Lombok Culinary : Our lunch at The Chili

I craved for crab meals while we were in Lombok on our 11th anniversary trip, and I read through entire list of  recommended places to eat on TripAdvisor and found The Chili on their #7 Resto in Kuta Lombok :) which have gotten a lot of positive reviews, and we decided to give it a try for our lunch as we wanted to be able to immediate burn out the intake calories (and cholesterol) afterward by doing some hiking and swimming.

The Chili is easily to spot. They have a stone signage in front of their humble establishment. It was one scorching hot day when we got there. They don't have Air-Con but they have small garden with berugak for dining area so we opted to eat in one of their berugak. Most of the building was made from bamboo, so I think it's pretty nice.

Their garden and berugak area

Their menu is not very extensive, although they have various seafood dishes, I only skewed our option to crab dishes and there are only 2 options on how you'd like your crab to be cooked; spicy with chilli - their signature dish (for the obvious reason of naming this restaurant) and garlic curry. Initially we wanted to try both of them but since it was just hubby and I (I doubted we could finished off 2 crab dishes by ourselves) then we opted to order the Chili Crab and some cooked vegetables (I forgot what kind) with Ice Lime Juice for our drinks.

The service was quite fast, not more than 5 minutes the waiter came with our drinks and another less than 5 minutes to havr our meals served. But again, there were only us in the restaurant at the time.

So how's the verdict?.

The Ice Lime juice is very nice, especially for the hot and sunny day.

The crabs are actually smaller than expected, maybe they're just a little bigger than my hand palm. But they served 2 crabs in one portion. So it should be enough for both of us. Apparently we underestimated the crabs. Despite of the size, they have very thick sweet meat. Hubby loved the how the chili crab is not that spicy at all, I meant AT ALL. So, to my surprise I didn't get any sweats or need any drinks to ease my 'burning' mouth by eating them vigorously, hahaha.

But frankly speaking, in my personal opinion the verdict is supposed to be: So-So, and perhaps for IDR 80K per crab dish, with no significant highlight, I would not come back for more. I wouldn't mind to pay more if the dish is tastier and more spicy than this, or maybe we should have tried the crab with garlic one?. I dunno.

I should have known that if a lot of foreigner (non-Indonesian) reviewing a culinary place in Indonesia, and said one particular dish is spicy, probably that dish is not really spicy according to Indonesian. Ha!.

For those who still wanna to give the place a shot, here is the address, and another tip from the waitress; Pepes (dish that cooked by using wrapped leaf with certain herbs and ingredient, popular dish from Sundanese)  is another best seller, maybe you would like to try some.

The Chili

JL Kuta Mawun,  Kuta, Lombok 83573, Indonesia

Mobile: +(62)81933157088

GPS Coordinates : 8°53'30"S 116°16'27"E