San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Indonesian cuisine lights up
Get ready for bakso and beef rendang — this underground food is booming.
The Bay Area is in the throes of a vibrant underground Indonesian food movement, with cooks driving to homes all over the region with boxes of satay with peanut sauce, meatball noodle soup and thick pancakes stuffed with chocolate sprinkles and cheese. Now, they’re hoping this recent groundswell of support will translate into mainstream success.
Dozens of these Indonesian chefs and home cooks were inspired to bring their food to the masses when they found themselves with more free time during the pandemic — and by the fact that two of the Bay Area’s last remaining Indonesian restaurants, Borobudur in San Francisco and Jayakarta in Berkeley, permanently closed in 2019. The only other Bay Area restaurant dedicated to the underrepresented cuisine is Indo Cafe in Saratoga, although there are a handful of others that serve a mix of Southeast Asian dishes.
The question is whether these cooks can get to the next level, open aboveboard businesses and see Indonesian food get the recognition they feel it deserves. They’re more optimistic than they’ve been in years. They no longer feel so alone, seeing so many fellow Indonesians start small businesses on Instagram. Perhaps more importantly, an exciting contemporary Indonesian restaurant, Warung Siska, is opening in Redwood City in July.
Other enticing developments include Rasa Rasa, a food truck that debuted in San Francisco’s Mission Bay just before the pandemic hit. Two of the three owners are Indonesian and specialize in dishes like beef rendang, a richly spiced beef coconut stew, and gado gado, a vegan salad finished with crispy tofu, tempeh and peanut sauce.
Indonesian desserts and snacks, even rarer to find than savory dishes, got a prominent audience at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market during the pandemic when San Francisco’s 1000 Layer Bakery got monthlong stints at the booth of nonprofit La Cocina. After slowly growing her home catering operation for several years, Jennifer Huang joined La Cocina’s incubator program in 2019 and started selling her treats — like the showstopping kue lapis legit, 25 layers of spiced, eggy cake broiled one level at a time — directly to customers for the first time. Her farmers’ market popups consistently sold out.
While Huang’s rise was a little more gradual, one of the quickest success stories is D’Grobak, a contemporary Indonesian street food popup that went from selling out of a home kitchen to becoming a fully licensed operation in less than a year. Based in a commercial kitchen in Richmond, D’Grobak is now selling 150 to 200 bowls weekly of bakso, a cloudy noodle soup topped with bouncy beef balls.
Crowds are starting to hit up D’Grobak’s popups in San Francisco and Oakland, appreciating the extra touches that make Yohanes Ng and Christna Lim’s bakso special. Ng, who also works as a sushi caterer, enriches the broth with bone marrow, stuffs meatballs with creamy boiled quail eggs and even created a vegetarian version using Impossible Burger.
It took Ng almost a year of tinkering with the recipe — playing around with the proportions of candlenut, spring onions, garlic and white pepper — to create a version that satisfied his memory of a particularly rich Surakartastyle (a city in Java, Indonesia) bakso he ate in Indonesia three years ago. “It inspired me on the first slurp,” he said.
Indonesian dishes that were previously inaccessible to most people in the Bay Area are now easier to try thanks to the efforts of these chefs. When 1000 Layer Bakery’s Huang moved to the Bay Area about 20 years ago, she could find Indonesian food — but the meals were always from fellow Indonesian families as part of an informal economy.
“You have to be Indonesian and in the Indonesian community to know who is selling — and everything is (written) in Indonesian,” she said. “That was the case for many years.”
But that changed during the pandemic. When Huang created an Instagram page for 1000 Layer Bakery last year to start selling treats like kue lapis, a chewy and bright green mochi cake flavored with coconut and pandan, she was stunned to see several other small Indonesian popups on the platform.
One of those new popups is Gurih Table, which husbandwife team Fik and Reka Saleh run out of their East Bay home. When Reka lost her parttime restaurant gig at the start of the pandemic and her other job became remote, she decided to pursue her dream of sharing Indonesian food.
In a nontraditional move, Gurih Table incorporates Fik’s Texasstyle barbecued meats into dishes like soto padang, a clear beef soup with rice noodles with potato croquettes. Gurih’s version is topped with a slice of smoked brisket.
Reka is looking at commercial kitchens to expand production, but it’s tricky. It feels like there’s a lack of resources and knowledge within the Indonesian community that might be holding her and others back, she said.
“I’m still learning myself. How do I start from home and go to the next step and get a brickandmortar?” she said. “Who can I turn to who has gone through it?”
Many are turning to Siska Silitonga, the San Francisco chef opening Warung Siska in Redwood City this summer. She got her start in 2015 serving groups of 10 people out of her home under the popup name ChiliCali. She grew to a commercial kitchen, her own line of jarred sambal and, now, a fullblown restaurant.
Silitonga is happy to share advice. She thinks this new wave of Indonesian cooks needs to learn to sell Indonesian dishes beyond their Southeast Asian community — though she acknowledges the challenge in explaining a cuisine that’s so vast, with thousands of islands that each have their own distinct dishes.
She wants to see more Indonesian cooks have fun and bridge cultures, similar to Gurih Table or the current Filipino food movement, where cheeseburger lumpia have drawn fans as famous as rapper E40. Perhaps most of all, she says Indonesian cooks need to fight the notion that Indonesian food should be cheap.
Many Indonesian dishes require a lot of chopping and blending herbs by hand, braising meats for hours and pounding ingredients like galangal, lemongrass, shallots and candlenuts into pastes. D’Grobak’s bakso meatballs, for example, requires shaping each individual ball with a spoon and cooking them one at a time.
That said, these cooks feel encouraged by their rising visibility. They’re developing relationships on Instagram that, just in the past few months, have translated into reallife friendships.
“We’re sending food to each other. When someone is doing something, we’re promoting them. There’s camaraderie,” Silitonga said. “We’re growing but there aren’t a lot of us.”