Some Southeast Asian Junk

The Best Satay in Menteng (Sate yang paling enak di Menteng)

Satay is very important to me when I travel to Indonesia.  It is one of the best foods that Indonesia has to offer--very small chunks of tender meat skewed onto bamboo sticks and grilled over an open flame, basted with a salty sweet marinade and served with a tasty peanut sauce.  However, I have yet to find the best version of satay in the local area where I spend most of my time, Menteng.  There is a rather upscale restaurant named Sate Khas Senayan (Special Senayan Satay) which has very good meat served in air-conditioned comfort.  This place as outlets all over Jakarta, and is popular with the businessman/politician crowd.  But the sauce there is too bland, too smooth and refined and processed for my tastes.  On the other hand, there are two little roadside stalls, Pondok Sate Pak Heri and Rumah Makan Super Rasa (or maybe Jaya Rasa) that have the perfect sauces, a bit more chunky and thick with sweet soy sauce, nice little roughly-chopped shallots and pickle on the side, but the meat is not as good.  They are certainly more authentic, given that they use whatever part of the goat/cow/chicken that they can, but the meat is undoubtedly tougher and chewier.

So I'm asking the internet.  Internet people, what is the best place in Menteng (preferably in the Jalan Sabang area) for satay?  Remember, my two real goals for satay are (1) tender juicy meat and (2) authentic, not-too-processed sauce.  I like all types of satay, including beef, lamb/goat, chicken, and "parts."  Suggestions appreciated in the comments below.

(I have put the title in this post in Indonesian to attract Indonesians googling randomly who can advise me properly on this question.  Saya menerjemahkan judul post ini ke bahasa Indonesia untuk menerima pengunjung Indonesia yang nasehatnya amat diperlu.  Orang internet, restoran/rumah makan mana yang menyediakan sate yang paling enak di Menteng (khususnya dekat wilayah Sabang)?  Yang paling penting adalah: (1) dagingnya lunak, dan (2) saos kacangnya sedap dan agak kasar, tidak diproses hingga halus-halus.  Bisa sate kambing, sapi, ayam, apa saja.)

Three Things, Mostly Unrelated Except for a Food Theme

JMP Update: Everything is going swimmingly in Tangerang.  JMP is having a great time with her students, teaching pianists and violinists how to play the recorder and teaching her three flute students how to become better flutists.  She reports that her students are friendly and quite musically talented--much better than she even expected.  She is the envy of all other faculty at JISMF because she understands Indonesian and can identify unusual foods (e.g., "that's not a potato, it's a fish ball" or "this savory pancake is called martabak").

Food Mistake: Every once in awhile I will order something I've never had before at a restaurant so that I can have something new to taste.  Usually it goes well, sometimes not at all.  Yesterday was a "not at all" moment.  I ordered something called sop kikil, which I guess you might translate as ox shank soup.  Ox shanks sound good, I figured it would be a fatty shank bone with some meat on it, sort of like oxtail soup.  What arrived at my table was a bowl full of very spicy and meaty, very delicious broth with fried potatoes and chopped tomatoes and herbs floating on top.  Yum.  When I put my spoon in it, though, I learned that I had the main ingredient was bite-sized pieces of knee joint cartilage, accompanied by some soft fat and marrow.  The fat and marrow were good, but the knee joint cartilage (which you were clearly supposed to eat) not so much.  Fortunately, with all that great broth and a plate of rice, I was happy.

Found in Translation: I was at a Chinese restaurant the other day called The Grand Duck King.  It's specialty was fresh fish (of course).  The restaurant was my very favorite kind of Chinese fish restaurant, with a a good fish tank full of living things.  I found some colorful translations of non-native creatures.

Kepiting laba-laba ("spider crab") = King crab
Kepiting telur ("Egg crab") = blue crab
Kepiting banci ("Shemale crab") = I'm not sure what this is, looked like a plain old crab to me
Kerang gajah ("Elephant clam") = geoduck
Kerang bambu ("Bamboo clam") = razor clam (this makes sense when you look at one)
Ikan malas ("Lazy fish") = freshwater bass

Gurame

Gurame fish are tilapia.  So I've been told by a foodie friend.  That answers a previous question.

