domestic geographical indication until 9 October 2013.

Thirty-nine years.

Indonesian legal scholars have written about this repeatedly, including theses out of UGM and work in the Jurnal Interpretasi Hukum, and they’re blunt about it: the country ended up at a legal and commercial disadvantage using its own place name.

So read the two dates together.

1974: someone else registers the name of your mountains. 2025: you register the hide of your own cow.

That’s the same lesson, fifty-one years apart, learned the second time considerably faster. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the second one happened in a district that has watched the first one play out in its own coffee for half a century.

The real business opportunity in Toraja isn’t more tourists

Not more tourists. I want to be really clear about that, because it’s the lazy answer and the numbers don’t support it.

Foreign visitor arrivals to North Toraja were reportedly around 32,272 before the pandemic, then 730 in 2020, then 179 in 2021.

One hundred and seventy-nine people. And the funerals kept happening. The buffalo kept arriving from Kupang. The meat kept getting recorded.

That tells you which economy is load-bearing, and it isn’t mine.

The opportunity is in the gap, same as it was at the fish market. It’s the boring stuff. It’s counting the animals so a district can actually budget. It’s breeding programmes so the buffalo don’t all have to come by boat from another island. It’s the lantang crews and the caterers and the woman who cooked rice for a thousand people that afternoon, none of whom appear in a single document I could find. It’s a shelf of Toraja products that carry the Toraja name on paper Indonesia owns.

And underneath all of it, a system for pooling money across hundreds of households, over decades, on nothing but trust and a written record, that has been running longer than any bank in the province and that no economist has properly measured.

They call it indan. Debt.

So here’s my question, and I actually want to hear it.

If you were building something here, would you try to formalise a system like indan, put it on paper, make it legible, make it fundable? Or is the fact that nobody can measure it exactly the thing that makes it work?

Thanks for reading Prep Time. If you’re Torajan and I got something wrong in here, please tell me. And if you know a place that runs on a ledger nobody has ever added up, I want to hear about that too.

I’ve been living in Bali almost a year now and there’s this thing I keep noticing and can’t stop thinking about. The influencer economy. Maybe it’s not even new, but living here you cannot miss it.

Restaurants and cafes inviting influencers in to eat. Hotels and villas inviting them to stay. Sometimes there’s money involved. A lot of the time there isn’t. It’s a free meal, a free night, a spa treatment, a table at a beach club, in exchange for a story or a post or a shout out.

And then I started noticing where it actually happens, which is not anywhere fancy. It’s WhatsApp groups. Facebook groups. Someone posts that a place is looking for creators this week, here’s what they’ll give you, here’s what they want back, DM to apply. No agency, no media plan, no contract. A group chat.

Which made me want to know, and this is the whole reason for this piece. Is that paying?

The Secret Society: the Bali app that screens your Instagram for free meals

The group chats are the loose version of this. Then I found the app, which is the same trade with a bouncer on it, and the whole thing stopped being vague.

It’s called The Secret Society. You sign up with your Instagram, and their team goes through your profile, your audience, your engagement, the kind of content you post, and they decide whether you’re in. You need an active account and three photos of yourself. That’s the whole entry requirement. If you’re accepted you get a feed of things you can apply for, and if the venue picks you, you get a QR code to show at the door.

What’s behind the QR code is not small. Restaurants from casual to fine dining. VIP tables at clubs. Beach clubs, pool clubs, gyms, spas, wellness lounges, clinics, salons, day trips, villa stays, brunches, sunset cocktails. And a plus one, frequently.

What you owe in return depends on the listing. Some want a reel. Some want stories. And some, I love this detail, just want you to be present to create a vibe at an event. That’s a real deliverable, written into a real marketplace. Turn up and be the kind of person who makes a room look full.

Both sides get rated afterwards. The venue scores you on whether you delivered. So there’s a reputation ledger running underneath it, which is the part that makes it a market rather than a favour.

It launched in Bali in mid 2024 and it was never a Bali idea. It came from Dubai in 2017, and the founder’s story is the actual reason I ended up writing this whole thing.

Who built The Secret Society (and why it’s really a promoter app)

Romain Fourel was a general manager at Abercrombie & Fitch in Dubai for six years, and while he was there he started modelling and doing social shoots for restaurants and bars. Which meant that venues started calling him. Not to book him. To ask him to bring people.

He told SEELE magazine it directly. “Restaurants, nightclubs, and beach clubs often asked me to bring Abercrombie models to their venues. That’s when I realized the appetite for these types of connections.”

Before the app existed, he was doing the job on WhatsApp. Not making money from it. Just connecting people, because people kept asking him where to go tonight.

And then this line, which I keep coming back to, about why he built the thing. “The landscape was filled with go-to solutions like promoters, while the social media space was evolving rapidly, but the tools weren’t keeping up.”

Read that again. He is not describing a new industry. He is describing the promoter job, the oldest job in nightlife, running on worse software. The whole app is that job with a rating system bolted on.

He self funded it, worked three years of multiple jobs to save for it, and his wife eventually told him to do it or stop talking about it. As of last year he’s got a team of 60, a thousand venues, and 100,000 members, across Dubai, London, Bali and Riyadh, launching in a new city every sixty days. Riyadh alone hit 4,000 members within about three months of opening.

He also said something about the psychology that I think is the most honest sentence anyone in this industry has said out loud. “I’ve always been fascinated by how hype works. It’s a psychological effect, a group dynamic. Hype needs to feel genuine, though. If it looks fake, it dies.”

So: a marketplace whose product is a feeling that must not look like a marketplace.

Is a free meal taxable in Indonesia? PMK 66/2023 already said yes

This was my actual question, the one that started all of it. And it turns out it is not a grey area at all, which surprised me, because everyone talks about it like it is.

Indonesia settled this in 2023. PMK 66/2023, the finance ministry regulation that came into force on 1 July that year, deals with two words worth learning. Natura, meaning goods whose ownership transfers to you. And kenikmatan, meaning the right to use a facility or a service. Both, when received in connection with work or services, are objects of income tax.

