Where you actually eat: the two hotel restaurants that decide your week

Nobody reviews these rooms. The tasting menu gets the photographs and the chef's name, and meanwhile you eat most of your meals somewhere else entirely, usually in swimming shorts, usually at an hour that suits nobody's kitchen.

That is the genre I want to write about, and it splits neatly in two once you start paying attention. Every hotel has a workhorse: the one room that opens early, closes late and has to do everything. Some hotels also have an outward-facing room: a beach club, a rooftop, a terrace on the street, with its own entrance and its own customers who have never seen the lobby.

The first tells you how deep the kitchen really is. The second tells you whether the hotel is willing to be judged by people who could easily go somewhere else. And you can work out which hotels have both before you book.

Part one: the workhorse

One brigade, fifteen hours, four cuisines. A guest wants eggs at seven, a nasi goreng at two, a green juice at four and a steak at nine, and every one of them has to be good, because a bad club sandwich on day two lodges in the memory far longer than a middling tasting menu ever does. This is the hardest brief in the building and almost nobody writes about it.

It is also much harder for some hotels than others, which is worth saying plainly. A three-hundred-room resort with eight venues can let its workhorse be a buffet with live stations and put the ambition elsewhere. A twenty-villa hotel has one room that carries the entire day, and nowhere to hide.

Which is why the small ones impress me most. Cotta at Soori covers breakfast and a Balinese-led dinner in a hotel with no second option, and it produces the chicken cooked slowly in volcanic sand that I still think about. Copper Kitchen, Bar & Rooftop at Bisma Eight carries the hotel almost single-handed, with Embers and a small teppanyaki room sitting over at the group’s villas rather than in the hotel itself, and it is good enough that people who are not staying there come up for the evening. The Tempayan at Tanah Gajah doubles as the all-day room at a hotel small enough that it has to, and on a good night the chef is untouchable.

Mads Lange at Capella Ubud runs from early morning until late in a tented dining room in the jungle, moving between Indonesian dishes and contemporary European cooking without dropping either, which is precisely the trick this genre demands.

Kirana at Anantara Ubud is the reason that resort feels alive rather than reverent. There is almost nothing nearby, so it has to be the one-stop shop, and it manages it: I ate there repeatedly without ever resenting it, mostly the local dishes, the ayam taliwang and the babi kirana in particular.

Nelayan at Jimbaran Puri sits on the sand and does the same job, and I never once caught it slipping. Banyubiru at The Laguna was rebuilt around warung-style stalls and a show kitchen precisely so that everything is cooked to order rather than held under a lamp, which is the single most useful design decision in this category. And Fire at W Bali covers breakfast and then turns into the grill in the evening, twelve cuts and a meat sommelier, which is an unusually confident way to use one room twice.

Part two: the outward-facing room

Now the pattern that made me start thinking about any of this. The best of these rooms are almost never buried in the middle of the resort. They sit on the edge: street side, boulevard side, beach side. The side a local can reach without walking past reception.

Uma Cucina is literally street-side at the front of COMO Uma Ubud, raised above Jalan Raya Sanggingan, open from lunch until late rather than all day, and it takes bookings from anybody who calls. The Pizzaria shared by Hyatt Regency and Andaz sits on the Sanur beach walk doing proper wood-fired pizza with the path running past the tables; we ate there regularly as a break from the Andaz and charged it straight back to the room. Pier Eight at the InterContinental Sanur is down on the sand at the end of the boulevard and is a genuinely good spot, provided you understand that the water in front of it is for looking at.

Kulkul Beach House at The Laguna is, for my money, the best beach bar in Bali and the constant on that property. Fisherman's Club at Andaz was our favourite for both lunch and dinner. Seasalt at Alila Seminyak does seriously good seafood with Japanese and Mediterranean leanings and welcomes outside guests. Cascades at Viceroy is the accessible end of a serious operation, and where I go for an Indonesian lunch with a view you would cheerfully lie about having seen. The Reef Beach Club at The Apurva and The Beach Grill at The Ritz-Carlton are the Nusa Dua versions, both better than the enclave's reputation suggests.

And Sundara at Four Seasons Jimbaran is the most famous of them, with its own entrance straight off the beach.