Greatest Cuisine

I tend to deal in superlatives: the best band of all time (Beatles), the best 80s movie (KK1), the best passenger airline (Singapore).  Cuisine is harder for me.  But one thing that I know is that I'm willing to admit that as a national cuisine, "Indonesian" food is not my very favorite.  Part of this is the fact that I don't think that you can speak of "Indonesian" food as a unified cuisine.  North Sulawesi food is entirely different from Central Java, which is different than West Java, which is again different from West Sumatran.  (As a general point, I don't think that any country's cuisine works this way: Tuscan is not Sicilian, Burgundian is not Alsatian or Nicoise, etc.)  I'm comfortable admitting that however much I like Indonesian food, there is no regional cuisine in Indonesia that I would really like to spend the rest of my life eating.  This point notwithstanding, I would make the case that there are individual Indonesian dishes that would stand up well to any other individual dish in the world.  I had one of the best exemplars of these dishes for lunch yesterday.

1.    Take a live gurame fish.  (I have no idea what kind of fish a "gurame" is)
2.    Gut it and scale it
3.    Rub it lightly with a paste made of salt, pepper, lime, and a little bit of mashed garlic
4.    Drop the entire thing into a big vat of extremely hot coconut oil
5.    Take out in 1 minute, put on a plate
6.    Serve with sweet soy sauce mixed with Thai bird chiles chilies and chopped shallots, garnished with sliced cucumbers

That's it.  The entire process should take no more than 3 minutes from fish tank to plate.  Done correctly, you can eat the entire thing, fins and bones and all.  The meat is sweet and the skin is crispy and the bones are crunchy, and there is very little grease because you only cook the fish until it's just barely done.  This would stand up well to any dish you can find.  Other dishes that I've been eating that are equally world class are sop buntut (oxtail soup with Christmas spices), coto Makassar (beef offal soup), gado-gado (composed salad with peanut sauce), sate (satay), rendang (super-rich curry), Javanese fried chicken, ayam/ikan rica-rica (fish or chicken with a garlicky and peppery sauce), and pergedel kentang (potato fritters).

As a matter of principle, though, let me state for the record that my vote for the best regional cuisine in the world is Central Vietnamese.  You get rich soups and lots of raw vegetables (as salads and spring rolls), along with stews, noodles, and baguettes.  The thing that really wins me over is the mix between rich foods and sparse raw foods.  The also-rans in this contest are three cuisines that are tied for second: Tuscan, Provencal, and Western Turkish/Lebanese/Israeli.  The tier after that is Alsatian, Roman, Basque, Southern Spanish, Oaxacan, North Sulawesi, Southern Indian, Japanese, and Cantonese.  Don't agree with me?  Let's fight about it.

You'll note that there's only one Indonesian regional cuisine here.  North Sulawesi makes a great exemplar of the best things about Indonesian food (and essentially, the food stretching from Bangladesh to Tahiti along the coast): fried and grilled fish of the type I described above, rich curries with lots of coconut milk, tropical fruits, fried chicken, and even pork bone soup because there are lots of Christians.  Part of what is convenient about being in big Indonesian cities is that you don't have to just eat the local Indonesian cuisine, but rather can mix all the different kinds of regional cuisines, all done perfectly.

As a matter of further dispute, if we were to go by national borders, the best national cuisine in the world is Malaysian.  You get all of Indonesian food, plus Chinese and Southern Indian, Pakistani, and Portuguese, and the mixtures of each of these create new options.

Someone Needs to Write a Book

A book about food in Jakarta for the interested traveller.  The problem isn't that such a book doesn't exist at all, it's that the books that do exist are geared towards the wrong type of consumer.  I was checking out books yesterday at a Periplus bookstore, and they were all geared towards rich Western expats.  I.e., about 90 percent of these books were things like "The Best Bars in Jakarta" and which of about a billion upscale Chinese restaurants in big frosty airconditioned malls are the best.  What I want is a book about regular restaurants and street food that tourists never get to.  There is a book called Makansutra which is supposed to do this, but I can't find it anywhere.

