Morgan Ong

Bali Pub & Grill, 2416 18^th Street, sits in the middle of a small block between Broadway and X Street. With the exception of a beauty shop, this block remained residential for many decades. The building that houses the Balinese restaurant was built in the early 2000s. It was home to Jag’s India House Restaurant before Bali Wine Bar & Grill opened here. In mid-2009, the restaurant’s owner changed the name to Bali Pub & Grill to reflect the European-inspired term for “bar” in Bali’s taverns and resorts.
 
Small local changes in land use patterns are linked to big national and global changes in economic behavior, such as more eating out, and in cultural behavior, such as more eating of “foreign” foods.  The evolution of Broadway exhibits both those trends. 
 
Most Americans have little familiarity with Indonesian cuisine in general or with Balinese food in particular. This unfamiliarity is understandable in terms of the relative lack of immigration to the United States from Indonesia.  The American Community Survey (2005-07) estimates that the entire U. S. has only about 88,000 residents who were born in Indonesia, despite its being the fourth most populous country in the world.¹  This compares to between one and two million each from China, Vietnam, and India.  In the local four-county region (Sacramento, El Dorado, Placer and Yolo Counties), there are about 1,000 immigrants from Indonesia, compared to 20 times that many from China, from Vietnam, and from India.  (Even more have come from the Philippines, but for various reasons probably having to do both with the food itself and with ethnic employment niches, restaurants featuring Filipino cuisine are not numerous.)
 
Bali (population 3 million) is one of 17,508 islands (about 6,000 inhabited) that make up the country of Indonesia in Southeast Asia.  It is one of the most famous of the islands due to its beauty, cultural distinctiveness, and proximity to Indonesia’s most populous island, Java (population 130 million). 
 
Indonesian food has not become as well known in America as other Asian cuisines, such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Indian. Bali is the single largest tourist draw in Indonesia, and its culture receives exposure to outsiders by that means.  In 2008, nearly 2 million foreign tourists visited there. However, the United States was only the tenth-ranked source of visitors to Bali, sending 69,000; the top source, Japan, sent more than five times that many.²
 
In the 1930s, Bali attracted Western artists, scholars, and others appreciative of its physical beauty and unique culture.  Their work helped project Bali’s image as a tropical island paradise, which became the basis of its large tourism sector several decades later.  Culturally, Bali is famous for its performing and visual arts.  Part of the island’s singularity lies in the lingering influence of Hinduism, whereas the rest of Indonesia is predominantly Muslim.
 
Rice Dominant
Indonesian has three different words for rice, padi for growing rice, beras for uncooked rice grains, and nasi for cooked rice.  Bali’s landscape and cuisine are both dominated by rice.  Some of the most beautiful humanized landscapes in the world consist of Bali’s terraced flooded rice fields reflecting a range of green, gold, and brown hues.  Subak, the ancient and still-used water management system for growing rice, is multidimensional, involving an extensive physical infrastructure, complex social arrangements, and significant spiritual practices.  Rice is the mainstay of ritual offerings on Bali, which range from a few simple grains of rice placed by a household doorway to fantastically elaborate sculpted tableaus made from brightly colored rice dough for major ceremonies at village temples.  “In Bali, rice is food, rice means life, rice is turned into art.”³
 
The production of paddy rice is something that the Sacramento Valley has in common with Bali.  While rice cultivation locally does not carry the same spiritual freight that it does on Bali, it does share with it the central challenge of water management.  Also, although one might be tempted to think of California’s rice farming as modern and innovative and Bali’s as ancient and traditional, that would not be wholly accurate.  Many farmers on Bali use scientifically improved strains of rice, which have made possible much larger harvests, but not without cost—to the environment and to tastiness. 
 
Rice is cooked early in the morning in most Balinese households and is available for eating throughout the day.  The most common dish is nasi goreng, fried rice with vegetables, while the also popular nasi campur refers to steamed rice served with bits of vegetable, meat, fish, and a krupuk (prawn cracker).  Simplest of all is lontong, rice steamed in a banana leaf.  Nasi Padang, from the Padang region on the island of Sumatra, is eaten all over Indonesia, and consists of rice with various side dishes, many of which are spicy hot. 
 
World Cuisine
Many cuisines have influenced Bali at its crossroads location, and ingredients from all over Asia and beyond have become important to its cooks.  The most obvious example is chili peppers, which were domesticated in Central and South America and brought to Southeast Asia by European explorers and traders, where “they’ve been embraced as though they were a native ingredient.”⁴  Important flavors in Balinese and Javanese cooking include cardamom, coriander, and cumin from South Asia, and the variety of soy products invented by the Chinese are vital ingredients in many dishes.  Garlic from Central Asia and the tamarind fruit from East Africa are additional evidence of wide geographical influences on Balinese cooking.  Of indigenous ingredients in Balinese cooking, the most important is coconut, which can appear in the form of oil, milk, or grated. The coconut shell is broken into pieces to serve as charcoal in the Balinese grill. The spices that drew European ships to Southeast Asia, such as cloves and nutmeg, are not native to Bali but to other islands in the region.  They appear in a number of Balinese savory dishes.
 
Over the past couple of decades it has become much easier to prepare Balinese dishes in the United States.  The arrival of Asian immigrants, even if not Indonesian, has resulted in the establishment of many Asian grocery stores and farmers markets selling the necessary ingredients.  Cookbook authors, such as James Oseland, recommend purchasing ingredients from jasmine rice to frozen spices in successful Asian shops where varieties will be greatest and turnover fastest (thus increasing the likelihood of freshness).
 
In Sacramento, there are many such enterprises from which to choose in the Stockton Boulevard corridor and in other scattered locations. Southeast Asian growers sell fresh Asian greens, Japanese eggplants, Kaffir lime leaves and lemongrass at local farmers markets.
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¹ http://factfinder.census.gov
² http://www.tourismindonesia.com/2009/02/japanese-tourists-top-list-of-tourist.html
³ Hamilton, Roy W., The Art of Rice: Spirit and Sustenance in Asia.  Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2003, p. 343.
⁴ Oseland, James, Cradle of Flavors: Home Cooking from the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.  New York: W.W. Norton, 2006,  p. 52.