Some Southeast Asian Junk

Ng Ah Sio Pork Ribs Soup Eating House

Regular readers of Indolaysia will know that I really like bak kut teh, the porky soup whose name literally means "pork bone tea." See here and here. I've decided that this is my favorite Singaporean food. On the recommendation of a friend I tried a place called Ng Ah Sio Pork Ribs Soup Eating House today for lunch. Yummy.

Unlike the Malaysian version whose recipe we tried above, this one is an assertive, peppery broth with big chunks of spare ribs in it and a pronounced garlicky note as well. The broth is rich and oily, the color of muddy water. Packs a punch.

Because I usually eat alone, hosts and hostesses will often seat me at a table with someone else. A bit awkward but I don't really care. Today they sat me down with a real character, though. His name was Mr. Ng, although he's no relation to Ng Ah Sio. Mr. Ng has been coming to that restaurant every day since it opened at that location in the late 1980s. The waitress confirmed this. I'm not sure what his story is, but Mr. Ng is a character. He explained to me in some detail the benefits of eating bak kut teh in a particular way, that is, combined with endless cups of strong tea. (The idea is that the astringency of the tea counteracts the fattiness of the broth.) He prepared the tea in the traditional Chinese fashion and shared it with me, which was nice.

He also, though, does something unique. As I was sitting down he was removing a little knife from his pocket. The waitress showed up with a head of garlic and a little bowl. Mr. Ng very deliberately removed a little napkin from his pants, spread it out, and then used it as a placemat as he proceeded to shave the entire head of garlic into little thin slivers. He made two piles (a big one for him, a little one for me), then separated them into two bowls, and poured over them a big slug of the dark rice vinegar that sit on the table as a condiment. He instructed me to use the garlic-vinegar mixture as a topping or addition to my soup. It was quite tasty, although I'm glad that JMP isn't around to smell my breath.

You can see pictures of my food adventures, and of some various interesting sights around town, here.

East Coast Park

Singapore, as I've mentioned before, is really small, but it still has to cram into its territory all of the things that a regular country has. That includes a vacation spot, which a friend and I saw today. East Coast Park is about 20 minutes from downtown, but it's definitely got a different feel to it. This is where Singaporeans go to hang out at the beach, to rollerblade and camp out and to pretend they're somewhere else. A friend and I visited it today, not so much to experience the beach life (although I did get quite a sunburn) but more importantly to try a good hawker center there.

Hawker centers, I should make clear, are a uniquely Singaporean thing. All over Asia, it's common to see little stands that spring up in heavily-trafficked areas that sell small dishes or quick meals. They are known as hawker stalls. Well, Singapore decided some years ago that a modern city doesn't have hawker stalls, but it didn't want to get rid of them altogether, so it decided to create hawker "centers" where the government provides the infrastructure and monitors the quality but the individual hawkers can still do their work.

There are probably a dozen of these centers, one of which is convenient to East Coast Park. My friend and I decided to order some specialties: sugar cane juice, grilled stingray, roast duck rice, and rujak (mixed fruit with sweet-peanuty sauce). Great way to spend the afternoon.

East Coast Park Hawker Food. Clockwise from Top-Left: Sugar Cane, Rujak, Duck Rice, Stingray

 

NRT-SIN (Tokyo to Singapore)

Jetlag woke me up at 3:30 AM this morning, which left me with a big chunk of time before my flight to Singapore at 11:00. Fortunately, I had a plan: head down to Tsukiji, the world's largest wholesale seafood market, to check out the action and snag a bite of super-fresh sushi. I would have preferred to have slept until 4:30 or so and gotten up in time for the first subway (left the nearest station at 5:04 AM), but since I was up far before that I decided to leave early and to walk.

I arrived at the market at 4:39 AM, which I thought was going to be way too early, but the place was packed with people and fish. This place is a big tourist draw, so it's a bit disorienting to learn that the place is nothing more than a big warehouse complex crawling with forklifts and semis. There's nothing charming about it in terms of a market. 

Tsukiji Fish Market

The charm, it turns out, rests in the little alleys off to the side of the market, where little tiny stalls do a brisk business in the freshest sushi that you can imagine.

On the recommendation of several Japanese friends, I decided to try a particularly famous one called "Sushi Dai." I had heard that it opens at 5:00 AM so I thought that it was good that I made it there so early, but it turns out that I wasn't the only one with this idea. When I strolled up around 4:50 or so, this is what I saw: a big mass of Japanese hipsters and salarymen, out for a last bite after a long night of carousing the town.