Part of the reason for this demand of mine is that I'm coming to realize that my normal advice ("eat where all the locals eat") is not really very good sometimes.  I followed a crowd yesterday to a big sprawling restaurant called Bakmi Gajah Mada which specializes in meatballs and noodles.  It was fine, but certainly not great.  I think that this was a post-church crowd, given that it was Sunday at noon and there were whole families everywhere.  At any rate, eating where the locals eat isn't always the best advice.  It's like if you came to the US and wanted to eat where the locals ate, you would rarely end up at a place like Louie's Lunch in New Haven or Arthur Bryant's in Kansas City; you'd be much more likely to end up at a Wendy's or an Appleby's.  So I want a resource that clues me in to the best local cuisine.  If I could find the Makansutra Indonesia version, maybe this would work, but no one seems to be able to find it.

This isn't the hugest deal, as I am familiar with enough local restaurants to sate myself and am happy to try random street food from time to time.  But I don't want to miss out on undiscovered secrets.  One of the places that JM and I really liked, a place called Waroeng Menteng that used to serve traditional West Javanese (Sundanese) food, has disappeared.  Bummer.  So for now I'm occupying myself by searching the internet for good places.  Sometimes you get good results: although these are from Malaysia, the chain is the same, and I've always wanted try polygamy juice.

Vietnamese Food and Motorcycle Kitties

We had two friends visit us while we were in Malaysia last time, and each of them was a cat fan.  So, we took each of them to see our favorite sight in Malaysia.  This is a guy named Jamil Ismail who keeps a harem of trained cats that he rescued from the streets of KL.  He brings them out to a busy street in the touristy neighborhood of Bukit Bintang, where they sleep on a motorcycle that is not only running, but also blaring really loud music.  Cheesy, perhaps, but whatever.  It's a little disturbing that we've been there so many times that he knows us, even enough to know that we speak Malay.

Anyway, Jamil is online now.  It seems that he updates his cat pictures about every single day.  This guy is no joke, he really like cats.  OK, maybe he's a little crazy, but who cares?

The point of this is that we saw the motorcycle kitties last night when we were out for dinner with friends at one of our favorite restaurants in Kuala Lumpur.  It's a Vietnamese restaurant called Sao Nam that has excellent dishes like mangosteen salad and duck with tamarind.  Last night we had (1) dragonfruit salad, (2) prawn and mangosteen salad, (3) duck with tamarind, (4) salmon with dill and fish sauce, (5) deep fried eggplant, (6) grilled chicken and herbs with rice noodles, (7) beef soup (pho), plus some desserts and a nice red wine.  The decor is "ironic Communist," with all sorts of prints of political posters all over the walls.  We took pictures both of the cat and of the restaurant (start here, click Next >> to scroll through other new ones).

Annalakshmi

Around Malaysia, India, Singapore, Australia, and now San Francisco, you can sometimes happen across one of a chain of restaurants known as Annalakshmi.  These are tasty vegetarian restaurants that serve all-you-can-eat buffets as well as a wide range of drinks and breads at a price that can't be beat: whatever you feel like paying.  If you check out the SF branch's website, you can find out all about its principles of athithi dhevo bhava (The Guest is God) and the fact that it's staffed only by volunteers.  What they don't tell you is that it's nice because it gives you Indian food off-the-beaten-path.  There are no standard veggie Indian dishes like regular dhal or vegetable samosas or whatever.  Instead, you get food that grandmothers cook, weird dishes without regular names or, oftentimes, identifiable ingredients.  But it's all vegetarian, so you know you can't get in too much trouble.

We went to the KL outlet last night for our dinner.  There is a woman who works there refilling the chafing dishes and stewpots who is very very nice, and who clearly has an interest in creating and nurturing vegetarians.  She always asks us "Do you take vegetarian food always?", to which we always answer "usually."  Last night she followed up with a new one: "Is it for compassionate reasons?"  Tough to figure out how to answer that, because in reality, it's not.  But we nodded politely and helped ourselves to an unidentified mushroomy fried thing.  We think that in the grand scheme of things, it's the ends that matter, not the means.

