Tom Pepinsky

Category: Food and Drink

  • 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

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    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

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    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
     

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    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

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    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

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    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

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    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