A gifted product is natura. A comped dinner is kenikmatan. A free villa night is kenikmatan. The regulation lists what’s exempt, things like food provided to all employees, benefits in designated remote areas, equipment you need to do the job, and a tasting menu in exchange for a reel is none of those. Tax practitioners in Jakarta have been saying this applies to influencers specifically since it landed, and the tax office reportedly runs a social media monitoring system called SONETA, though I could not find the founding document for that one and I’m not going to pretend I did.

The US arrived at the same answer from the other direction. Comped experiences and gifted products given in exchange for a post are barter income, taxable at fair market value, and brands have increasingly been issuing 1099-NEC forms for the value of what they sent, with the product value sitting in the same box as cash would.

And since April this year Indonesian immigration has taken the strictest line of the three, treating unpaid content deals in Bali as commercial activity requiring a work visa regardless of whether money moved. That’s a whole separate article and I’m not writing it today.

Three authorities. None of them coordinating. All of them landing on the same conclusion, which is that the free dinner is a payment.

The only people still calling it a gift are the people doing it.

What a comped meal actually costs a restaurant

Here’s where I got properly interested, because the two sides of this are not even valuing the same object at the same price.

Say the dinner is a million rupiah. Full service restaurants run a food cost of roughly 28 to 35 percent, so call it 30. The venue’s actual cash outlay on that meal is around three hundred thousand.

But the tax law values what you received at fair market value. Which is the menu price. A million.

I find this genuinely funny in a bleak way. The restaurant is thinking in cost. The creator is thinking in value. The tax office is thinking in menu price. Nobody wrote anything down. And the venue is booking it under food cost, alongside wastage and staff meals, rather than under marketing, which means the thing is invisible in the one line of the P&L where you’d actually go looking for it.

Now the second number, which is the one I’d want if I owned a restaurant.

Full service places run a net margin of about 5 to 10 percent, with prime cost eating 55 to 65 percent of revenue. Take 7 percent as a fair middle. To generate three hundred thousand rupiah of actual profit at 7 percent, you need to sell about four and a quarter million rupiah of food.

One comped dinner costs you about four paid ones, in profit terms. And that’s the generous version, because I’ve only counted the food. Not the table you couldn’t sell. Not the server, the kitchen, the host who managed the booking. Not the hour.

Against that, the benchmark marketing budget for an established restaurant is 3 to 6 percent of revenue. So the question isn’t really whether comping is ethical. It’s whether anyone is counting it against that 3 to 6 percent at all, and from everything I can tell, mostly they aren’t, because it’s hiding in food cost.

If you own a venue and you’ve comped fifteen covers this month, you have spent real marketing money and it is not in your marketing line.

Bali run clubs, club promoters, and who gets paid in cash instead of food

So back to the dinners, because this is the part that actually rearranged how I think about it.

Nightlife has been paying people to bring people for decades and has never once been coy about it. The rates are public and boring. Promoters get somewhere around five to twenty dollars a head depending on the venue and the night. Bottle service typically commissions at 10 to 20 percent of the table spend. Head promoters on a percentage deal can sit at 20 to 35 percent of everything the bar takes. There are sub promoters underneath them on five to ten a head. It’s a tiered commission structure, written down, argued over, paid in money.

Same job. Bring bodies through a door on a night the venue needs bodies. The nightclub version gets a cheque. The hospitality version gets a plate.

And it isn’t just me and it isn’t just apps. The community layer here is enormous now. Bali’s run clubs have gone from a niche expat thing to a real network of clubs partnering with cafés and wellness brands, whole business models built on a morning run that ends at a coffee shop. Entourage, started by two Dutch founders, ran more than 250 events in its first year and grew WhatsApp groups past 4,000 people, runs and padel and surf, hosted at local venues.

Every one of those events is footfall delivered to a business at a specific hour. Every single one is a promoter deal. Almost none of them are called that, and I’d guess very few are invoiced.

Forbes called this the third space boom and framed it as everyone from wellness to hospitality competing on who can make a stranger feel like they belong by the end of the night. Which is lovely, and also, belonging is now a media buy with a rate card that nobody has printed.

Influencer marketing in Indonesia: the market size nobody is counting

Right. The opportunity, which is what I actually wanted to get to.

Start with the honest admission that this industry cannot measure itself. Global influencer marketing forecasts for 2026 run from about 34.1 billion dollars at the low end to 47.8 at the high end, with Mordor landing at 40.51 in between. That is nearly fourteen billion dollars of disagreement about the size of a thing.

Indonesia’s own number is about 257 million dollars in 2025, up from 225 the year before, growing near 10 percent a year. Which sounds modest until you put it next to the participation. GroupM counted around 12 million Indonesian creators producing something like a million pieces of content a month against roughly 143 million social users. One of the highest creator to population ratios anywhere.

Twelve million creators. Two hundred and fifty seven million dollars. That’s about twenty one dollars per creator per year in measured spend.

Obviously that can’t be the whole picture. And the reason it can’t is the reason I’m writing this. The measured number counts cash. It does not count the dinner, the villa night, the beach club table, the QR code at the door, the discount I negotiated for my group. None of that is in anyone’s market size, because none of it moves through a payment rail.

The barter layer is not a small edge case sitting next to the real market. In a place like Bali it might be most of the market.

So the openings, as I see them, and I’d love to be argued with on all of these.

The boring one, which is usually the right one. Somebody should sell venues a way to see this spend. Not a creator marketplace, there are plenty. A tool that pulls comps out of food cost and puts them in the marketing line with a cost per cover attached. Every restaurant I’ve ever talked to about this has a feeling about whether it works and not one has a number. Traceability is unglamorous and it’s the difference between a budget line you can defend and a habit you can’t.

