Bakso sellers are an integral part of the street culture and street life of both Indonesia and Bali. These spoon-tapping, bowl-clanging food peddlers (tukang bakso) nudge brightly painted, rickety mobile carts from compound door to compound door in the late afternoon selling bakso. Their colorful push cart contraptions, colloquially called kaki lima (kaki meaning leg, lima meaning five) consist of two bicycle wheels, a back stand and the two feet of the cook! A popular Balinese favorite, bakso is a clear mild soup usually containing round meatballs or boiled chicken, glass noodles, shredded cabbage, rice cakes, hot chilies and herbs. The soup is served out of a pot kept hot over a burner. Vendors bring their own plates and cutlery, but as there is no running water plates are casually washed in a plastic bucket. Other rotating vendors tempt excited school children to come outside for roast chicken with strong sambal, small bungkus rice packets and individually made and mashed orders of minced, scented secrets encased in brilliant green banana leaves.
Each mobile restaurant seller makes a specific food-associated sound as he walks or pedals along to let customers know exactly which snack is trundling up their village street. The mie ayam (chicken noodle soup) seller hits a wooden stick against a hollow, reverberating bamboo tube (“tek-tek”). The always welcome bakso man pings the side of a soup bowl or tinkles a glass with a spoon. The late afternoon steamed rice cake (kué putu) merchant toots a bicycle horn. Families look forward to his sweet corn skin wrapped traditional jaja. The coconut ice cream cone purveyor rings a small ding-a-ling bell, and the rujak (a spicy, sweet and sour fruit salad) hawker squeezes a diminutive horn. Loyal Balinese patrons rush through their carved split household gates, bowls in hand! Mobile food orchestras produce a cacophony of these characteristic snacking sounds (taps, rings, tinkles, toots, whistles, horns and chimes), the unmistakable and familiar resonating trills heard throughout the Indonesian archipelago.
Traveling trolley cooks also congregate outside Bali’s larger tri-weekly village markets and at events, fairs and temple festivals, usually in vacant lots or at strategic locations, promoting local foods like tofu in sweet sticky peanut sauce, clear pork ball soup and green mung bean porridge in portable plastic bags. Most street cart food sellers are young, unskilled, otherwise unemployed males from East Java and other neighboring islands. Meatball soup hawkers, young coconut traders and grilled fish purveyors are all local male migrants from outside Bali. Because they obtain working capital easily, they can sell everywhere. Kaki lima vendors often live in a compound together with other street hawkers and make their food in the early morning before they set out for a long day of pushcart selling. They typically carry an onboard stove, food supplies, dishes, washing up water and sometimes a dining bench as they take to the road to dish up bowls of noodles, steamed rice coconut treats, tiny satay and nasi goreng (fried rice) or bakmi goreng (fried noodles). Bakmi is a vermicelli-like dish with vegetables, shrimp, shredded meat, etc. Soto (soup) ayam (chicken) hails from Java but it is available everywhere in Bali that the kaki lima men go. It contains cellophane noodles, bean sprouts, scallions, lemon slices, hot chili, egg slices, fried onion bits and sweet soy sauce. Reliable kaki lima vendors also feed the thousands of licensed beach sellers roaming the long sandy stretch from Kuta to Seminyak.
Operating from often nothing more than an old bicycle with a wooden board and plastic crate set atop the seat, stationary beach bicycle warung are brilliantly equipped to portion out precooked nasi bungkus (nasi campur to go) in folded conical brown paper packets for Rp.3,000. Bungkus means wrapped up in paper or leaves, or a wrapped package (nasi bungkus is normally a multi-element rice mixture wrapped in a banana leaf). One determined beach entrepreneur even carries two heavy pink plastic bags all along the pantai filled with packets of folded nasi campur in brown paper parcels. He easily disposes of them to the communal knots of sleeping-squatting, chattering necklace and manicure ladies who appreciate the convenience of his “walking restaurant.” The busy beach baristas also carry peanuts, swirled krupuk sealed in crisp plastic, water in plastic jugs and coffee. They normally stock long hanging strip packets of instant coffee. They snip one off the row with scissors, unravel a plastic cup from a pendulous sleeve and pour in hot water brought from home in ceramic jugs. When they run out of boiling water, they get more from a convenient sister concocting regional specialties at a nearby food stall. Their regular coffee brand attracts customers at Rp.2,000, while special ginseng coffee costs Rp.3,000. A row of permanent beach bars serves ice cold soft drinks and beer to tourists on the white sands across from the Inna Kuta Beach Hotel. Eddy, owner of Eddy’s Bar, delivers service with a delighted smile. He greets returning guests with hugs and utter joy, as lost-long family members.
Roving bygone Bali peanut sellers balance a traditional bamboo pole across the back of their shoulders supporting two large V-shaped bamboo slings with tightly packed fiber nets full of brown unshelled peanuts. This shoulder-borne carrying pole with the two baskets is called a kander in the Malay language.) Different vendors offer fried peanuts. Customers carry away their piping hot snack wrapped in kertas bungkus kacang goreng (special paper used to wrap fried peanuts). A traditional Balinese-style jagung bakar (grilled corn) seller squats low over the ground on a rough-hewn hand-made wooden stool. She arrives at 3 p.m. every day and situates herself at the exact same spot on Kuta Beach, by the side of the footpath near the local warung market. She brings with her an antiquated, collapsible foot-tall easel-style wood base. It supports a small, battered metal tray under a two-rod grill pan filled with glowing charcoal. The seasoned, weather-wrinkled ibu is all set up to do a roaring trade from this primitive contraption well supplied with fresh pale green ears of corn, a spare black plastic bag full of charcoal shavings and a plastic tub of salted butter. She husks yellow cobs of corn and places them on the grill, six at a time, continually fanning the darkening ears with a practiced hand and an old bamboo mat to keep the embers alive. The ears are turned over for three to four minutes and served with a final brush of either salted butter or chili sauce for Rp.5,000 each. Sunset belongs to other two-wheel-and-handle stand corn on the cob cart sellers, usually male migrants from Lombok strung along the water line at lit-up Jimbaran beach. From the sandy southern beaches to busy temple ceremonies, they fan and sell charcoal-grilled browning ears of corn and roasted peanuts by portable kerosene lamplight as the sun descends on the island of the gods.
Warung stalls set up at the local pasar malam or at Denpasar’s bustling night markets serve simple, fresh, genuine local delicacies at minimal prices in minimal comfort (nasi goreng with fried egg is Rp.7,000). Mie goreng (hot, fried flat thin noodles) is an Indonesian and Balinese grazing mainstay, similar to nasi goreng. Popular snacks include sweet, fluorescent ice drinks; sweet and sour rujak; satays; lawar; mie bakso (meat balls and noodles); tahu goreng (deep-fried stuffed beancurd) and salted peanuts. There will always be a market stall selling heavily fried martabak (derived from India), a folded-over egg omelette pancake filled with tidbits of vegetables. Martabak pancakes are made from a sheet of dough with various added fillings (martabak telor is a deep-fried beef, egg and vegetable pancake). Martabak manis is a sweet-stuffed pancake.
A vast choice of vividly colored fried rice crackers (krupuk) sealed in plastic bags dominates the domestic snack market. Krupuk is a generic term for all kinds of baked or deep-fried crackers made from a starch base (various kinds of flour) with seasonings and ground shrimps, fish or other ingredients. Krupuk udang is a prawn cracker,