The City Still Craves Traditional Food

Jakarta - “It`s not the right taste!” said Eric, a Minangese after he finished eating at a Padang food stall in Senen, Central Jakarta.

“I don`t think the food stall serves food with the real Minang flavor,” he said.

Padang food stalls are mushrooming everywhere in the city. They serve hot and spicy Minang food from West Sumatra province, where the capital city is Padang.

According to Eric, many Padang food stall and restaurant owners do not even know how to make the real Minang food, having maybe worked for a Padang restaurant or married into a Minangese family.

“They think they already know the taste,” said Eric, a small scale trader, with disappointment.

He said cooking the real Minang food required strict adherence to certain rules and the use of specific ingredients. For example, ripe coconuts were required to produce quality oil for the food, especially when making rendang (meat simmered in spices and coconut milk), the main Minang dish.

Rendang should not be boiled at a high temperature.

“If the rendang still looks yellow, there must be something wrong with the ingredients,” he said, adding the right rendang should be blackish.

Bad chilies, onions, and garlic must not be used otherwise they will ruin the taste.

Eric also regretted many restaurants used the term “Padang” to describe the food they served.

“It is actually wrong to use the term `Padang food`. The food itself is originally from West Sumatra, not from Padang,” he said.

Originating from Pariaman, situated on a coastal area north from Padang, Eric does not like being called “Padang”.

Yati, a middle-aged Sundanese was also highly critical of some of the Sundanese dishes available at food outlets in the city. The food is originally from West Java.

“I cannot taste the real Sundanese food in the city,” she said.

Sundanese food like sayur asem (sour vegetable soup) and pepes ikan (fish wrapped in a banana leaf and roasted) do not taste like those in West Java, she claimed.

To make sayur asem, she only needed onions, garlic, tamarind, peanuts and a little bit of terasi (condiment made from pounded and fermented shrimps or fish), and a few chilies.

However, she found people also added ribs and salted fish to sayur asem in the city.

“Somehow, it doesn`t suit my palate,” she said.

As a result, she never has Sundanese food when she eats out.

Unlike the hot and spicy original Minang food, Sundanese dishes do not require many chilies.

“We use more tomatoes and fewer chilies to make sambal (sauce made by crushing chilies and other spices),” she said, adding eating sambal with a lot of chilies gave her a stomachache.

Yati also said she did not like to buy rice in Jakarta. She believed most of the rice in Jakarta had been stored in a storeroom probably for months, which affected its taste.

Traditional rice from her home village tasted better because people cooked it in a traditional way without using a rice cooker, like the Jakartans, she said.

Traditional food in Jakarta has lost its authentic taste due to the amalgamation of various traditional foods in the city to cater to the market`s demand.

As a metropolitan city, Jakarta is a melting pot of different ethnic groups with different palates.

“The traditional flavor of the food has been lost because chefs have become very creative and experimental. However, some people as a result find the flavors strange,” said Henry Alexie Bloem, President of the Indonesian Chefs Association.

The flavor of some of the typical dishes is now very different from the original taste.

“It`s hard to preserve the original taste. Entrepreneurs have to invest a lot to produce the original taste, as it requires a high level of meticulousness, expertise and chefs to undergo thorough training. It demands a lot of money,” he said.

He said Indonesia had huge culinary resources, which actually suited the city people`s taste.

Nevertheless, most restaurant owners did not deliver food packaged appropriately.

“Traditional food should also be delivered the right way. People in the city like to feel a sense of prestige. Restaurant owners should consider their customers` lifestyle and preferences for atmosphere when serving traditional food,” he said.

Dadi Krismatono from a community of food aficionados, Jalansutra, said the first challenge restaurants came across when serving traditional food from each region was the availability of certain materials and seasonings, which were hard to find in the city, such as certain limes called lemon cui from Manado and pakis (a kind of edible fern) leaves for making Minang curry.

However, he also thought appreciation for regional food was on the rise in the city regardless whether it was traditionally cooked, as each restaurant could opt to either maintain or ignore traditional cooking methods.

Traditional food is now available not only at food stalls along the streets, but also in upmarket restaurants.

“People are responding well to restaurants introducing Indonesian fine dining, which allows them to hold official and glamorous events and serve traditional food,” he added. (nia)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com (1 June 2009)

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