The pricing one. There’s no rate card for any of this in Southeast Asia. Global guides will tell you a hotel creator collab runs three hundred dollars at a small boutique up to three thousand at a property with a formal programme, with raw footage licensing on top at plus 30 to 50 percent. None of that translates to Canggu and everyone here is negotiating blind. Whoever publishes the first credible Bali rate card sets the market, which is a genuinely powerful position.

The one that’s already happening. The industry is drifting from gifting toward paid plus licensing, because brands worked out that the valuable thing was never the influencer’s audience, it was the footage. You can buy a reel once, or you can buy the B roll and cut it into campaigns for a year. That reframes the creator as a production company that happens to have followers, which is a much better business for them and a much clearer invoice for everyone else. It also makes “production fee” an honest description instead of a euphemism.

The one nobody’s built. The community layer has no infrastructure at all. Run clubs, dinner groups, padel WhatsApps, the whole footfall economy, all of it operating on goodwill and vibes with no contracts and no rates. Nightlife solved this decades ago with a commission structure. Hospitality hasn’t, and the people doing the work, me included, are mostly taking payment in a form they can’t bank, can’t report, and can’t build on.

And there’s a real risk in all of it, which is Fourel’s own line. Hype needs to feel genuine, and if it looks fake it dies. Every one of these fixes makes the thing more formal. More formal means more visible. More visible means the audience can see the machinery, and the research on disclosure is genuinely split on what that does. Broadly, telling people it’s sponsored costs you engagement in the short term and buys you credibility over time, and it hurts big accounts more than small ones. So the people with the most to lose from honesty are the people at the top, which explains a lot about who’s arguing for what.

So, comped meal or production fee?

I’m still going to message the next venue and ask for a discount. Let’s be so for real. But I’ve stopped thinking of it as a favour, and I’ve started thinking about what it’s actually worth to them, which is a table of confirmed people on a night they’d otherwise be quiet, and what it costs them, which is more than they think and less than I’d have guessed.

The thing I can’t stop turning over is that we built an entire economy on the one form of payment that leaves no trace. Not because anyone was hiding anything. Because dinner didn’t feel like money.

So my question for you, and I actually want to hear it. If you run a venue, do you know what you spent on comps last month? Not roughly. The number. And if you’re on my side of it, bringing the people, what would it take for you to send an invoice instead of a thank you?

Thanks for reading Prep Time. If you’ve negotiated one of these deals from either side, tell me what it looked like. I’m collecting them.

Writing this from Bali, where I have now walked past three gyms in about four minutes, which is not an exaggeration and is not even unusual anymore.

You know what I mean if you live here. There’s a gym every 300 metres. Then a mega gym. Then a wellness club with cold plunge and infrared and a juice counter. There are running clubs, there are walking clubs, there was that whole drama a while back that I’m not going to relitigate here. The whole island has quietly turned into a place where your workout is a social calendar.

So it makes sense that the food followed.

Why Bali restaurants are putting "no seed oil" on their staff t-shirts

I ate at Butter Protein Club when it first opened.

What I remember most isn’t a dish. It’s the staff. They were wearing crew shirts that basically said it out loud, no seed oil, we only fry in beef tallow. The ingredient list, on a t-shirt, walking around the room before you’ve even ordered.

And their whole pitch was carnivore diet but make it healthy, and make it not cost a fortune, which in Bali is genuinely a position. They were popular from the very beginning and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. The shirt WAS the marketing.

They’re still running that way. Butter Protein Club describes itself as an animal-based, seed oil free fitness steakhouse, fried things in beef tallow, stir fries in grass fed butter or olive oil, salads in extra virgin olive, vegan dishes in coconut oil. The Meat Emporium over in Kerobokan does tallow fries too. There is now an entire directory of seed oil free restaurants with a Bali section, which is a sentence I could not have written five years ago.

So I got curious. Is this a real shift, or is it a t-shirt? And if it’s real, where is all that beef fat coming from?

The answer to the second one turned out to be the interesting part.

Why McDonald’s stopped frying in beef tallow in 1990, and why the fix was worse

Quick history, because it’s short and it’s genuinely a bit unhinged.

Until 1990, McDonald’s fried in beef tallow. Then it stopped. The company announced the switch to vegetable oil in July 1990 after eight years of internal study, cutting saturated fat per serving by about 45 percent.

A big reason it happened is one guy. Phil Sokolof, an Omaha businessman who had a heart attack at 43, started the National Heart Savers Association and bought full page newspaper ads in New York and Chicago going directly at McDonald’s over the tallow. He’s reported to have spent around 15 million dollars campaigning over two decades, though I’ll be honest, that figure travels around the food press and I couldn’t chase it back to a primary document, so hold it loosely.

Here’s the part that makes me laugh in a not funny way. The vegetable oils that replaced the tallow were partially hydrogenated. Which means trans fats, which the FDA later moved to eliminate entirely, forcing the entire industry to reformulate a second time.

So the fix was worse than the thing it fixed. For about twenty years. Nobody meant it. That’s what makes it bleak.

And now it’s swinging back. The 2026 US Dietary Guidelines promote cooking with butter, beef tallow and olive oil, and RFK Jr said he was “ending the war on saturated fats.” Steak ‘n Shake switched its fryers to 100 percent beef tallow in early 2025 and posted its best same store sales since 1992. SPINS data puts US retail sales of products containing beef tallow at around 1.1 billion dollars in the year to March 2026, up roughly 275 percent in three years. Conagra put it on the front of a bag of fries. Utz is frying chips in it.

Forty five years of policy, reversed, and the crew shirt in Pererenan is downstream of all of it.

Beef tallow vs seed oils: what the research actually says

Short answer, not really, and I want to be careful here because this is the part everyone gets loud about.

The strongest card the tallow side holds is a real one. Christopher Ramsden and colleagues recovered the lost data from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment and published it in the BMJ in 2016. It was a proper double blind trial, 9,423 people, 1968 to 1973, swapping saturated fat for linoleic acid. Cholesterol went down. Deaths did not. Ramsden’s argument is that trials like this got half published for decades, which made the swap look better than it was.