Wait Line for Sushi Dai, 4:50 AM on a Monday

The woman with the pad is taking orders. The way it works is, she tells you that you can have whatever you want, but everyone orders the Chef's special...she relays that to the three sushi chefs inside, who make your sushi right at the tiny bar (which is, truth be told, only slightly bigger than our bathroom at home, and seats no more than 12 people). They take their time: the special comes with 11 pieces, and it takes about 45 minutes to an hour to go through it. Had I arrived any later it would have been way too late--I didn't get a seat until 5:45, and by 5:00 the line behind me had 30 more people in it.

A problem arose, though. I'm allergic to shellfish, and this is one of their specialties. I had a friend write up a big long note about this to give to the chef or the waitress, and it is currently sitting at home on my printer. So, last night I took it upon myself to learn how how to say "don't kill me with shellfish" in Japanese. Here's what I pieced together from various internet forums (apologies if this is horribly impolite): Sumimasen. Watashi wa koukakurui no arerugi ga arimasu. Sakana wa OK desu. Osusume wa nan desu ka? Literally, "Pardon me. I have an allergy to shellfish. Fish is OK. What do you recommend." I whipped this out for the waitress and it seems to have worked perfectly, for the chef kindly substituted interesting fish choices for the three shellfish items he was giving out (live shrimp sushi, sea urchin roe sushi, and live octopus sushi).

OK, enough of that, after waiting for all that time, how did it taste? I can't say that I'm the world's leading expert on sushi, but numerous Japanese people have told me that this is the best sushi in Japan, and that means that it has to be in the running for best sushi on the planet. It was clearly the best sushi that I've ever had. Everything was fantastic: so fresh, so perfectly soft, so simple and good. The biggest surprise was not the high grade fatty tuna, which was delicious, but rather the sleepers like smelt, flounder, sea bass, and my favorite, Spanish mackerel. If you've had mackerel before, you know it can be off-puttingly oily and fishy tasting. This stuff, though...the chef lightly brushed it with a sweetish salty glaze and topped it with scallions, and gave me firm instructions not to eat it with soy sauce. Nothing fishy or oily about it, just clean and tasty.

Spanish Mackerel Sushi

The scene at the tiny little restaurant was also great, with Japanese chefs working their gigantic knives while screaming Japanese things at you (which, truth be told, only mean "HERE IS SOME SEA BASS" and "I HOPE YOU LIKED THAT" and "THANK YOU FOR COMING").

The Chefs at Sushi Dai (Pardon the Flash)

After that great meal, I made my way back to Narita for my flight here to Singapore. This was uneventful, although it was JAL business class so it was quite nice. From one big Asian metropolis to another, then. Tomorrow the real work part of the trip begins.

Disappointing Meal Leads to Social Commentary

Last night I had a disappointing meal. My first meal on this trip which really failed to live up to expectations. It was at Bakmi Gajah Mada (GM for short), a noodle restaurant which I had tried before a couple years ago and found to be "meh," but which gets a great review in the book that I use to scope out local good eats, Laksmi Pamuntjak's Jakarta Good Food Guide 2008-2009.

And I mean, it gets a glowing review. Listen to these select quotes:

• Bakmi GM is still on top of the game
• the first destination of a student returning from overseas is not his or her own home, but the nearest Bakmi GM
• everything from their original versions of noodle soup to their more recent creations...are wonderful [sic]
• approaching legendary is the consistently brilliant fried wonton
• the level of consistency is almost supernatural

"Wonderful." "Brilliant." "Supernatural." "Top of the game." This from an author who does not seem given to hyperbole in her other reviews, who rates places that cost US$500 a person and finds basic faults with taste and presentation. So Bakmi GM is "brilliant"? Well OK then! Maybe I went on a bad day the other time. No worries, I'll try it again. I followed Laksmi's directions precisely this time, getting the two dishes that she recommended by name: the fried wonton (pangsit goreng) and chili-fried beef noodles (bakmi daging cah cabe hijau). To drink, fresh pineapple juice.

Panda Express Bakmi GM

OK. First for the good news. The pineapple juice was competent. But I've never had bad fruit juices in Southeast Asia, and I mean ever. Basically they are just fresh fruit in a blender. Hard to mess that up.