Banana Leaf Rice and Other Food Pictures

When our friend Lindsey was visiting we took her to one of our favorite types of restaurants, a Tamil (southern Indian) restaurant that serves food known here as "banana leaf rice".  What it is, you see, is a big banana leaf covered with rice and other foods.  The restaurant that we took Lindsey to, in a part of town known as Bangsar, was good, but we are sad that we didn't take her to another one that we found yesterday.  This one is in Petaling Jaya, a neighboring city outside of KL proper but well with the metro area.  It's a place called Raju's, and it has a loyal following.  We think that it easily beats the place in Bangsar, the trendy area where we took Lindsey (sorry, Lindsey!). 

We have heard that sometimes you can see VIPs there, and that the current PM Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi used to go there a lot when he was still only Foreign Minister.  No VIPs there this time though.  But we shouldn't talk the place up too much because Malaysians have very strong opinions about what the best banana leaf rice places are.  Some people love Raju's, some people think it's good but too expensive, and some dismiss it as not spicy enough.

We got some pictures and have posted them in our Culinary Delights folder, along with some others.  These others include pictures of our attempts of popiah and cap cai, two dishes whose recipes we posted last week, and a bunch of others whose recipes we have not yet posted.  Our pictures from Raju's start here, and you can scroll forward to see what banana leaf rice looks like and to watch me (TP) give a demonstration of how to eat curry with your hands.  Please excuse the hair style: we decided to take showers after we went out into the heat of the day for lunch and errands.

Tempe and Tofu

Here's something that we've been thinking about a lot lately.  In the US, we don't eat a ton of meat.  Probably two to three times a week, and that includes tuna.  In fact, unless we are making a special dinner or having our customary fish on Friday, we almost never cook meat for ourselves. 

We eat meat at restaurants.  We almost never get vegetarian meals at restaurants.  Here's why.  Have you ever noticed that there are very limited vegetarian options at restaurants?  Normally there's some sort of pasta with eggplant or mushrooms in it, a grilled vegetable platter, or the "vegetarian version of a meat dish" option.  While pasta with eggplant or mushrooms is fine, that's what we eat at home.  Grilled vegetables are fine, but usually not particularly exciting.  It's the "vegetarian version of a meat dish" option that really bugs us.  Who wants vegetarian chicken cacciatore?  Who wants vegetarian chicken stirfry?  The whole strategy of taking a tried-and-true meat dish and simply replacing the meat with tofu or black beans or tempe is wrong from the get go.  Tried-and-true recipes are tried and true because they were based around meaty flavors, not neutral soy or beans.

There are interminable examples of this in college towns.  There's a restaurant in New Haven in particular that frustrates us.  They serve ready made pastas and rice dishes that are just oily and bland, not excitingly vegetarian.  We'll never forget the Vegetarian Moroccan Tangine or the Tempe Pasta Carbonara.  Blech.  Oftentimes restaurants like this will try to fool you with salt, olives, garlic/ginger, herbs, or extra olive oil.  It doesn't work.

How does this relate to Indonesia and Malaysia?  Well, this is a part of the world where people developed dishes from scratch around tempe and tofu, accentuating their particular tastes and textures, rather than trying to back into vegetarianism by ruining meat dishes.  To be totally honest, we had never had really good tofu or tempe until we got to Jakarta.  But when you try mendoan tempe or sambal goreng kering tempe or tahu isi, or even just a perfectly fried piece of super-fresh tofu at a Sundanese restaurant, you realize that this is how vegetarian food is supposed to be.  In other words, not designed to be vegetarian, but designed to be tasty.

We know what many of you meat eaters are thinking.  "Yeah, I guess tempe and tofu is OK, but it just doesn't taste that good.  Why not just eat meat?"  We are sure that we can't convince you for real, but trust us.  We have been hooked.

