Tasting Jakarta’s Legendary Dishes

devyleona(75)

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Hello, Friends especially Foodies!

I live in Jakarta, the capital city of my country, Indonesia. Like I always say, in our country, each place has its’ own delicious food, like what we also have here in Jakarta. Now I would like to introduce you to one legendary iconic over decades restaurant in Pecenongan, a culinary heaven which was located in Central Jakarta area. This old restaurant is one of the best to serve this dish (even the name of the restaurant used this dish name… could you guess it?), and it also serves other Indonesian Chinese food dishes, without much more to talk, let me present it to you…

THE OUTLOOK

As you could see, this restaurant still had it old lay out, so modest from the outside and didn’t change from the original building…

THE DINING AREA

As you could see this restaurant only had a square dining area, so modest with not too bright lamps they used. The furnish they used were old and made from wood. When I pulled the chair, reminded me of the old 1990 style of wood dining chair.. They put the red chess napkin over all tables. Almost all of the things here were old, they even used the old air conditioners which in our opinion were not proper anymore cause it wasn’t cold enough for the room, instead would be an electricity vain, paid the electricity bill but not cold enough, also not good for the environment. Right? Here they only had this one floor dining room.

THE MENU

Here was their menu book

Their special menus were 5 dishes:

Jakarta Spring Roll (LUMPIA JAKARTA), the must try one, they even named this restaurant with this dish name!
Whole fish with bean curd
Hotplate Seafood/Beef Kale
Hotpot Bean Curd Seafood
Fried Baby Birds which could be served with separated Salt & Pepper and also Butter sauce..

They also had some menus like Barbeque seafood, Steak (in Indonesian Chinese style), Bean curd…

They also had birds dishes here (this was special), Chicken dishes, Squids, Fish..

Even they had crab dishes, frogs (one of our favorite meat), Eels (my favorite), Beef and also vegetable dishes of course!

And they also still had shrimp dishes and any other dishes you could find.

They didn’t serve many kind of beverages here..

THE FOOD & THE OUTLOOK

We ordered only their special dishes that day, we wanted to get the best they could prepare. The two menus came at the same time and not a long time to get our 3rd dish delivered.

Then here was our dinner

From left to right we ordered: Fried Early Bird, Jakarta Spring roll and also Beef Hotplate Kale.

Looked so yummy in their modesty appearance, reminded me of the table of the occasions when I was a child, usually the table were held to celebrate anniversary, wedding or anything..

THE TASTE & THE FLAVOUR

Some of the pictures I took when we enjoyed our dinner

Now I would explain a bit more about the taste and the flavour of each dishes we had, the one we ate first was their

Beef Hotplate Kale

It had the super tasty soft beef, with soft fresh kale, in sweet, spicy and a bit savory flavour. It served on the hotplate so we had to be careful of the hotplate. It had thick little soup and contained black pepper. It tasted so perfectly delicious cause they used the best quality of ingredients here and the portion contained more than enough for two persons. Great!

The second menu we had was their

Fried Early Bird

It served separately with the butter sauce which had the sweet and a bit savory flavour, also the salt & pepper.. The bird original flavour was savory and it was crunchy. The meat was just a bit cause the size was small. I preferred to put the salt & pepper on my bird than used the butter sauce, cause the sauce tasted too sweet for me. I also loved this dish, even the portion was small. I always miss the fried early bird, and this menu was rare here.

The last one, we had their special

Jakarta Spring Roll (Lumpia Jakarta)

It contained stirred vegetables, tofu and chicken as its’ filling with that crunchy not hard skin. It had the sweet savory flavour and what made it special was it served with the authentic peanut chilli paste which had the spicy, sweet and savory flavour. Perfect dish to try!

THE PRICE

For these dishes plus two portions of rice and a free tea (they didn’t tell us that it would be free), we paid 151,800 IDR or around 10.6 USD which we said fair to the tasty dishes we had. And this restaurant served free iced tea so you wouldn't be thirsty when you eat here...