Now for the bad news. I mean, look at that. Does those plates look any different than what you'd get at P.F. Chang's? The fried wontons tasted to me just about like the fried wonton skins that you get as a free appetizer at any strip mall Chinese restaurant in the US. The only difference is that these have a tiny bit of bland chicken wrapped in the middle. The sauce was, I kid you not, that same syrupy unidentified red glop that we know in the US as "duck sauce." Duck sauce! I'm almost offended that I had to pay for what I normally consider to be complimentary appetizers. The beef noodles were no better. The noodles themselves were gummy and sticky, not properly fried and mixed with other ingredients. That's a rookie mistake, Asian Noodles 101. The beef was sticky-sweet and liberally enhanced with MSG. The peppers were fine. Did they even try here? Basically the only differences between this and an equivalent dish at P.F. Chang's is that this is cheaper and that they understand the proper ratio of noodle to condiment. (Asian noodles, much like Italian pasta, are to be dressed with their accompaniment like a salad, not drowned in it.)

Now what's going on here? How could Laksmi Pamuntjak--a world traveller, a bonne vivante, a gastronome with three editions of a popular (and pretty expensive) English language food guide under her belt--consider this boring and uninspired food to be brilliant? My working hypothesis is that it's not about taste or presentation, but about modernity.

When you go to Bakmi GM you're not getting authentic or even really "good" food. What you're getting is air-conditioning, waiters in uniforms, consistency, comfort, and an ambience of that middle class lifestyle that has really only been available in Indonesia for about thirty years or so. It's the same impetus that leads many very good restaurants all over Southeast Asia to locate themselves in malls. Bakmi GM is not about the food, it's about representing a certain social position. Sort of the way that McDonald's is in the US, or at least how it was when it first opened and represented the triumph of modernity, mass production, and food science over the varied competencies of local burger joints. Note the emphasize on "consistency" and the idea that it appeals to students who miss home. Maybe a parallel experience is a freshman from Orange County, CA in my Vietnamese class while I was still in graduate school who did her final presentation about the best restaurant in the world: California Pizza Kitchen.

The problem with my hypothesis is that Laksmi P. is no aspiring middle class writer. I've met her. She's serious and far more cosmopolitan than I am. Her other recommendations have been very solid. And it can't really be her audience either, for her book cost US$26 and is entirely in English, which makes it pretty much geared not towards middle class consumers but rather for Jakarta's globe-trotting upper crust. They can absolutely afford much better than this, and they can find much tastier cheap eats at the side of any road. So call me perplexed.

Singapore, Stomach First

People often talk about Singapore as a place where people are obsessed with food. Before yesterday I hadn't been to Singapore in a couple years, so part of me forgot about this. Or at least thought it was a little exaggerated, as lots of places are obsessed with food. Italy, France, and so forth. But seriously, Singapore is obsessed with food in a way that I don't think is comparable to other places. Maybe it's a consequence of the fact that Singapore is so, well, orderly and boring. There's no politics to talk about, no real economic woes to talk about (although Singapore is getting hammered by the crisis in GDP terms, unemployment is still only around 3%), the weather is essentially the same all the time (hot and humid, or not quite as hot but more humid, or raining), the traffic is usually pretty OK by regional standards, there's no really old history (the city was a fishing village until 1800) and so forth. So what else is there to talk about besides what to have for lunch? I think that standard Singaporean day revolves around (1) eating and (2) thinking about where to eat next. There are many, many, many food blogs dedicated to Singaporean food.

This bothers me not in the slightest, of course, because I've seen all the tourist things there are to see in Singapore. Moreover, I love to sample local food, and I had two sets of great tour guides to show me where to go. So what did I do on this trip? I caught up with old friends and ate good food. I focused on South Indian food this trip more than Southern Chinese food, which is Singapore's number one specialty. The problem is often that Chinese food has shellfish in it, so I have to be careful to stick to pork and fish. I can't eat lots of things like chili crab or prawn whatever or really authentic char kway teow. Plus, this one place that we wanted to try for dumplings was closed for renovations so we substituted banana leaf rice for pork-intensive dumplings. I ignored Malay and Peranakan food entirely because, well, it's often so close to Sumatran food and that's normally better here (or in Malaysia itself) anyway. The pics and descriptions are here (they start with my most recent meal in Jakarta, but the Singapore pictures are a few in). Below is the pretty front garden of my friends' place, which is a great and quiet retreat from the disorganized hustle and bustle of downtown Jakarta.

A Leafy Front Garden in Singapore

Storm Beer (Bali)

The craft brewing craze has arrived in Indonesia. Seriously. I was strolling around one of Jakarta's swanky malls this weekend, pricing bespoke suits (everything's out of my price range), and happened across a fancy grocery store. I always have fun looking at grocery stores in other countries, and so I took a stroll through it. And while there, I noticed a display selling five kinds of specialty beers brewed by a firm called Storm Beer, based out of Bali. So of course I had to get a couple to sample.