That’s a fair hit and it deserves to be taken seriously.

But then. A pooled analysis in Circulation looked at actual linoleic acid measured in people’s blood across 30 studies in 13 countries and found higher levels went with LOWER cardiovascular disease, stroke and cardiovascular death. Not higher. Lower.

And the American Heart Association’s line is blunt. Their 2024 piece is literally headlined “There’s no reason to avoid seed oils and plenty of reasons to eat them.” Stanford’s Christopher Gardner in that piece: “People are cooking with these oils, not drinking them.” His sharper point is that seed oils are getting blamed for the company they keep, because they live inside ultra processed food, and “it’s hard to cast the blame on the seed oils when these foods contain so many other things.”

Although, fairness, that same AHA article carries a correction from March 2025 because an earlier version got the inflammation mechanism wrong. Even the people telling you not to worry got a detail wrong once.

So the honest read is this. The scientific consensus has not flipped. What flipped is who’s holding the pen. And even the movement didn’t fully get its way, the 2026 guidelines promote tallow but never actually attack seed oils, which is a very quiet detail nobody posts about.

Oh and one more thing I enjoyed. Cate Shanahan, who’s called the mother of the seed oil movement, brands them the Hateful Eight. Two of the eight, corn and rice bran, are not seeds.

How palm oil replaced coconut oil in Indonesian kitchens

Here’s where it stopped being an American story for me.

We did this. Before we had a word for it.

Until the 1960s Indonesian households fried in coconut oil, pressed from kopra, the old dried coconut flesh. That was the fat. It was ours, it grew here, your grandmother used it.

Then the state chose differently. From the mid 1970s the government backed palm because it was faster and cheaper to produce, plantations went from 174,000 hectares in 1974 to around 200,000 by the early 1980s, and by 1984 palm was locked in as the flagship commodity while ordinary coconut got left behind. Coconut cooking oil faded out through the 90s.

So while America is having a wellness movement about going back to the traditional fat, we already did the swap, forty years earlier, at national scale, by decree. And nobody here is nostalgic about it because nobody was asked.

And cooking oil in Indonesia is not a lifestyle choice. It’s a political object. There’s a government price ceiling on it. MinyaKita’s HET sits at Rp 15,700 a litre, and it doesn’t hold, real prices run above it, and plain bulk cooking oil was going for Rp 19,400 to Rp 21,500 a litre in late April 2026.

The government is also now fighting for the leftovers. Permendag 2/2025, in force since January 2025, tightened exports of used cooking oil and palm residues specifically to keep raw material at home for cooking oil and to feed the B40 biodiesel mandate.

Read that again. Your jelantah is now strategic. The oil you already fried in is being fought over as fuel.

Where does beef tallow in Bali come from? Not from Bali cows

This is the bit that changed my mind about the whole business question.

I assumed, lazily, that a Bali tallow supply would come from Bali cows. It almost certainly doesn’t.

Bali has roughly 353,000 head of beef cattle. Sapi Bali is a small, lean tropical breed. A study of carcass composition at the slaughterhouse found separable fat making up only about 1.25 to 2.15 percent of the carcass, rising with slaughter weight, across animals slaughtered at 225 to 300 kilos. For comparison, that’s a fraction of what a grain finished Western animal carries.

You cannot build a rendering business on that. There’s barely anything to render.

Then there’s who eats it. Cows are sacred in Balinese Hinduism and beef is rarely eaten, most strictly among Brahmin and Kshatriya families, less absolutely further down, and buffalo gets used ritually precisely because it’s exempt from the cow’s status. I don’t want to flatten this into “Balinese don’t eat beef,” because that’s too neat and it isn’t true across the board. But it does mean the demand for beef here leans heavily on Muslim Indonesians, Javanese workers and tourists, and the supply chain is built accordingly.

Nationally we don’t even have enough beef for ourselves. The Ministry of Agriculture estimated 2025 supply at about 491,700 tonnes against consumption of 724,200 tonnes, a deficit of 236,500 tonnes, covered by imported feeder cattle and frozen meat. The 2026 gap is projected to be bigger.

So the tallow in that fryer in Pererenan is, in all likelihood, imported. On an island whose used cooking oil is being held back for fuel. Marketed as the natural, ancestral, local choice.

That’s the twist and I don’t say it to be mean about anyone. It’s just what the numbers say.

Is beef tallow better for deep frying than palm oil? The stability data says no

I went in assuming tallow’s economic case was fry life. It’s low in polyunsaturates, so it should survive the fryer longer, and longer fry life offsets a higher purchase price. That’s the argument you hear.

I could not make it stand up.

Standard palm olein has a Rancimat oxidative induction period of about 27 hours at 100 degrees. That is a genuinely excellent frying fat. And a 2025 study in Food Chemistry comparing beef tallow’s frying performance against other fats found that despite tallow’s inherent stability suggesting it should hold up beautifully, most of the samples tested performed similarly to or worse than high oleic sunflower.

So the fat that Indonesia flooded its own kitchens with, for reasons that had nothing to do with health, happens to be one of the better things you can put in a deep fryer.

Which means if you switch to tallow, you’re not buying performance. You’re buying flavour, and you’re buying the story on the t-shirt. Those are legitimate things to buy. They’re just not the same thing as an efficiency.

The beef tallow business opportunity in Bali, in three layers

Three layers, and they point in slightly different directions.

Layer one, the demand is real and it is foreign. Bali took 6,948,754 direct foreign arrivals in 2025, up 9.72 percent, with Australians at 1.63 million the single biggest group. Australians, Americans, Brits. Exactly the populations where 28 percent now say they avoid seed oils. You are not selling to Bali. You are selling to people who flew here already believing this, and Butter Protein Club figured that out early.

