A Hidden Restaurant

We left the Prambanan Temple Complex fairly close to dinner time. The nice thing about a packaged tour is that you don’t have to worry about where you will eat or finding a place that should be food-safe. You just get on the bus and the touring company will take you to a place at about the right time.

At least the good ones will. This trip was so good about it that I didn’t pay much attention. By the time I was hungry, there was food. Mind you, having spent the previous seven months starving myself, my perspective might have been a bit different from someone who eats a good deal more. To me, there was too much food all the time.

Like usual, I was in it for the ride. What’s more, I don’t require pretty scenery along the way. I require things that I am not familiar with. So this particular ride was great!

The last time I saw someone holding their roof in place with old tires was in Mongolia, and the roof in question was the flap of a ger (ie yurt). Although this wasn’t particularly common in Indonesia, it wasn’t a surprise either. on this particular road it fit in.

I did not recognize the cemetery we past at first, though it’s perfectly obvious to me now. Somehow my first though was of bunkers or maybe something to do with a temple. I guess I assumed that if most people cremated, then what use a cemetery? I think if not for the bright paint on some of the tombstones I’d have caught on faster.

The road got more and more remote with less and less traffic. Fairly soon we were on dirt road. Some of the hungrier people in the tour started voicing concerns. Did the driver really know what he was doing?

Up to this point we’d been eating at some very, very nice restaurants. Not only was the food good, but so was the ambiance. We’d been serenaded at the table more than once. We’d had lines of servers come around with platters of food to choose from.

Generally speaking, these kinds of places did not come at the ends of dirt roads. But this one did.

With waitstaff waving us in, we dutifully trudged off the bus and into the building.

Again, we were treated to good food in a pleasant environment. This time we ate under a substantial roof but no walls. A tall bamboo thicket rose from the riverbed a story below. During the course of the meal some poor gardener worked to cut it down. Probably to improve the view of the river. Sorry, I didn’t get any good shots. There was too much bamboo in the way. 🙂

This is just a little pond built into the restaurant.

They even had the usual array of souvenirs for sale in the entry and exit ways. Clearly someone knew what they were doing, except for the location, maybe?

The answer was that the owner knew exactly what he was doing every step. He used to be a tour guide. He used his connection in the industry to get the word out that he could provide exactly the kind of dining experience that people from the US and Europe wanted in a place convenient to the temples at substantially lower prices by putting it in an out of the way place.

It became an over night sensation. People love the surprise of finding such a restaurant in such a place.

After that it was just a matter of winding our way back to more substantial roads, past fish farms, and into the familiar streets of Yogja