Eat Around the World - Indonesia

It had been over a month since we had tried a new ethnic cuisine, so last Friday we set out to explore a new country. We didn't really have anything in mind specifically, but we were thinking Asian. Both of us wanted Mongolian barbeque, but we weren't able to find a restaurant that looked really good.

We ended up deciding on Indonesian and headed to Jayakarta Restaurant in Berkeley (Yelp review here). The restaurant was really crowded, and we were excited for some new flavors.

We ordered four entrees, all of which were very different. For noodles, we ordered mie tek-tek: egg noodles sauteed with fried eggs, strips of chicken, vegetables, and spicy sauce. This was by far our favorite! So flavorful!

A yelp review we read said that the satays were good, so we ordered the assorted sate with chicken, pork, beef, and shrimp. They are basically like kabobs with a peanut sauce on the meat. These were probably my second favorite item.

For one of our main dishes we went the chicken route and ordered ayam panggang bumbu rujak. Say what? According to the menu, this is barbequed chicken marinated in their special gravy of peanut and coconut milk sauce. This item was almost too flavorful for me - too strong. I felt like I was eating potpourri. Also, the chicken was not boneless, so it was kinda a pain to eat over rice.

Lastly, we ordered babat goreng kecap: beef deep fried and crispy, then sauteed in sweet soy sauce. This was a big disappointment. When we read deep fried and crispy, we thought there would still be some beef left. Wrong. The beef had been fried to crispy strips of...crispy strips. There was literally no meat left.

All in all, we gave the restaurant a seven (good). It was not amazing, but we enjoyed most of what we ate and would go back. The noodles by far blew everything else out of the water!