Layer two, the supply gap is the whole opportunity, and it’s boring. Nobody in Bali is producing halal certified, food grade, consistent beef tallow at commercial volume. And the certification isn’t optional anymore. BPJPH’s mandatory halal regime explicitly lists edible beef fat, dripping and tallow as products requiring certification, and it applies to imports too. That’s a barrier, which is exactly why it’s a moat for whoever does it properly. The catch is the raw material. Local sapi Bali won’t feed it, so a serious operation is buying trim from Java or importing, and at that point you are a processor and a distributor, not a farm to fryer story.

Layer three, and this is the one that worries me, everyone wants this fat for fuel. The global tallow market is put at 10.3 billion dollars in 2026, forecast to more than double by 2036, but around 64 percent of that is INEDIBLE grade going into industry and energy. US renewable diesel capacity is up 538 percent since January 2021 and tallow, used cooking oil and animal fats have become structurally constrained commodities. Indonesia is doing its own version with B40. So the food business and the fuel business are bidding for the same barrel, and the fuel business is much bigger than you.

And for anyone running a kitchen here rather than building a supplier, the operator maths is less scary than it sounds. When Steak ‘n Shake switched, food cost went from 30 to 31.4 percent of net sales. A 1.4 point gross margin hit. They absorbed it because traffic went up. That’s the whole trade in one number. It costs more, and it only works if it brings people in the door.

Utz’s chief executive Howard Friedman has said the quiet part about all of this, that consumer interest could fade as fast as it arrived and flexibility matters more than committing your whole portfolio. He’s right. This entire category is currently attached to one administration’s dietary guidance in a country most of these customers are only visiting.

So should a Bali kitchen fry in beef tallow, or in coconut oil?

The thing I can’t shake is the coconut.

If what people actually want is a traditional, local, minimally processed cooking fat with a real story attached, Bali is sitting on it. It grows here. It was the default until the state decided otherwise. It’s already what Butter Protein Club uses for its vegan dishes. And Indonesia’s coconut oil industry is right there, underbuilt, waiting.

Beef tallow in Bali is an imported answer to an imported question. Which doesn’t make it a bad business. Imported answers to imported questions is arguably the entire Canggu economy and I say that with love and as a participant.

But if I were putting money in, I’d be much more interested in the boring middle. Certified, consistent, food grade rendering that supplies twenty kitchens instead of one. The Paotere lesson again, honestly. The money isn’t in the fish. It’s in everything that happens between the boat and the plate.

So, my question for you, and I actually want to hear it. If you were opening a kitchen in Bali tomorrow, would you fry in beef tallow you have to import, or in coconut oil that grows down the road and has a better story than either of us has been telling?

And if you work in a Bali kitchen already, tell me what you actually fry in and what it costs you. That’s the number nobody publishes and I’d love to know.

Thanks for reading Prep Time. If your kitchen changed its oil in the last two years, for any reason, I want to hear why.

It’s been a few days and my sandals still smell faintly of the ocean and of something that used to live in it. I’m not throwing them out tho, it’s worth it.

We left the hotel at 6:30 in the morning, and got there just before 7. We’d been asking around beforehand, “Which fish market to go? Rajawali or Paotere?” and every person answered the same way and answered it fast. If you want THE fish market. Paotere. Nobody said well it depends what you’re after. Just Paotere, like there was only one correct answer and I’d been a bit silly for asking.

What Paotere fish market actually looks like at 7am

The Grab drops you at the entrance and drives off, and the first thing that happens is that you don’t see the fish market immediately.

You’re in a long alleyway of kiosks. They’re selling food, bags, the ordinary stuff any traditional market anywhere sells. It could be any pasar in the country. There’s no gate, no sign going FISH THIS WAY.

What tells you is the people coming the other direction. The entire time you’re walking in, there’s a steady counter-current walking out, and every single one of them is carrying fish. Heavy plastic bags of it, held out away from the body.

It’s 7am, they’re finished with their morning, when mine hasn’t started yet. That was the first moment it properly landed that I was arriving late to something.

I had also braced for the smell, and I was expecting that thick funk you get from walking past a supermarket seafood counter near closing. I had decided in advance that I was going to be very mature about it.

But not at the entrance, not further in, not at the boats. It never came. I didn’t understand that at the time. I understood it completely a few hours later, but let me not skip ahead.

Inside Paotere: wet floors, motorbikes and everyone shouting

You don’t arrive at Paotere. It starts happening around you before you get there.

Still outside the main-roofed-market part, still technically in the walkway, and there’s already shrimp on the ground in front of you. Squid. Fish laid out on sheets of plastic at your feet, so you’re immediately doing that careful “walking on eggshells” where you’re looking for parts of the road where it’s less watery. Then you’re under the roof and the volume goes up. People calling you out, working for your attention, because in a room where everyone is selling more or less the same thing, attention is the only lever anybody has.

Walk farther down, you start seeing motorbikes come through. Actually through, not around, styrofoam boxes strapped to the back, and everyone steps aside without looking up.

And the water. The floor is not damp, it is WET, in every direction, seawater and melted ice and whatever else, and it is going on your feet whether you like it or not. Wear sandals you have already emotionally let go of. That is my one practical piece of advice in this entire article.

The boats, the barracuda, and Makassar fish prices that stopped me

Then you keep walking and the market opens up and there are boats.

Not two or three picturesque ones. A wall of them, hull against hull, loading and unloading, and behind those, more. The impression is that it doesn’t end. Men moving crates, ice going one way, fish coming the other. This is the part where I stopped trying hard to analyze and just stood there for a while.

And the fish coming off them.. A barracuda, easily a metre and a half, laid out on the wet concrete like a piece of furniture. Swordfish. A shark, a small one, maybe 50 centimetres, which I did not expect and had to double check with the person I was with because I thought I wasn’t looking correctly. Crabs. Clams. Tuna in sizes I didn’t know tuna came in. Mackerel everywhere.

Then I started looking at prices.

The barracuda was Rp200.000. The whole barracuda. Longer than my torso. Whole beautiful fish going for Rp25.000, for Rp50.000. I did some bad calculation in my head, then did it again. Did I heard wrong?

