Tom Pepinsky

Category: Food and Drink

  • Traipsing throughout Jakarta

    James and I had a nice time the other night.  We first stopped by a great Chinese seafood restaurant that our friends really enjoy, and had all sorts of steamed fish and wok-fried vegetables and tasty tofu and the like.  Our friends are observant Catholics and decided to lay off the chicken that we ordered, but that just meant more for us.  James was funny, though.  He has spent a bunch of time travelling throughout China, from Kashgar to Harbin to Guangzhou, so he’s familiar with Chinese food.  He claimed that the food was delicious and very authentic, but he was simply amazed that there was absolutely no pork or ham available.  I told him that this is normal in Indonesia, where almost every restaurant is halal so that it can attract business.  There’s a similar phenomenon on NYC and Philadelphia of kosher Chinese restaurants, but in Indonesia you’d have to really search to find a non-halal restaurant.  JM and I, on our travels throughout Java and frequent attendance of nice restaurants, never saw pork.  The only exception was Bali, but that makes sense because it’s a Hindu island.

    After dinner at that restaurant, we headed to a fancy Belgian-run restaurant for dessert.  It was also quite good, although the clientele was entirely ethnic Chinese and Western.  I had a chocolate tart with basil ice cream, which was surprisingly delicious.  Yes, you read that right, basil.

    We capped off the night with a drink in a bar in the leafy, prosperous neighborhood of Menteng, which is where the Freedom Institute is.  This place was excellent as well.  I had a drink that essentially boiled down to a Mint Julep accented with crushed watermelon and lime juice.  Very tasty.  This restaurant, named Loro Jonggrang for character on display at the Hindu temple of Prambanan in Central Java, featured cultural artifacts from throughout Java and Bali.  It was nice enough that we asked and received a tour, checking out very nice pictures and carvings.  The place even included a Sukarno room, a tribute to Indonesia’s first President.

    My project for the next week is to get as much new Indonesian music as possible.  One of our friends is really tapped into the Indonesian arts community, enough that she knows all the new jazz/fusion groups such as Krakatau (whom JM and I have seen live) and played a traditional flute with a jazz group at the recent Java Jazz Festival.  I’ve asked for her recommendations for the best modern Indonesian pop, rock, and jazz.  JM and I are only really familiar with Peterpan and Sheila on 7.  Other bands we’ve heard are good include Slank, Dewa, and Iwan Fals.  I’ll keep you posted with the results of my search.

  • Kafe Wien

    Yesterday I had a very busy day, three interviews.  It’s really amazing how much it takes out of you when you have to talk about politics for an hour and a half or so in a foreign languages, and it’s even more amazing how tired you can get after you’ve done that three times in one day.  Suffice it to say that I really slept well last night.

    My last interview was with a journalist who has great connections with the Indonesian business elite.  He also has a great Indonesian business and politics blog.  We had a very nice time discussing all sorts of things related to corruption and cronyism during Soeharto’s time and these days now, and discussing the types of reforms that have been successful and the types that have not.  A wonderful conversation, very useful for my research, full of insights.  The guy has contacts everywhere, and we discussed some of the more interesting shenanigans of Soeharto and his cronies both during the crisis and after Soeharto’s resignation.  Helps to explain why Soeharto is still a free man, and why Soeharto’s son Tommy was only sent to jail after he arranged for a judge to be murdered.  (Tommy, by the way, got out of jail a couple days ago because his tummy hurts.)

    Our meeting was at Plaza Senayan, a very very upscale mall.  Malls in Indonesia, as we’ve discussed before, are really the center of all glamorous living.  It seems weird, but it’s true.  Tommy Hilfiger, the Body Shop, Ermenegildo Zegna, all were there.  We met at the fanciest restaurant at Plaza Senayan, Kafe Wien, a mock-Viennese cafe.  Seeing all of the waitresses in their dirndls was certainly the high point of my day, although it caused some weird cross-cultural mental interference remembering the time I spent in Austria while I was in high school.  The coffee was delicious, the clientele was very wealthy, and they even had a string quartet playing Mozart.  But like good Indonesians, the reporter and I ordered sop buntut instead of wienerschnitzel, and it was great.

    As an added surprise, I was walking through the Freedom Institute today and ran into an old friend, a PhD student in history at the University of Wisconsin but originally from Sumba and currently living in Jakarta.  Great to see him, and he’ll me and James around to see good stuff this weekend.