A trio of Audrey Hepburns

Lurid signs on lagoon

Glasses at Le 48

Seeing Richard with beer glasses on - my large Bintang

Bali has it's share of oddball restaurants. We usually eat one Indonesian dinner there to reaffirm that we've had enough of the food. It's generally too hot (spicy) for my super taster tongue* (rendered even more sensitive post-rad) and prepared too long ahead of time. The Balinese cook food in the morning and leave it available for whoever in the household wants to eat any time of day. They eat alone, when they are hungry - communal dining is for special occasions. Everyday eating is a solitary affair - alone with God. 

So Balinese

We look elsewhere for our meals - not necessarily for fine dining but for the food service quirkiness that seems to wash up on Bali's shores.  Le 48 in Candidasa lived up to our expectations - expectations established by the huge, lurid sign they have draped across their patio looking out on the lagoon. The decor theme is "Breakfast at Tiffanys" and the Balinese waitresses are costumed like the iconic Audrey Hepburn in the film - little black dresses, long black gloves and a rhinestone bracelet. There were three girls working the night we dined there and one of them was pregnant! The black, white and red decor is stark and modern - just as unexpected in this setting as the trio of Balinese Audrey's. Mother nature can't abide plain white spaces so geckos have moved into the vacuum. The acrobatic, sticky footed creatures** cling to the walls (I counted 20 at one time), croaking their "Toke, Toke" sound. "Toke", pronounced "tokay" is what the Balinese think the geckos sound like. I don't agree...it's "Uh-oh, Uh-oh" to me.

One of the Audrey's

The food was sort of French and not bad. The Audrey's were excellent, providing the kind of service you'd expect at a very upscale restaurant - quiet, efficient and absolutely correct.

*Not a boast, but a statement of biological fact - a burden I had to overcome during the course of my career. From Prevention.com:

To identify supertasters, researchers rely on a chemical called PROP, used to treat some thyroid conditions, applied to small strips of paper that tasters put in their mouths. Nontasters, who also account for about a third of the US population, will taste nothing, and medium tasters, another third, will find the taste moderately bitter. But to a supertaster, the taste is overpoweringly bitter: Some researchers believe supertasters experience flavors with three times the intensity of others.


**From Answers.com. 
Geckos are the ultimate climbers of the vertebrate world with the amazing ability to freely scamper around on walls and ceilings. How do they do that? Each of their toes is covered with tiny hair-like projections called, setae. The tip of each seta is covered with hundreds of very fine projections called spatulae.

Each spatula has a microscopic diameter smaller than the wavelength of visible light. The spatulae stick to walls and other surfaces by van der Waals forces, an electrostatic attraction or repulsion between materials caused by the uneven distribution of the charge on their molecules. These allow geckos to cling to almost any surface without secreting a sticky substance.