Having lived for some time in the Napa Valley of beer, I have pretty high expectations of craft breweries. (I also have a limited tolerance for annoying craft brewing techiques, like brewers that attempt to outdo one another making the "hoppiest" or "strongest" or "darkest" beer in search not of good taste but rather of superlatives. But I digress.) So here are my reviews of three of Storm Beer's selections. I decided to skip two of them (Bronze Ale and Pale Ale) because I tend not to like those styles very much, especially pale ales. The remaining three are the ones that looked most appealing.

Before we get started, let me admit that I have no idea about how to taste and or rate beer. None. So this is just me aping the way that I've seen other beers rated.

Storm Beer Golden Ale
Pours a large head, but is highly carbonated so it evaporates quickly. Cloudy with a golden color. The nose hints of wheat and hops. The initial taste is wheat and yeast, followed by unidentifiable sweetness (not like a honey or sugar sweet, but I can't describe it properly). Dry bitter finish and aftertaste. Overall: for a summer beer there is probably too much flavor here, but it is pretty good and I prefer this to the standard local swill.

Storm Beer Iron Sout
Pours a nice head, also fairly carbonated. Brown/black in color. The nose smells roasty. Taste is surprisingly bitter and thin, less big and chocolatey or malty or roasty as I would prefer in a stout. Bitterness continues though the finish and aftertaste. Again, the word that comes to my mind is "thin." Overall: this is unremarkable as far as stouts go, but it's not a bad beer in general.

Storm Beer Tropical Ale
Another big foamy head, highly carbonated but less than the Golden Ale. Lemony yellow in color, not cloudy but still opaque. A distinctly skunky nose, reminiscent of the lower rungs of the Milwaukee ladder/my sock drawer, but combine that with a whiff of lemon. Confusing taste: starts with lemon, then moves to grassy and herbal flavors. Also a bready/yeasty note which does not combine well with the others. Finishes with more lemon and some light hops. Citrus taste lingers for a bit, and is not unpleasant, but the last bit of the aftertaste is of Icehouse. Whoops. Overall: sock drawer + Icehouse: this is a disappointment. Maybe a slice of real lemon might help. Would not drink again.

A Stroll Around Menteng

Yesterday I took a stroll around Menteng, the prosperous leafy "inurb" of Jakarta which is where I like to stay. It's a nice part of town because it has sidewalks that you can walk a long and tree-lined streets that are pretty and shaded enough to avoid the hottest part of the equatorial sun around here. I walked for about three hours, with a break in the middle for lunch.

I've walked around this area before, so there's not really much new to report about it. But I did get a couple of good pictures, in particular this wordless advertisement for PDI-P:

Sukarno the Orator

Some additional pictures are here. You get to the new pictures by clicking "next."

For dinner I tried a cuisine that to my knowledge I had never tried before: Acehnese. There are a couple of reasons why I'd never had it before. First off, Acehnese food is hard to come by, as there are fewer Acehnese people in Jakarta than there are other ethnic groups. Second off, I'd always heard that it's not much different than other Sumatran foods, in particular Padang-style West Sumatra food. I know now that this isn't really true. Acehnese food blends Sumatran food with lots of Arabic and Gujarati influences, giving it a distinctly different kind of taste marked by notably different spices. Less of the Christmas cookie spices of Java and the eastern islands, and more of the peppery and sour tastes of central Asia. My very tasty dinner at Rumah Makan Meutia in the Bendungan Hilir neighborhood demonstrated this quite well.

Rumah Makan Meutia. Assalamu'alaikum.

I also can confirm that Acehnese food does indeed make use of a special herb that one tends not to associate with cuisine. Its seeds go in the basic spice paste and also gets used in ayam tangkap, a chicken and fried curry-leaves (etc.) dish.

Check out more recent food pictures here, including nasi rames, soto ayam istemewa, es teh tarek, mie Aceh, roti cane, and ayam tangkap. You get to the new pictures by clicking on "next.

It's the Wrong Heri, Gromit!

One of the consequences of living in a country with, ahem, lax copyright enforcement is that when a restaurant with a unique name hits on a particularly winning recipe or formula, ripoffs and clones will spring up immediately. For the unsavvy consumer--that is, me--it often becomes impossible to tell them apart, to tell the real ones from the fakes. Examples of this include Ayam Goreng Ny. Suharti, a famous Javanese fried chicken restaurant; Sederhana, the country's best Padang-style restaurant; and, it turns out, Pondok Sate Pak Heri on Jalan Sabang.

