Indo Cafe's Beef Rendang Sapi
It was EAT99 night at Indo Cafe -- an easy-to-miss strip mall restaurant with a small and strange parking lot at 137th St North. Four friends joined me to make a deep dent in their expansive "Indo Dutch" menu (which you'll learn about in your homework assignment below).
Indonesian food is so rare in Seattle, we felt like kid foodies playing in a brand-new food playground. Usually, one taste will announce itself so definitively during a meal that I have no question what the featured dish should be; however, for this dinner, all of the dishes fought so valiantly for first place that a winner was not clear. At all. I actually felt a little panicked about it, so I asked my friends to weigh in.
Here is how the conversation went:
1) Beef Rendang Sapi, tender dry beef curry slow-cooked with coconut sauce, topped with a hard boiled egg and shrimp crackers. The most expensive dish at $16.95 (and it was a full plate of beef!).
"This reminds me why I loved pot roast as a kid. But it's so much better than pot roast."
"If you don't eat beef, you would have to eat this anyway."
"Stuffing the beef and rice into the shrimp chips is everything."
"How could the featured dish not be the beef rendang?"
2) Empek Empek Palembang, two kinds of fried fish cakes swimming in a homemade sweet, dark vinegar sauce, topped with egg noodles and cucumbers, $12.95.
"The fish cakes were so light and springy! Not at all fishy."
"That sauce! It was just the right kind of sweet. Not a sugar sweet. A kind of sweet I've never tasted before."
"None of us have ever tasted anything like this. The featured dish should definitely be the fish cakes."
Also known as water spinach, river spinach, water morning glory, and swamp cabbage, I became addicted to these tender shoots sauteed with garlic while living in Ho Chi Minh City, where my favorite seafood restaurant served it as a side to tamarind crab. Indo Cafe's version made me almost weepy with nostalgia for it.
There's only one other place I know of that serves ong choy in Seattle (I'm positive there must be more...), and that is Rainier Restaurant and Barbecue. Anthony Bordain featured their Ong Choy Beef Salad (with raw, crunchy ong choy) during his visit here in 2012, and I'm devoted to its sweet, salty, crunchiness topped with the most tender strips of beef. I think nothing of making the drive from Edmonds to Martin Luther King Jr. Way for it.
"There is no vegetable even close to this in texture."
"How could you come here and not get this every time?"
"Ong choy is definitely your featured dish. It's so rare!"
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