| If you don’t eat at Restaurant Indonesia for the food, then you have to go there to meet Eileen.
At 11 years old, Eileen is the youngest of three children who work the front of the house while her parents, owners Rachel and Jim Siow, cook in the back. It’s a great system with each child responsible for a specific task. An older boy seats you and takes drink and appetizer orders. His girlfriend refills water and sets tables. Eileen takes orders for the main course. All the children serve the food and clear tables.
We tried to give our entire dinner order along with the appetizer, but we were quickly shut down – the system is not to be tinkered with. We ordered the appetizer hot platter of popular Indonesian finger foods ($9.50), accompanied by a sweet and sour dipping sauce. My favourite was the bregedel jagung, crispy patties filled with creamed corn and pieces of carrot. The other items were lumpia (egg rolls), resolles (breaded chicken rolls) and the spicy stegosaurus-shaped pastel (the dinosaur description is Eileen’s), a golden, deep-fried pastry filled with chicken, pepper, onions and peas.
At 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night, the restaurant was full. The diners included a few families with babies, adding to the impression that this is truly a family restaurant. Eileen comes by with her notepad and diligently jots down your dinner orders. She takes her position seriously, but once business has been taken care of she will chat with you. She has to work at the restaurant every day after school, she told us, which gets in the way of her Internet research for her current astrology project.
For dinner, we shared gule ayam ($9.95), chicken and vegetables in a mild curry sauce with fantastic hash brown-style potatoes. The udang mentega ($12.95) featured a generous serving of prawns with tomatoes, green peppers, onions and button mushrooms in a garlic and citrus butter sauce. The saté dinner ($10.75) comes with six sticks of saté (your choice of beef, chicken, pork or lamb) threaded onto bamboo skewers, served with coconut-flavoured rice and mixed vegetables. The chicken and beef were very tender and the accompanying peanut sauce was delicious with its big bits of crunchy peanuts.
If you’re rice lovers like us, you’ll probably need to order an extra serving of rice. And compared to Thai coconut rice, the Indonesian version is less sweet. Although one can taste the individual spices in each dish, the overall flavouring is quite subtle.
The dinner menu features a great selection of chicken, seafood, beef, pork and lamb dishes. Vegetarians are not overlooked, as there are about 10 vegetable and tofu meals. There are also several variations of fried rice and fried noodle dishes and, of course, Indonesia’s traditional breakfast dish, nasi goring – fried rice with vegetables, meat and shrimp topped with a fried egg.
It was a most pleasant meal and, even though we were full, we couldn’t pass up the pisang goreng ($2.95) – fried banana with coconut or vanilla ice cream. Delicious!
Restaurant Indonesia has been open since 1980 and the Siow family took over in 2003 when the business moved from 17th Avenue and Sarcee Trail to its present location. The Siows, who hail from Malaysia, say there is little difference between the cuisine of their home country and Indonesia.
Underneath the restaurant’s green awning are a few rusty cyclos (Southeast Asian bicycle taxis) and staring at you from within the restaurant are dozens of exquisite Balinese masks that tell the story of how the gods and goddesses fought the demons in the epic Ramayana. However, the decor eventually faded into the background as we became more and more enchanted with Eileen.
Restaurant Indonesia is located at 1604 - 14 St. S.W. Phone: 244-0645. |
Copyright ©2005 FFWD. All rights reserved.