As a final note: There is an exception to our rule that we never get vegetarian meals in the US.  The first is Indian food.  We've never felt undernourished with a meal of saag paneer, channa masala, and vegetarian korma.  At the same time, we don't avoid meat at Indian restaurants either.  We should also note that conceivably, American vegetarian restaurants could do what many Chinese restaurants do here, which is figure out how to take gluten and yeast and other fungi, and create vegetarian bits that actually taste like meat.  Of course, there's little sense in recreating authentic meat flavors with fake meat unless you actually are averse to eating meat on principle.  But the point stands. 

Foodie Links

One of our favorite sayings is "I bet Google knows." We say this when we don't know something, or when are having an argument.  Lately, Google has also been particularly useful in helping us find recipes for local cuisine.  Sometimes our local cookbooks are confusing or misleading, and sometimes we just like to get a second opinion on a recipe.  The problem comes from sifting through a whole bunch of Indonesian and Malaysian foodie sites.  In the past couple days we've made an effort to find the best Indonesian and Malaysian food sites out there.  Without further ado, here they are.

Indonesian

• Merry's Kitchen has lots of good recipes.  The directions are easy to follow, and as Merry did her undergrad and Kansas and an MBA at Golden Gate University, her English is flawless.  Lots of good recipes for things like semur lidah (Ox Tongue in Sweet Nutmeg Sauce), and more tame things.  Especially good for spice paste and sambal recipes.
• Kokkie Blanda is also good.  Blanda means "Dutch", and Kokkie probably means "cook" in Dutch.  At any rate, this site is more expansive than Merry's Kitchen, but the names are all in Indonesian so you can't tell what you're going to get before you click it unless you know what the names mean.  Plus, our Dutch cook has spelled all the Indonesian names in the old Dutch style, so dulu becomes doeloe and ayam becomes ajam.  Annoying.  But things are organized by type of dish at least, so if you pick what kind of food you want, you can just browse.  The recipe for lemper (sweet sticky rice stuffed with chicken) looks excellent.
• Claudia Lum has some great recipes, but they are all in Indonesian, and some of the links don't work.
• Dapur PInter is another good Indonesian language site with lots of deserts.  It is heavy on Dutch-inspired and Javanese dishes, as well as having some recipes from the Outer Islands.  Its name is a play on the acronym of the ISP (Pacific Indonesia) and the slang version of pintar, meaning "smart".

Malaysian

• The name of the site www.MalaysianFood.net says it all.  It's easily the best Malaysian food site out there.  It breaks things down into five categories--Malay, Chinese, Indian, Eurasian (mostly Portuguese) and Nyonya (or Straits Chinese)--and has good descriptions of every type of food in its historical context.  Even if you don't like to cook, it's fun to read.  Be sure to check out the recipes for Devil Curry and Rojak, which you can make at home in the US with little trouble.
• Kuali is the online food page for The Star, an English-language Malaysian broadsheet.  It has some very good recipes, but it includes recipes for lots of different cuisines and the organization stinks.  Under "Cuisine" you can jump straight to Malay or Nyonya food, or browse through the Chinese and Indian sections, which include lots of local favorites but also stuff you're more likely to find in China or India than Malaysia.
• Mesra.net - Resepi has thousands of recipes that all look good.  Alas, it's also in Malay, and very slang-y Malay at that, so non-Malay speakers will be out of luck.

We also have some good news regarding ingredients.  Almost nobody outside of residents of NYC or LA will have access to an Indonesian or Malaysian grocery store, but there are two sites worth noting.  IndoMerchant will send Indonesian food right to your door from Los Angeles, and it won't cost very much either.  Their selection is great.  You can get the little things like kecap manis and terasi and sale, and also weird ingredients like keluak (groundnuts), daun salam (salam leaves), and others that are impossible to find in the US.  (Thai food lovers: they will ship you fresh kaffir lime leaves.)  Most of the weird ingredients that we've listed in our recipes can be found here, for cheap.  Regarding Malaysian food, you can visit the online store at www.MalaysianFood.net and get good things as well.  You can even get Bah Kut Teh spices (see our recent recipe below), prepackaged!