Where to eat

Depot Mie Bakso

While the cuisine in Dili may not be the most exciting on the planet, there are plenty of local restaurants offering cheap eats of perfectly reasonable food. If you can live without Western food, you can have a decent meal for less than $5 every time. For a prime example, head to the Chinese-run Depot Mie Bakso. You can get there from Café Brasil. Just walk towards the football field and you’ll soon see the sign.

Although it would be tiresome to write a recommendation for every restaurant like Depot Mie Bakso, as an example of how cheap and good the food in Dili can be, this does the job perfectly. Locals and expats alike eat at the restaurant and the lunch-time rush bears testimony to the popularity of the place. Unfortunately Depot Mie Bakso is only open during the week, so you’ll have to find another place to eat on the weekends.

As a general rule of thumb, if you pass a place like Depot Mie Bakso and see a lot of people eating there, go and check it out. The food at some of the smaller restaurants around Dili will churn your stomach for a good few hours, but thankfully Depot Mie Bakso is a safe bet.

Don’t worry about reading a menu, either; if you sit down, one of the waitresses will eventually bring you over a plate of the house meal, which is the more or less the same every day. You get a plate full of rice, chicken, some vegetables and some curry sauce, with the possibility of a boiled egg. All this can be yours for $1.50, plus $0.25 for a bottle of water or $0.75 for a soft drink.

The best time to visit this kind of restaurant is about 1 or 2 PM when it’s a bit quieter.