How fish gets to Paotere: the 11pm to 5am night shift

I talked to a man named Samsul, who catches and sells his own fish, and I asked him the dumbest, most useful question I could think of, which was basically: can you walk me through your day.

His day starts at 11pm. He leaves then, reaches the fishing ground around 1 or 2 in the morning, and works with a bagan, which is a lift net platform, the kind with lights that pull the fish up toward the surface in the dark. He hauls the net at 3am. He’s back at Paotere by 5am.

Allu, who sells squid, told me almost exactly the same numbers. Out around 11 at night, back at subuh, first light. He closes at 3 in the afternoon. Rian, another seller, goes out right after Maghrib prayer and gets in around 1 or 2 in the morning.

So by the time I rolled up at 7am, freshly showered, feeling quite proud of myself for being awake, every single thing I was looking at was already eight hours old and had been hauled out of the Makassar Strait in the dark by someone who had not slept.

The market’s official rhythm matches this exactly. Researchers from Universitas Hasanuddin who studied Paotere’s operations found marketing runs in two shifts, roughly 5am to 10am and then 1pm to 5pm. Samsul put it more bluntly. The fastest it sells out is 9am. If there’s stock left it drags to noon, and then he comes back for the afternoon round, 2 till 5. Rian said the same, morning from 6, second wave at noon.

The same study counted about 5,000 people moving through that port on a normal day. Fishermen, pond farmers, port staff, collectors, and people like me and you just buying dinner.

Who actually sets fish prices in Makassar (it isn’t the auction)

Here’s where it got interesting for me.

The place is officially called a Tempat Pelelangan Ikan. A fish AUCTION place. Allu, when I asked where we were, said “lelong Paotere,” the auction. The name is right there. The city has been trying to police that auction since the 1950s, and Makassar’s municipal archives show officials writing to the police in 1954 asking them to supervise it because of recurring chaos, which is a very funny detail to find in a government file.

And yet almost nothing I read about how prices actually get set in this part of Indonesia describes anything like an auction.

What it describes is a system called punggawa-sawi. A punggawa is a patron, usually a boat owner or a financier. A sawi is his crew, his client, the person who owes him. Anthropologist Andrew McWilliam of Western Sydney University and Nur Isiyana Wianti of Universitas Halu Oleo describe it as “an economic safety net but also a form of market-based inter-dependency founded on debt.” The punggawa funds the boat, the fuel, the gear. He also runs the shop that sells you rice and instant noodles on credit when the wind is too strong to go out. In return you sell your catch to him. Not to whoever pays most. To him.

A study of fishermen in the Spermonde islands just off Makassar found 53 % of fishermen were in one of these relationships and only 37 % were independent. And the researchers are direct about what that means for price. The fisherman repays his debt by selling exclusively to his patron, “who sets the price and keeps track of the debt balance.”

So who sets the price at Paotere? Not the auction, mostly. The person who lent you the money for diesel.

But I mean to be fair.. This system is also the reason a lot of families eat during bad weather. There’s no rural bank showing up at 11pm to fund your fuel. The punggawa does. McWilliam and Wianti end their paper with a line I keep thinking about: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

When I asked Rian whether prices were going up or down, he said up. Why? “Kencang angin.” The wind is strong.

That’s it. Small fishermen across Indonesia stop going out for two weeks to two months during the west monsoon, losing up to 5 million rupiah a month according to the national traditional fishers’ union. Allu told me prices were stable the day I came. Rian told me they were climbing. Neither of them was wrong. They sell different fish, and the wind doesn’t treat everyone the same.

Ikan bolu, juku’ eja, and what South Sulawesi really eats

I asked Rian what the actual Makassar fish is. The one that’s theirs.

Ikan merah, he said. Red snapper. Then he gave me the Makassarese: juku’ eja. About 22 to 25 thousand a kilo. Then kudu-kudu, a boxfish, which I had genuinely never heard of. Then bolu. And when I said what’s bolu, he said, bandeng. Milkfish.

Which is the plot twist of this entire piece, because bandeng isn’t caught in the strait at all. It’s farmed in brackish ponds and trucked in. A Paotere trader told Kompas the bandeng there comes from Barru, Pangkep, Maros and Luwu Raya, inland and up the coast, by road.

And here’s the number that made me sit up. Fisheries economist Dr Suhana, reading 2025 BPS household data, found that the single largest weekly per capita spend on fish in South Sulawesi is bandeng, at Rp80,236. Shrimp and lobster second at Rp43,225. Cakalang third at Rp35,467.

South Sulawesi is a maritime province with a legendary seafaring history that spends more of its fish money on a pond fish than on anything that swims in open water. The province eats about 66.81 kilos of fish per person per year against a national average of 58.76, and the thing it reaches for most is farmed.

Suhana’s read on why is lovely. He argues people here don’t treat fish as cheap protein, they treat it as something with taste, prestige and tradition attached. Fresh sea fish is what you serve a guest.

Which is exactly what Bahtiar was doing. I met him walking out with a heavy bag and asked what he’d bought. Ikan cepak putih. Ten of them. Friends were flying in from Jakarta and Lampung that same day and wanting ikan bakar and kapurung, the sago dish, the Sulawesi cousin of papeda. He was going to do the fish in kuah asam, sour broth. He was hunting at the fish auction at 7 in the morning because people he loves were coming over.

Then he told me the price, and this is where the article turns.

Indonesia’s seafood export gap: where the money actually goes

Bahtiar paid Rp200,000 rupiah for ten fish. Rp20,000 each. And he said, unprompted, that in a restaurant one of those fish would probably run you Rp25,000.

Layer one, the domestic gap. Officially, Paotere landed 187.9 tons in the first quarter of 2026, worth just under 8 billion rupiah, which works out to about Rp42,000 a kilo at the dock. Meanwhile the Hasanuddin team physically measured 34.127 tons crossing that dock PER DAY. 34 tons a day across a quarter is roughly 3.000 tons. The official ledger says 188. That’s about 6%. I can’t tell you where the rest goes, and neither could any source I found, which is its own kind of answer.

