For lunch, we had wanted to go to a Padang style restaurant. As I think I explained earlier, Padang is a region of Western Sumatra and the food from there is very popular in Jakarta. I even think I saw some Padang restaurants in Lombok as we drove by. Padang restaurants are the original fast food. Basically, the moment you sit down, a server brings a variety of dishes and places them on the table. You pay for whatever you wind up eating and when you're finished, they put the rest back for someone else. In addition to this, you can also order other things that would be made to order.
This is one of the more well known Padang places in Jakarta, Rumah Makan Surya. (Rumah makan means "eating house"). Masakan Padang means "Padang food"
This is what you see when first walking in:
And as soon as you sit down, you get the layout:
We're not exactly sure what everything was - Padang food does tend to use a lot of offal. A common dish is cow brain, but I didn't want to try it as I'm always a little worried about mad cow disease.
We wound up eating the vegetable plate
- which was red sambal, eggplant, string beans and a common Padang vegetable, singkong or boiled cassava leaves. In this photo, beneath it is sambal ijo - or green sambal made with green chillies and green tomatoes, which is not very spicy but goes really well with everything which I ordered in addition to what was brought. It arrived immediately so it was made in advance which is not surprising. At the top left, there's a finger bowl full of water - it's traditional to eat this type of food with your right hand, so the bowl is to wash your fingers beforehand and then when you're finished. We also had the brown slices to the right of the veggies in the main photo - here's a closeup:
At first, we didn't realize what it was - I thought it was some kind of beef jerky that had been deep fried, but it turned out to be cow's lung which was delicious. Like a beef cracker - it was really dry and hard like a rock but you could bite off a piece easily. It tasted a little smoky and savory. My wife LOVED it!
We also ate the beef rendang - Padang is supposedly the origin of rendang. The classic way to make it results in a curry so dry there's basically no liquid left whatsoever. So it's the meat covered in a heavy paste that had been cooked for hours. It was amazing. In the main photo, it's the super dark brown lumps on the bottom right.
Finally, we also ate the shrimp balado as I can't get enough of balado....
The shrimp were shell on, but deep fried so the shell was nice and crispy.
