The search for an Indonesian taste of home.
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When I arrived at Saratoga’s Indo Cafe on a rainy afternoon, owner Maria Handayani was making martabak. A thick and spongy pancake, martabak is one of the most popular street snacks back in our shared motherland, Indonesia. Served with lavish amounts of Wijsman (a Dutch canned butter) and a choice of chocolate sprinkles or grated cheese, martabak is the most sinful of desserts.
Each bite oozes butter, chocolate and cheese in your mouth. It’s usually served as a late-night supper, since street vendors start making it only after maghrib, the Muslim call to prayer at sunset, making it the only acceptable kind of nightcap in Indonesia.
Martabak is also the one piece of home I have been unable to find here. I’ve lived all over the United States for nine years now and have managed to find acceptable replacements for traditional Indonesian dishes — except for the magical martabak.
It’s probably why I feel so invested in Handayani’s efforts to master this recipe. Upon my arrival, her husband said that Handayani had been baking martabaks nonstop for the previous three weeks in an effort to create the perfect version. She has practically perfected many other Indonesian dishes evident at Indo Cafe, which Handayani has run since 2011.
Indonesian food is as diverse as its 17,000 islands, so for any restaurant to accurately capture the whole breadth of the cuisine is close to impossible. But with that being said, Handayani’s cooking is as close as it gets to traditional Javanese fare in the Bay Area, a nod to Handayani’s childhood growing up in East Java. The rice combos, for instance, come with either nasi uduk (coconut rice) or nasi kuning (lemongrass and turmeric rice) and the option of fried chicken and/ or beef rendang. There is also an array of curries to choose from, including gulai nangka (jackfruit curry), spicy pork rind curry and telor balado (egg curry). These were the kinds of dishes I ate growing up: humble yet flavorful home-cooked food in its nature, perhaps the equivalent to the American plate of mashed potatoes, roast chicken and green beans.
But unlike American comfort food, these dishes are far from simple. “Indonesian food is very labor intensive. I have to be physically fit to make it,” Handayani said. “Unlike in American cuisine where they just use salt, pepper and maybe garlic or chile powder to marinate the meat, we spend at least three to five hours just trimming spices like galangal and lemongrass for the rub.” It’s why Handayani intentionally kept Indo Cafe a small operation, because she wanted to make the food as it is done back in Indonesia.
Other transporting dishes on the menu include Handayani’s version of mie tek tek, a Javanese stir-fried egg noodle dish whose name is derived from the sound street hawkers make when cooking (“tek tek” being the sound of the spatula hitting the wok). While Handayani’s version doesn’t come with the charred, smoky flavor, it still reminds me of one I would eat on a hot humid night in Yogyakarta. Then, there’s the lontong cap go meh, rice cakes served with chicken and egg curry. It’s a dish that catches the attention of visitors who speak Chinese, because “cap go” translates to “15” in the Hokkien dialect. Chinese Indonesians have adopted the dish during the 15th day of Chinese New Year celebrations despite its Indonesian roots — just another example of the complexity in Indonesian cuisine and culture.
I did wonder whether Handayani’s cooking would be appreciated in Saratoga. After all, Saratoga suburbia is a far cry from the culinary capital that is San Francisco. Plus, Indo Cafe’s hidden location, tucked behind the UPS on Big Basin Way, doesn’t even allow much foot traffic, if any.
But she chose to be in Saratoga for a very specific reason. “I wanted to start small because I knew how much work it would be. I did not want to take any shortcuts,” she said. “Plus, I like that it’s not too crowded, and that we are surrounded by other mom-and-pop stores.” (Saratoga has strict formula retail laws.)
According to Handayani, the people who first discovered Indo Cafe were primarily Indonesian students living in the area. But word spread quickly. (Han-
dayani jokes it’s because of the recent gluten-free trend in America, even though Indonesians have been eating naturally gluten-free for years.)
One customer, Amy Gu, found out about Indo Cafe through a Yelp newsletter. “It was a fresh experience, since I never had Indonesian food before,” she said.
It certainly leads me to ask the question whether Indonesian cuisine can become part of the mainstream American palate, the way sushi and ramen have for Japanese food.
Who knows, maybe that dish could be the martabak, thanks to Handayani. It’s not part of the regular Indo Cafe menu yet, but she hopes to launch it once she perfects it.
After our interview, I waited patiently for several hours for the martabak to rise to the exact height desired. During that time, Handayani force-fed me ayam goreng penyet, fried chicken covered with sambal, in a true tante (auntie) hospitality, an Indonesian warmth she extends to her customers.
I would have waited anyway, for that is what you do for a piece of home, even if it may just be a possibility.
And I am happy to say that when I took my first bite and got that familiar — albeit slightly smaller — explosion of butter, chocolate and cheese, it was pretty close ... as close as it gets to perfect.