The market is also legally classified as a Type D port, meaning it’s built and permitted for an average of about 2 tons a day. It’s doing 34. Its own ice plant makes 500 blocks a day and it isn’t close to enough, so people buy ice from outside. The clean water tower is broken, so traders draw from a borehole about 100 metres deep and the big boats buy water outside the port in jerrycans on carts.

Now zoom out, because that’s not a Makassar problem. Up to 29% of Indonesia’s fish is lost in the domestic supply chain every year, mostly to bad ice, overpacked baskets and no cooling between hands. National cold storage capacity sits around 500,000 tons against roughly 20 million tons of fish produced annually. That is the entire opportunity in one sentence. A country that catches an ocean and refrigerates a puddle.

Layer two, the export picture. Indonesia is the second largest fish producer on earth by volume, around 22 million tonnes. Its seafood exports in 2025 came to US$6.27 billion, up 5.2%, with the US the biggest buyer at 1.99 billion, overwhelmingly shrimp.

Vietnam, on roughly 8.8 million tonnes, exported over 11 billion dollars.

Read that again. Vietnam catches under half of what Indonesia catches and sells it for nearly double. That gap is not fish. That gap is cold chain, processing, grading, traceability and paperwork. It’s everything that happens to a fish AFTER it stops being a fish and starts being a product.

South Sulawesi specifically sent 355,431 tons of commodities to 63 countries in 2025, around 11.1 trillion rupiah, of which fisheries were roughly 7.1 trillion. Biggest single earner? Seaweed, at 2.3 trillion. Top destinations China, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and the Philippines. The province’s number one marine export is something almost nobody in Makassar sits down to eat.

Layer three, Paotere is not just a supply chain. It’s a room. It has boats, noise, a metre of barracuda on wet concrete, and men who’ve been awake since ten last night. People pay real money to stand in rooms like that.

Tokyo has already run this experiment for us. The old Tsukiji inner market pulled roughly 42,000 visitors a month. Then it moved into Toyosu, a bigger, cleaner, more modern facility, the largest fish market in the world. Visitors dropped to around 10,000 a month and Tokyo has been building shopping complexes and hotels next door trying to win them back.

They upgraded the building and lost the thing people came for.

Makassar is running the exact same experiment right now and I don’t think enough people have noticed. Since 2005 Indonesia has been building PPN Untia, a 38-hectare national-class fishing port on the edge of the city, presidentially inaugurated, meant to take the industry and the auction that Paotere physically cannot hold. Local press spent years describing it as somewhere people go fishing for fun and couples go to be alone.

In the first quarter of 2026, Untia landed 49.1 tons. Paotere, the crowded one that ran out of space over a decade ago, landed 187.9.

Nearly four times, on a fraction of the land, with a broken water tower.

So should Makassar modernise Paotere, or leave it alone?

The opportunity in Makassar is not more port. It’s everything in the gap between the boat and the buyer. Ice that actually works. Cold trucks. Small-scale processing so a fish leaves the province worth more than it was worth at 5am. Financing that competes with the punggawa instead of pretending he doesn’t exist, because he’s the only one lending at 11 o’clock at night and until someone else does, he sets the price. Traceability, which is boring and unsexy and is the literal difference between 6 billion dollars and 11.

And underneath all of it, a market that’s already one of the most alive rooms I’ve walked into this year, that nobody is really treating like the asset it is.

But I’ll be honest about the tension, because I don’t think it resolves cleanly. Every single fix on that list makes the chain more formal. And the informality is not just inefficiency, it’s also Samsul deciding on the spot which fish go to the restaurant and which go to the auntie in front of him. It’s Bahtiar getting ten fish for Rp200,000 because he showed up early and knows what he’s looking at. Modernise it badly and you get Toyosu. A better building that fewer people love.

I asked Samsul, at the end, if there was anything he wanted to say. He’d been awake since before eleven the previous night. He said “pokoknya semua sukses, bahagia selalu,” basically, may everyone succeed and always be happy. And when I asked who all the work was for, he said his family.

So my question for you, and I actually want to hear it. If you were building something in that gap, would you formalise Paotere or would you fund the people already in it and leave the room alone?

Thanks for reading Prep Time. If you’ve got a market in your city that runs on a schedule nobody sees, tell me about it.

The whole world is kind of breaking up with wine right now, lowest it's been since 2000. Except here. Southeast Asia is quietly falling for it. So I went digging into how you even become one of those wine people who can swirl a glass and just know, and found out the fancy word for them literally started as the guy who carried the luggage.

Writing this from a cafe with a garden, open concept, so breezy. Had a flu for a couple of days but being out here is so good, having the sun actually touch your skin after being stuck inside. Also might I add the World Cup finals are coming. I was rooting for France and England and neither of them made it, so honestly the bronze fight is the most fun for me now, eh.

Speaking of. I’ve been on a wine roll these past few months. I’ve never been a wine person before but somehow it grew on me. My palate keeps changing too, started from never liking wine, to liking dry white, to now, give me a sweet red with my steak or a grilled chicken thigh (yes, gym food and wine same plate, best of both worlds baby). I’m not saying I’m a wine expert by any means, I just like what I like (the girl cant even name more than 5 types of wine for gods sake), not to mention I’m seeing a rise of natural wine bars poppin up in Bali. But I always find people who can taste a wine and actually tell you the difference so amazing. They’re the cool kids. I wanna be them.

Wait, the word “sommelier” means WHAT

So I went down a rabbit hole. And the first thing that made me laugh is the word itself. Sommelier. Sounds fancy right, sounds like something you whisper in a dark restaurant. Nope. It comes from an old French word, saumalier, for the guy who drove the pack animals, the donkeys hauling stuff around, from the Latin sauma, which literally meant the load a beast of burden carries. Like. Beast of burden energy. And it gets funnier, because for a while a sommelier was just the person who moved the French royal court's luggage when they traveled, Louis XIV era and everything, and only around the 1680s did it finally become the wine guy, basically a fancy butler. So the cool kids I wanna be? Their whole title started as the person carrying everyone's bags. I think about that every time I watch someone swirl a glass like it weighs nothing.