What the open door does, and what it costs

When a hotel restaurant has to win customers who could simply walk on to the next place, it gets sharper. It is judged nightly by people with no room key, no loyalty and no reason to be polite, and that is a discipline no internal audit reproduces. It also changes what the hotel thinks the room is for: not an amenity guests will use because they are trapped, but a business that has to be good on a Tuesday in February. The cynical reading is that this is about revenue rather than pride. Fine. The result is the same, and you benefit either way.

But it has a price, and Sundara is where you see it. You pay a great deal at that resort for privacy and a self-contained world, and then you walk down to the beach club and it can feel properly touristy. If Sundara were guests-only, Four Seasons Jimbaran would be about as close to a complete hotel as I have stayed in on this island. The open door is the reason the food is good and the reason the mood is not quite what you paid for, and I am genuinely unsure which way I would choose.

The two kinds of room, and where to find them

All-day and outward-facing hotel restaurants in Bali

Restaurant	Hotel	Which kind	Go for
Mads Lange	Capella Ubud	Workhorse	Indonesian and European from early to late, in a tented room
Cotta	Soori Bali	Workhorse	One room carrying a whole hotel, and doing it well
Copper Kitchen & Rooftop	Bisma Eight	Both	Carries the hotel on its own, and outsiders come up for it
Kirana	Anantara Ubud	Workhorse	Ayam taliwang, babi kirana, and no competition anywhere near
Nelayan	Jimbaran Puri	Workhorse	On the sand, and never once slipping
Banyubiru	The Laguna	Workhorse	Warung-style stalls, everything cooked to order
The Tempayan	Tanah Gajah	Workhorse	A small hotel’s only room, and a chef worth catching
Fire	W Bali	Workhorse	Breakfast, then twelve cuts and a meat sommelier
Kulkul Beach House	The Laguna	Outward-facing	The best beach bar in Bali
Sundara	Four Seasons Jimbaran	Outward-facing	Its own entrance off the beach, for better and worse
Fisherman’s Club	Andaz Bali	Outward-facing	Lunch and dinner on the Sanur beachfront
Pizzaria	Hyatt Regency	Outward-facing	Wood-fired pizza on the Sanur beach walk
Seasalt	Alila Seminyak	Outward-facing	Seafood with Japanese and Mediterranean leanings
Pier Eight	InterContinental Sanur	Outward-facing	The boulevard end of the beach, good cooking, poor swimming
Uma Cucina	COMO Uma Ubud	Outward-facing	Street-side Italian, lunch until late rather than all day
Cascades	Viceroy Ubud	Outward-facing	An Indonesian lunch with an outrageous view
Reef Beach Club	The Apurva Kempinski	Outward-facing	The Nusa Dua beach club done properly
The Beach Grill	The Ritz-Carlton	Outward-facing	Lunch on the sand below the cliff

Opening hours in Bali move with the season and the occupancy, and hotels publish them inconsistently, so we have left times out. Message ahead if you are planning to arrive at an odd hour.

The part that surprised me

The daily cooking gets less interesting as the room rate climbs. The workhorses I have enjoyed most are mostly not in the most expensive hotels on this island, and several of the ones that have bored me are. Amandari and Amankila are two of the finest hotels in Bali and I would send you to either tomorrow, and during the day both are weak on the plate. Mandapa, Bvlgari and both Four Seasons serve food that is competent, pretty and predictable in a way that does not match what the rest of the property is doing. Ubud as a whole is quieter on this front than its reputation suggests.

I do not think that is laziness. I think it is caution, and caution scales with price. Once a hotel is charging a thousand dollars a night it has a great deal to lose from a guest disliking lunch and very little to gain from a guest loving it, so the daily menu is engineered to be beyond reproach rather than worth remembering. Which is why the best all-day cooking in Bali keeps turning up in hotels with fewer rooms and less to protect.

How to use all this before you book

Two questions, and they take a minute. First, find the hotel's all-day restaurant and ask what it actually is. If the answer is a buffet with live stations, you are in a large resort that has decided dinner is logistics. Not a disaster, but plan to eat elsewhere twice.

Second, ask whether somebody without a room key can walk in, and whether the room has its own entrance from a street or a beach. If it does, the odds are strong that you will eat well all week, because strangers have been keeping that kitchen honest for years.

Neither test is perfect. Kirana breaks the second one comprehensively, because there is nobody to walk in and the food is excellent anyway. But between them they have told me more about how a week will go than any menu I have read in advance, and they cost nothing to check.