The two ends, rated by the same people
912 places in this guide publish a Google price band. 372 of them top out at Rp 125,000 and 190 of them start at Rp 250,000, with 350 sitting in the middle and taking no side.
Compare the two ends, rated by the same public on the same platform, and the cheap group has a median Google rating of 4.80 against 4.70 for the expensive one. 67 per cent of the cheap places clear 4.7; 64 per cent of the expensive ones do.
Price is a bad filter, not a reversed one
The gap is three points, not thirty. This is not the claim that expensive restaurants in Bali are bad: 122 of them clear 4.7, and the ones that do are in this guide too.
It is the smaller and more useful claim that price carries almost no information about whether you will enjoy the meal. Paying four times as much moves the median down a tenth of a point, which means using price as a filter throws away the 250 places on this list for nothing in return.
What the list is made of
136 of the 250 are cafés and bakeries against 112 restaurants, which is the coffee scene showing up in the numbers: the cheap end here is unusually strong at breakfast and unusually thin at dinner.
It also spreads much wider than the expensive end does. Denpasar carries 25 entries, Pererenan 25 and Ubud 24, which are not the places you land on when you sort the island by spend.
One honest limit, and the thing it costs you
The band is Google's, not ours, and a place with no published band fails both tests rather than landing somewhere in between: an unknown is not a claim in either direction. So this compares the two ends of the 912 places that publish one, and says nothing about the 293 that do not.
The practical cost of eating this way is that the good cheap places are scattered, rarely on the street you are staying on, and often have no website at all. You find them on a map, on a phone, standing somewhere with a scooter. That is the one part of this that needs a connection rather than a plan.