Ok so how do you actually become one

Anyway I got curious how you actually become one, and ok, it’s a lot. Turns out there are two totally separate ladders and the serious people climb both. One is WSET, the bookish one, four levels of knowing wine, how it’s made, why it tastes like that, taught in like 70+ countries. The other is the Court of Master Sommeliers, which is the restaurant floor one, the blind tasting, the serving, the running of an actual wine list. Most people who take it seriously end up with a bit of both.

And the top? Brutal. Fewer than 300 people in the entire WORLD hold the Master Sommelier diploma, the count sits around 291 to 299 right now. The theory part of that final exam passes about 1 in 10. The baby entry exam is nicer, passes like 60 to 75 percent, so basically the door is wide at the bottom and needle thin at the top. And it costs money the whole way up, a couple hundred bucks for the first WSET course, closer to a thousand for the Court’s intro thing, then over a thousand dollars PER TRY as you climb, before you’ve even bought wine to practice with. So becoming a cool kid is less “born with a magic tongue” and more “quietly obsessed for years and also kind of rich.”

Plot twist: the world is over wine. Except Southeast Asia.

But here’s the plot twist that actually got me. I apparently started loving wine at the exact moment the rest of the planet is over it. Global wine drinking just hit its lowest since 2000, and even Asia Pacific as a whole dropped about 4 percent in a year. And yet. Southeast Asia and India went the other way. As the middle class here grew, people started drifting from beer and spirits toward wine, and the fastest growth in the world is now expected out of Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia. So wine is dying basically everywhere except, lowkey, my backyard.

And I find that kind of sweet honestly. Like a whole region learning to love something its grandparents never touched. Wine was never our drink. No family vineyard, no bottle passed down, no old ritual. So we’re building the whole thing from zero, one palate at a time, exactly like mine wandered from “no thanks” to dry white to whatever this sweet red phase is. Even China, which everyone calls this giant wine market, still drinks only about half a litre per person a year, the lowest of the top 20 wine countries. So a big market and an actual wine culture are not the same thing. One is money. The other is a feeling, and feelings take longer.

Bali makes you work for it (thanks, tax)

And here in Bali the feeling has to fight the math, hard. Indonesia taxes imported wine like a crime, duties reported around 90 percent, plus a 2015 rule that pushed some drinks up to 150 percent of their market price. You can carry in ONE litre per adult. So every bottle on a Seminyak list already climbed a giant wall of tax before it hit your table, which is exactly why wine here feels a little glam and a little out of reach. Meanwhile Bangkok cut its wine duties in 2024 and prices dropped up to 40 percent almost overnight, and boom, wine bars everywhere. It kind of blows my mind that one line in a tax code decides what's in your glass on a random Tuesday. Wine likes to act like it floats above money and paperwork. It never has. Even the word remembers, someone always carried the weight.

The natural wine bars, and the purity plot twist

Which, ok, brings me to the bars I keep wandering into. The natural wine ones. Warm light, handwritten labels, bottles that taste a little wild and alive. And natural wine is basically the only part of the wine world still SPRINTING, growing over 20 percent a year while regular wine shrinks, and Asia Pacific is projected to be its fastest growing market. The idea is pretty and simple, grapes grown without the chemical stuff, fermented with the wild yeast that’s already there, nothing really added or taken away, barely any added sulfites.

But here’s the part that made me actually laugh out loud. The movement that’s all about purity and nothing added? Kind of invented by a marketing guy. The origin story is four winemakers in Beaujolais who ditched chemical farming in the 80s, and everyone calls them the Gang of Four, except that name was made up by an American importer named Kermit Lynch to SELL the wine, and the winemakers never even called themselves that. So the whole “nothing added” thing was, itself, kind of branded into existence. And their mentor, a guy named Jules Chauvet, wasn’t some barefoot hippie either, he was a trained chemist who studied fermentation and argued against dumping sulfur in wine before it was cool. The godfather of “wine with nothing in it” understood exactly what was in it. Iconic.

Oh and the purity has a catch the wine nerds still fight about. There’s no such thing as a zero sulfite wine, because fermentation makes sulfites on its own, so the honest labels can only say “no sulfites added,” not none. And then they argue endlessly about how much is too much. Which I kind of love. I walked into these bars for the vibes and the cute labels and turns out there’s this whole passionate messy argument underneath about what “real” even means. Makes the cool kids feel more human. They’re not sure either. They’re just further down the same road I’m on.

Will it last? Maybe not. But..

I’ll be real though, none of this is guaranteed to last. Seoul had its own natural wine craze and reportedly went full boom and bust in like a couple years. Bali’s moment could fade too, the laneway bars turning into smoothie spots by the time you read this, who knows. But the thing that actually sticks isn’t the trend. It’s the people quietly building real careers inside it. The Court has been teaching in Asia for over 19 years now, started in Hong Kong and Singapore, spread into Vietnam, Malaysia, India, China, and in 2025 handed out its 2,000th certificate in the region. Singapore made its first ever Master Sommelier, Mathias Camilleri, back in 2017. Somewhere in a restaurant near you a server who started out carrying plates is doing flashcards between shifts, climbing from the floor to the cellar. Which is honestly the same trip the word sommelier has been making for 700 years, from the one who carries the weight to the one you trust with the good bottle.

Am I gonna become a Master Sommelier? No. Let’s be so for real, the girl still can’t name 5 wines. But I think I finally get why I keep drifting into those bars, why I want so bad to be able to taste a glass and just tell. It was never really about the wine. It’s about the quiet unglamorous obsession underneath it, the years of studying and the insane tax and the fights about sulfites, all that invisible weight somebody carries so a stranger can sit in a garden cafe on a breezy afternoon, a little flu-ish, a little in love with the sun, and craving a glass of cold Chardonnay that was never part of her culture before.