Montgomery Inn: I'm Not Convinced

Okay, let's not get into details, but I found myself in Cincinnati, Ohio a few weeks ago, and a classmate recommended that we all try Montgomery Inn. There are a lot of sports jerseys in Montgomery Inn. I take this to mean that big men who burn a lot of calories and can afford to eat substantial quantities of protein like the barbecue at Montgomery Inn.

I think the big men in sports jerseys should go find a place with linoleum on the floor and sauce in plastic squeeze bottles.

Or they can visit New York and stop by Hill Country or Fette Sau because I like me some super fatty ribs, and Montomery Inn's ribs aren't as lip-smackin' as one would hope.

I will say this for the place, amazingly friendly wait staff. Almost disturbingly friendly. They make people nicer out in the midwest I've discovered.

Montgomery Inn, 925 Riverside Drive, Cincinnati, OH

Best meal of the trip

Our best meal of the three week trip to Indonesia was not in Indonesia. It was in the Ueno district of Tokyo.

We had an eight hour layover in Narita airport on our multi-leg journey back to the states, and my brother and I opted to take the train into Ueno to try and find a decent meal. Our plane landed a bit after seven in the morning, and by the time we went past customs and got on the train, it wasn't until 10am that we arrived in Ueno. We had some time to kill, so we roamed the food market in this mall that was only a few blocks from the train station. It was like a Japanese version of the food section at Harrod's. In other words, awesome.

Then we made our way over to Ameyoko-cho, which had tons of vendors setting up for a day of selling, including fish mongers with enticing displays of fresh seafood. In the end, we decided to choose the above restaurant, which was just opening up around 11am. We saw a Japanese business man pop in and hoped we would be in good hands.

It turns out we were. The restaurant consist of a small cooking area with a wrap-around bar, where individuals can pool up a stool and order their lunch.

A steaming vat of tonkotsu broth simmered away as we decided which picture on the menu looked tastiest.

My brother went with a more traditional, miso ramen. When that bowl arrived, his bent his head down, started slurping and didn't come up until he was done.

I opted for a kimchee ramen and was soon a very very happy woman. The noodles were more similar to Momofuku's than Ippudo's, but they were thicker and chewier than even David Chang's. I loved it. Wish I had a second stomach so I could have ordered more. But life is not always fair.

Some ramen restaurant, Ueno district, Tokyo, Japan

Makin' Lunch

My brother and I visited a temple in Bali, and I snapped this picture when I peered into the kitchen for the restaurant adjoining the temple.

Three Monkeys

Our last meal in Ubud was at a place, that remarkably, I remember: Three Monkeys. We went because Lonely Planet said that they had good Vietnamese summer rolls. My brother loves a good summer roll. Three Monkeys does not make amazing summer rolls. Don't go.

We ordered coconut juice with lime, which turned out to be young coconut juice and really not satisfying when what you were hoping for was a tall glass of sweet creamy coconut milk with beads of condensation running down the sides of the glass.


By now I had really given up on Indonesia food, so I tried the Singapore soup noodles. Not enough kick, but there was enough potential there that I want to go to Singapore and try some of their food. See, that's the thing. Really amazing cuisine is good enough that even poor renditions will still permit you to see the potential. A crap tarte tatin is still pretty good, so you know it's worth it to find a really phenomenal one. Though I guess those Costco croissants really give no indication of how amazing a fresh buttery croissant from a little Parisian patisserie can taste.


My brother decided to play it safe and went with the nasi goreng (more fried rice), but it had these bitter greens in it and he gave up on finishing his dish until I plucked all of the offending vegetable out of his platter. My brother is a grown man, but he still knows how to manipulate his big sister.

Three Monkeys, Jl Hanoman, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

Another restaurant in Ubud

Maybe I'm not a true devotee of my passion. I mean, I spent a lot of time in Bali eating at restaurants designed for tourists. Like this one, where I ordered some green veggie juice. It had celery, cilantro and green apple in it and made me feel ridiculously healthy and virtuous.

And look, I'm not truly adventurous, because we ordered, yet again, a Tom Yum Soup. I wish Indonesia would consider adopting Thai cuisine as its own.

Boring grilled meats.

Well actually, this fried rice wrapped in either grape or lotus leaves (I'm going with lotus) was remarkably good. One of the better fried rice dishes of my life. It had a little kick in it, was super aromatic, and I found myself digging in the folded crannies of the leaf looking for the stray kernels.

Chicken wings weren't so exciting. But I love the skin so much, I don't really regret ordering it.

Balinese Coffee and Chocolate

The real focus of our visit to this tourist stop was the coffee and cacao. These are coffee beans on the plant. They are ripe when the beans turn red.

Here are normal dried coffee beans, pre-roasting, pulp extracted.

These are super special coffee beans. They came from poo.

Yes, that's right poo. Poo from a civet that likes to eat the coffee beans.

This one's tired from a hard day's work.

They had a lady on site who demonstrated how to roast the coffee beans and bring out the aroma.

After roasting, the beans take on the dark brown tones we all know and love.

Here's a mortar and giant pestle (OMG, I just started to spell giant "jiant." What is wrong with me?) to pound the coffee beans into grounds.

Then we got a complimentary tasting of coffee, ginger coffee, ginger tea, and hot chocolate. Yum. I don't know much about coffee, so I couldn't really gauge whether or not the Balinese coffee was exceptional. We got a packet of ginger coffee for my mom. I started to feel weird after taking sips of the different drinks one after another.

But I did not feel bad enough to stop myself from taking a photo of this cute cinnamon jar that was on the table to flavor our drinks.

