Fantastic Voyage

Visiting the newly relocated Indonesia takes our writer back in time.


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Published: Aug 28, 2007

CURRY UP: One of Indonesia's best entrï¿½es features bone-in chicken thighs bathed in a thin, aromatic yellow curry sauce.

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Eight years ago, to celebrate my 24th birthday, my girlfriend attempted to make me a burrito. I remember it vividly. We were traveling on a cargo ship from Borneo to Sumatra across the South China Sea. The journey was already several days old, but unbeknownst to me, she had spent many hours shopping for ingredients before we'd set sail. The Indonesian crew had kept her secret, guarding her purchases in a corner of the mess room. Until that point in the voyage, we had been eating whatever the chef cooked for everyone else — which mostly meant rice and dried fish.

It's the thought that counts, they say, and I have never been so touched by a gift, but the fact remains that no Mexican with two eyes and a tongue could ever have guessed what my birthday meal was. The "tortilla" was a Malaysian flatbread made from flour and sweetened condensed milk, the beans belonged to the lentil family, and you can forget about avocados or sour cream or cheese of any description. (The rice, to be fair, was a dead ringer.)

For me, that story is a reminder of just how audacious the whole idea of an ethnic restaurant is. What an endeavor, to lift a whole cuisine out of the agriculture and climate that have always nourished it, and plop it down thousands of miles away where almost nothing is the same. And if that's hard to do with the staples of the Mexican diet, Indonesian cuisine has got be even less portable.

For one thing, there's the fish. A country made up of over 6,000 inhabited islands eats a lot of them, and they're not the species on display at Whole Foods. Then there's the fruit — from the crunchy selak with its snakeskin-like peel to the divine mangosteen, which is so notoriously unfit for travel that Queen Victoria was said to have offered a knighthood to anyone who could bring her one unspoiled. (No one managed the feat.)

So it's all the more surprising and impressive that the newly relocated Indonesia restaurant still manages to hit so many of the right notes. It's run by the same family that closed an identically named place in Chinatown earlier this year. They moved way down to Snyder Avenue to be closer to Philly's biggest cluster of Indonesians, and during each of my three visits, I was the only non-fluent speaker in the place.

If authenticity is what you're after, you won't find better. My first bite of chicken curry all but transported me back to the archipelago. The bone-in thighs were bathed in a thin, yellow sauce that melded too many ingredients to deconstruct them, but the aroma wafting from a tiny lemon leaf was what reeled my senses back through eight years of time.

A curry of young jackfruit managed the same trick. When jackfruit turns up on Stateside plates, it's usually ripe and sunshine yellow. Indonesians commonly eat it before it sweetens, treating it more like a vegetable. With its faintly sour flavor, this version could have fooled a roadside vendor in eastern Java. Another pre-ripe offering was the mango in a fruit salad served with a dipping dish of sweet soy sauce. I prefer mangos fully ripened, but it was pleasant to be reminded of how different they taste when their acidity hasn't totally disappeared beneath the natural sugars.

Indonesia is the birthplace of satay — grilled skewers of meat served with peanut sauce — and the restaurant's versions are excellent. The lamb was particularly tender and flavorful, and the sweetness of the peanut sauce worked well with an accompanying mince of chili peppers that was fiery enough to make your scalp sweat.

Chicken marinated in coconut juice and deep-fried without any breading, however, didn't come out so well. The meat was a little too dry and tough, and much of the flavor seemed to have been cooked out of it. Nor was I taken with the tofu that came with my nasi campur — although the tempeh (fermented soybean cake, another Indonesian invention) was better.

My favorite dish was another one based on an exotic ingredient. Rawon is a beef soup that derives its characteristic flavor from the keluak nut. Once cooked, the meat of the keluak becomes oily and tarlike, with a deep flavor that recalls bitter chocolate. This makes for a broth that, despite its thinness, can almost seem more robust than the beef cubes at the bottom. This version beats just about any beef soup I can remember.

I will confess that overall, I find Indonesian cuisine a bit less compelling than the rich food traditions of its northern neighbors, particularly Thailand. But by Javanese standards, Snyder Avenue's Indonesia is spot-on. You might have to settle for fried bananas instead of mangosteens for dessert, but it's hard to complain about much else — especially given prices so fair they border on cheap. When it comes to ethnic restaurants, it doesn't get much truer than this.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

Indonesia

1725 Snyder Ave.

215-829-1400

Tue.-Sat., 11 a.m.-8 p.m.

BYOB.

Takeout available.

Wheelchair accessible.