Best Food in Bali: the dishes worth planning a morning around (2026)
Sometimes you do not want to know where to eat. You want to know where to eat one specific thing, because you have been thinking about it since yesterday. These lists are built that way.
One dish, every kitchen on the island that puts it on the menu, and what each version actually is. They cross neighbourhoods, so a list may send you an hour up the coast. When it does, the entry says so, with the ride time in it.
Best shakshuka in Bali
Bali cooks shakshuka better than an island this far from the Levant has any right to. Nine kitchens put it on the menu properly: two do the Middle Eastern version over fire, the rest serve it as brunch, and one builds it on aubergine instead of tomato. Prices run from 75,000 to 125,000 rupiah, and the expensive one is not automatically the good one.
Also spelled shakshouka, and on some menus here it hides as baked eggs, skillet eggs or Moroccan eggs. → the nine, with what is in each pan
Best hummus in Bali
Hummus in Bali splits three ways: the kitchens where it is the whole point, the Greek and Middle Eastern rooms where it arrives as part of something larger, and the beach clubs where you will end up ordering it anyway. Ten places, most of them in Seminyak, Kerobokan and Canggu.
→ the ten plates worth ordering
Best avocado toast in Bali
The dish this island has made its own, and the one where the gap between kitchens is widest: the same 100,000 rupiah buys you a smash on soft sourdough or fermented pickles and pomegranate on seeded rye. Eight across the island, and a separate seven for the Uluwatu coast alone, where breakfast is the meal that matters.
→ eight across Bali · → seven on the Uluwatu side
Babi guling, and when it sells out
The one Balinese dish most visitors have heard of before they land: a whole young pig, spit-roasted, served as a plate with rice, crackling, lawar and soup. It is a lunch, and the crackling runs out by early afternoon. Sixteen warungs across the island, with the hours each one keeps.
→ the best babi guling in Bali
Dinner, by quarter
Dishes cross the island; dinner does not. Nobody drives ninety minutes for an evening meal, so those lists are written by quarter instead: thirteen in Ubud, twelve in Balangan.
→ dinner in Ubud · dinner in Balangan · and the beaches, with what is worth eating after each one.
Questions people ask about food in Bali
What food is Bali known for?
Locally, nasi goreng, babi guling and the warung plate. But the food people travel across the island for now is the breakfast and brunch cooking that grew up around the surf coast and Canggu: shakshuka, avocado toast, hummus plates, bowls. That is what these lists cover, because that is what people actually plan a morning around.
Is food in Bali expensive?
Two economies run side by side. A warung plate is 40,000 to 70,000 rupiah. The kitchens in these lists run 75,000 to 125,000 for breakfast and well past 250,000 a head for dinner in Ubud or Seminyak. Neither is the real Bali more than the other, and the prices in our lists come off the kitchens' own menus.
How do you choose the places?
The dish has to be on the kitchen's own menu, and we have to be able to read it. Where a kitchen does not publish a menu we can check, the entry says so instead of inventing what comes on the plate. Nobody pays to appear, and there are no affiliate links anywhere on this site.