Oh, and backtracking a little, these are fruit pods from a cacao tree. The green one isn't ripe yet, but the yellow ones are.

The cacao seeds are used for making chocolate.

But you can take suck on the pulp enveloping the seeds. It's got a mild, sweet flavor with a very subtle almost citrus flavor.

And that's your coffee cocoa lesson for the day!

Balinese Fruits

Mangosteen are my favorite fruit, but somehow, stupidly, I failed to eat even one during my trip to Indonesia. Can we say idiot?

My brother and I did go to this location set up for tourists to learn more about Balinese agriculture. We got to try some of the local fruits including this snake fruit, which I did not dig. It tasted like a slightly dry, slightly sour, too firm pear. No thank you.

The passion fruit was awesome though. It had a milder flavor than I would have suspected, and the little seeds were encased in these translucent jelly sacks that were fun to pop in my mouth. I do find it rather mortifying that I've never had fresh passion fruit before.

This, I don't know what this is. Pretty ain't it?

Guava was more boring than I had hoped. Now I do think I've tried fresh guava on a trip to Thailand, but I don't really remember it, so I'm still just as embarrassed. It sort of had a bland flavor.

Somewhere in the green hills of Bali, Indonesia

Somewhere near Monkey Forest Road

Oh crappers, this is what happens when you don't write things down. We went to this restaurant somewhere near the famous Dirty Duck restaurant in Ubud, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was. Dumb kid brother, you reading this? Do you know where we went? I bet DKB is not reading this. Loser.

Stir fried broccoli and garlic. Do you ever feel a bit duped when the waitress brings out a dish you could easily make and easily make better? It's not the restaurant's fault: they said it was just broccoli with garlic. I'm the fool who ordered it.

The fried noodles in Indonesia tend to be on the sweet side, and they often included a slightly bitter dark leafy green that DKB did not appreciate, and one meal I found myself diligently picking out every single piece with my chopsticks, just so he wouldn't give up on the entire dish.

Even halfway across the globe I'm a sucker for fried calamari, and this time my weakness resulted in a delicious plate of crispy seafood.

Had the most difficult time figuring out what kind of fish was in this dish with chili from Lombok, an island just east of Bali. The waitress solved the problem by bringing out the fish, and after observing that it did not look like anything I had seen scuba diving a few days before that was likely to be over-fished, I acquiesced to having it cooked up for my consumption.

These pictures are all out of order. Soon you're going to start having to suffer food photos taken on manual mode without flash in my new attempt to not be the totally obnoxious food paparazzi at the restaurant.

The prior picture is of a crab soup and this one is of a corn soup, which was better than a crab soup, but both had too much cornstarch for my taste.

Did I just inappropriately switch tenses there? I'm pretty good at knowing when to use a semicolon and how to identify passive, but the switching of a tenses always trips me up.

Somewhere near Monkey Forest Road, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

Venturing Across the Street

Not surprisingly, when dumb kid brother and I did venture across the street from our hotel, we had one of our better meals. After scuba diving one day in Pemuteran, our dive guide took us to this restaurant facing the tiny street across from our hotel. Their Tom Yum soup was steaming hot, sweet, sour and spicy, just as I had barely dared to hope.

But the dining establishment did not exactly knock things out of the park with this chicken curry. It tasted like it looks.

The real reason why DKB and I went back to this restaurant was for their rendition of Nasi Campur, which our dive guide had enthusiastically recommended. We turned down the opportunity to watch a full moon ceremony (and the accompanying obligation to acquire some sarongs) to instead stuff our face with fried goodness: shrimp chips, chicken, tempeh, even fried hard boiled egg. Culture-schmulture, I got hunger.

Oh, and you know what's weird about the fruit juices they serve in Bali? They have watermelon, papaya, orange, the usual tropical options, but they also have what is basically an avocado smoothie available, which is always accompanied by a drizzle of chocolate syrup! Falls into the weird enough I don't know if I even like it category.

Amertha Bali Villas - part two

We had dinner at Amertha Bali Villas twice. The second night we had a Tom Kha soup that was a bit too watery, and you couldn't taste the coconut enough, but overall it was decent.

The Vietnamese summer rolls were beyond awful though. They had huge sticks of cucumber and carrot that were wholly unappetizing, and were inexplicably served with a soy based sauce.

We both decided to try Indonesian entrees, and I opted for Babi Kecap, which is basically pork in a sweet soy sauce. The meat in Indonesia we had was universally more tough than what I've been used to consuming in America. I presume this is in part due to the lack of a large CAFO complex to raise protein in Indonesia. Tough pork aside, the dish was not good. I generally found that the sauces for the Indonesian dished we had lacked complexity and were too sweet.

My brother's choice of Beef Rendang was not better. Same problems of tough meat, overly sweet sauce that didn't offer a very interesting taste profile.

I'll say this for Amertha Bali though, they make a really good oatmeal for breakfast. It's a tad on the watery side, but it has a good amount of cream in it, and it's served with brown sugar and raisins for you to add to taste.

Amertha Bali Villas, Pemuteran, Bali, Indonesia

Amertha Bali Villas

We spent the first three nights at Amertha Bali Villas, and ended up eating a few meals at the hotel restaurant, as there wasn't much in the way of alternative food options on the narrow strip of road the hotel turned off from.

The food was passable, it would turn out to be among the better food we had during the trip, but it's still hotel food. I think this is a Tom Yum soup.

This Thai Beef Salad was pretty tasty, but I just wanted a whole lot more of it.

The curries though, were generally all poor. This shrimp and pineapple curry was watery and lacked a piquant kick.

Amertha Bali Villas, Pemuteran, Bali, Indonesia