“Canggu is where everyone wants to be,” says Tony Smith, co-owner of Finns Beach Club, next door to the new attraction. “There are hundreds of restaurants and bars within a few blocks of our establishment and every week it seems a new one is opening.”

Here are five of the most exciting new places to eat and drink in Canggu.

Smoke

A short walk from Echo Beach, one of Bali’s most popular surfing spots, Smoke is an experimental barbecue restaurant set in a green garden. Customers dine while seated on sofas or at communal tables under a large safari-style tent. The meat – and vegetarian alternatives – is cooked in an open kitchen equipped with custom-made racks, grills and barbecue pits where chefs visiting from around Indonesia hold court on Saturday afternoons.

The menu at Smoke is short and simple: a choice of beef brisket, crispy pork belly, pulled beef, smoked chicken thighs, sausages or barramundi, served with Asian coleslaw, crispy baby potatoes, and truffle mac and cheese, capped off with chimichurri, white barbecue or fermented hot sauce.

“The idea stemmed from the first lockdown, at the start of the pandemic, when all the restaurants were closed,” says co-owner Louka Taffin, an Australian raised in Bali. “To kill time I got on YouTube and learned how to smoke brisket on charcoal. There was a lot of trial and error but once I got into the groove of things, I started inviting friends over to my villa for barbecues on weekends.

“Word got out and soon there were all these randoms coming to my house to eat, so my partner and I began brainstorming on how to simplify the smoking process that was taking up to 12 hours at home and supply homestyle barbecue in a commercial setting every day. That’s how Smoke was born.”

Butterman

Ten years ago, Jalan Pantai Berawa – or Berawa Beach Road – was a backstreet connecting the tourist precinct of Seminyak and the once-remote surf breaks of Canggu. Today it’s one of the most popular strips in Bali and home to the island’s most popular cafe-bakery.

Since opening in September, Butterman has literally overflowed with customers. They come for croissants that are soft and crunchy at the same time, and available in plain, chocolate and double-baked with almond cream; or filled with béchamel sauce, ham or chorizo and drizzled with Emmental cheese from the French-Swiss border region.

“Our success is based on three things: good branding, good location and the best croissants you’ve ever had,” says co-owner Stephane Simond, a self-taught French pastry chef who has worked in Indonesia for 15 years. “They’re better than the rest because they’re more buttery and crispier, and people love crispy and buttery things.”

The bakery also serves baguettes filled with ham and cheese or roast beef, desserts such as strawberry cheesecake and Valrhona dark chocolate tart, and a Butterman black truffle eggy jar: a breakfast dish comprising poached eggs, button mushrooms and cream cooked in a mason jar.

Ivy Lounge

As you walk into this breezy venue set on the second floor of a high-end retail complex on Berawa Beach Road, you’ll feel like you’ve been transported to Miami or Dubai. Several steps up from the rustic beach-chic decor that’s everywhere in Canggu, Ivy Lounge is a nightclub restaurant slathered in Italian marble with oversized white sofas and water features on the walls.

“There are so many places to go out at night in Canggu but we noticed there was nowhere for people who like to dress up and spend an evening in a luxurious environment where they can walk on marble and order cocktails from a marble bar that’s nearly 10 metres long,” says co-owner Daniel Hubeny, of the Netherlands.

Ivy’s liquor menu is voluminous for Bali, with 10 kinds of sparkling white wine and 16 cocktails, including twists on classics such as the cinnamon espresso and banana old fashioned. The tapas menu is cut from the same silk cloth, with dishes such as wagyu beef tartare, duck with baby carrots and freshly shucked oysters garnished with lime foam.

However, the real reason to come here is to see the beautiful people swan around the dance floor at night and during special events like the Melbourne Cup or New Year’s Eve.

“During the pandemic, you have to hustle to draw in the crowds, so we’ve been hyper-creative with our events,” Hubeny says. “Our next will be a crypto night where we’ll have live trading [of digital currencies] on a big screen and waitresses in evening gowns.”

Zali

A 15-minute drive from Berawa, Pererenan is a more relaxed and less developed neighbourhood of Canggu. It is also where Joseph Ghantous chose to open Zali, a breezy whitewashed Lebanese restaurant, in June, only weeks before Indonesia became, briefly, the global epicentre of the pandemic.

“It may not sound prudent to open a restaurant during these very hard times, but when you put things into context you can see things differently,” he says.

“Zali is unique because it’s the first authentic Lebanese restaurant in Bali. The food is practically identical to the food my business partner and I grew up eating when we were children because his mum, Lisa, designed the menu and is the chef. And since there’s a nice community of expats living in Pererenan, restaurants that stand out for being a little different have proved sustainable during the pandemic.”

The menu at Zali starts with mezze plates like hummus with mincemeat and baba ganoush – the iconic eggplant garlic dip – before progressing to traditional salads based on heirloom tomatoes, beetroot or dill, and the most mouth-watering tabbouleh this side of Beirut.

Mains comprise bowls filled with long-grain rice, yogurt, cauliflower and chicken skewers or falafel. Then there’s manoushe, a Lebanon street food made of flatbread stuffed with different meats, cheeses and vegetables. For those who somehow find room for dessert there’s “Lisa’s Ice Cream”, which is flavoured with ashta, a cedar-like resin of the mastic tree.

Santanera

A sleek 140-seat bistro cocooned inside a new three-storey building close to Batu Bolong Beach Road, Santanera is a tropical interpretation of The Great Gatsby with a samba track looping endlessly in the background. Think floor-to-ceiling windows, soaring archways, murals of bare-breasted Greek goddesses, pendant lights with Persian tassels and an iron spiral stairwell leading to a rooftop garden.

Santanera’s menu draws on the Latin American heritage of chefs Andres Becerra and German Rincon. Colombian by birth, they have worked extensively in their own country, but their culinary focus on fresh farm-to-plate tapas and refined organic ingredients was honed working at award-winning restaurants in Melbourne, Copenhagen and Catalonia.

They serve three kinds of ceviche based on fish, octopus and prawns, or tomato consommé; savoury empanadas pastries filled with braised duck; and a pork tomahawk steak with purée and crackling.

The pièce de résistance is a dessert called compressed watermelon, a Balinese rendition of the classic Colombian street food “strawberries and cream”. With layers of white chocolate crumble and white chocolate ice cream, it brings an evening together in a decadent restaurant that strives to deliver more of an experience than just a meal.

“Whether at home or in a restaurant, a meal is a necessity. We all need to eat,” says co-owner Philip Cappelletto, from Italy. “But if you have the same meal in a place with a certain kind of light, ambience, perfume, design and people, you can be sitting there for hours and don’t feel time passing by. That is when the magic happens – an experience we work hard to deliver for everyone who walks through our doors.”