The Bottomless Bowl

One of the best and worst things about traveling to a developing country is trying all the odd and occasionally frightening culinary finds and traditions. I had one of these experiences on a trip to Indonesia. This particular trip brought me to the Aceh Province in North Sumatra. The Acehnese are a proud people and take their Islam pretty seriously. As a result, after a hot day of travel over many hours of driving, finding a place for a decent meal accompanied by a cold beer can be challenging.

My traveling colleague, an enormous, sweaty, ill-tempered Dutchman was kind enough to direct our driver to an innocent looking roadside restaurant-gas station-mini mart. It was just past lunchtime and the sun was at its hottest point of the day. We walked into the sweltering dining room-motorbike-repair station-kitchen and I noticed that some of the lunch menu items were proudly displayed in large decorative bowls. The bowls were then placed inside a large glass display cabinet with sliding doors.

We ordered some rice dishes, some chicken curry, and some kind of bonefish curry. Our order was wheeled out a few minutes later on an elaborate cart in those fancy type bowls we had seen earlier. The food was actually pretty good though needed some liberal spicing up with the ubiquitous sambal sauce. We were pretty confident they had no alcohol in the joint but jokingly asked if they had any cold Bintang. By some miracle they did have the beer but it was so hot it could have passed for malt soup.

After we finished eating our rice and picking gingerly at the chicken and bony fish curries, the cart returned and the waiter-mechanic-head chef cleared our plates. What unfolded next was truly horrifying. The big bowls returned with the cart and our leftovers were scraped back into their respective bowls. I sort of thought maybe they didn't want to mix the food types because they would feed them to the local cats or maybe their goat or something. When we walked out we saw what really happened to our leftovers. They went back into the display cabinet and into their original bowls. No wonder there was not meat on that chicken. I was probably the fourth person to gnaw on that chicken leg that day.