I learned this yesterday as I was looking for a quick bite. I had in mind something like fried fish or roasted chicken, and I wanted it to be fast. So I walked over to the local foodstall street and started walking down it. Then I started noticing something. There was another place calling itself Pondok Sate Pak Heri. Hm. Then I saw another one. By my count, there are no less that four different places that block that call themselves the exact same thing and sell the same thing.

So how do you know which one is the right one? By how many people were there. Only one Pondok Sate Pak Heri was crushed with people at 7:15 PM, and it was not the one that I went to the second day I was there. So I decided that in the name of fairness to the real Pak Heri, I'd try this one as well.

The Real Pak Heri

Crushed with motorcycles, with a bunch of people waiting and an oversized grill going out front making a huge smoky haze that extends half a block, this is the place to be. I also notice that almost everyone was ordering the chicken sate. So because of this, and because I'm feeling like I may have eaten enough mutton for an army over the past week, I decided to sacrifice comparability in the name of variety. Also, because I was feeling tired and antisocial, I got my sate to go and ate back in my room.

Sate Ayam, tambah lontong

This shows you the customary way to get something "to go" in Indonesia: wrapped in a banana leaf, and then wrapped in butcher paper. This is chicken sate with steamed pressed rice cakes in banana leaves (lontong) on the side. And the taste? Pretty damn good.

My grade: B+. As far as taste goes, these are a winner. Tender dark meat chicken, rich sauce, nice and peanuty and sweet and salty. Just how I like it. The rice cakes are good too, big and tender. But the problem? No acar (the crunchy vinegary vegetables). This is a deal-breaker for me. It makes the dish too rich.

More food pictures are up in the food pictures folder, including gado-gado and masakan Padang.

Sate Battle

I love sate (satay), Indonesia's version of grilled meat on a skewer. To give you some sense of how much I love sate, I've already eaten it twice since I've been here, and I've only had four meals (breakfast doesn't count). I'm always looking for the best sate around and decided that it would be fun to do a comparison of two well-loved sate places in my neighborhood, Sate Jaya Agung (Great Victory Satay) and Pondok Sate Pak Heri (Mr. Harry's Sate Stand). There's a third one near there, Sate Sabang, which I have yet to try but will get to soon, maybe this weekend.

Anyway, here are my notes. I decided that to be fair, I'd have mutton sate in both places. (Mutton is my favorite kind of sate.). We'll start with Sate Jaya Agung, which is my sentimental favorite. It's the first real sate that I ever tried here and they seem to know me there.

Sate Jaya Agung at night
 

They do a brisk business throughout the day. An order of sate, white rice, and a bottled water costs about $2.50, which is pretty good if not the very cheapest way to eat. When you order, this is what you get.

Sate kambing, tambah nasi


That's about ten skewers of mutton--skewers are made out of fractured and dried bamboo links--along with some rice and a bit of pickled carrot and cucumber (acar). Note also that there are condiments available, including sweet soy sauce (kecap manis), a vinegary kind of salty soy sauce, and MSG (which you can use like salt). Underneath the sate is a sauce made out of kecap manis, mashed peanuts, oil (lots of it), and spices. The idea is that you sort of smear the sate in the sauce, then eat it with the rice. Yum.

My rating: A-. I love the sauce here: sweet and rich but subtle. The meat is tough, but that's about what you can expect. What's nice is that they don't skimp on the really fatty pieces, which are the real treats. The big problem here is that the acar is lame. There's not enough of it and it's limp and disappointing.

Now let's move to its competitor across the street.

Pondok Sate Pak Heri at noontime rush hour


This place comes more highly recommended than the other one. What you get when you order, I must admit, certainly does look better.

Sate kambing, tambah nasi


The rice, you see, has fried shallots on it, as do the sate skewers. You also can see that instead of acar, you get real fresh vegetables (cucumber, carrots, tomatoes, birds-eye chilies) with the sate here.

My rating: B+. I just don't think that this place stands up as well. The fresh vegetables are a huge improvement, as are the shallots--they really give everything an extra depth of flavor that Sate Jaya Agung does not have. But, there are two flaws. (1) The sauce is far too oily and doesn't appear to have any peanuts in it. I suspect that it's not really traditional to have a peanuty sauce for mutton sate, but I miss it anyway. The sauce was basically palm oil plus kecap, not my favorite and not particularly inspiring. Plus, (2) the meat was more uneven. The fatty pieces were just fat--I don't mind this too much, actually--but the lean pieces were waaaaay to chewy, and I got a crunchy bit in one of them. A big no-no.

I've decided to keep a log of all of the food that I eat this trip, if possible taking pictures of all of my dishes and posting them in a food-pictures folder. I'll post here if/when that becomes available

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 Jaya Agung 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.)