A Christmas Story

A girl walks into a bar in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood on a cold autumn evening, her first time there, a dark, wood-paneled joint called Hopleaf specializing in Belgian craft brews, also on the list of "125 Places to Have a Beer Before You Die." She is 24, not far removed from the days of bargain basement beer stockades in the college fridge, which translates into the drool that is domestic gruel. The punchline? She works for a company representing Miller, so drinks products such as Genuine Draft, Lite and High Life every Friday at happy hour. She knows it doesn't taste very good, but does not know better, and there are only so many dollars in a 24-year-old's purse for spending on beer. But at Hopleaf, she is handed a long, laminated menu that reads like a European train schedule, with names like Orval, Rochefort, Chimay, Kwak, La Chouffe, Duvel, Grimbergen, Rodenbach, Westmalle, Brunehaut and Abbaye St. Martin - a lot harder to pronounce than Budweiser and Coors and a lot more expensive. However, it is pay day, so why not? She picks the Abbaye St. Martin Blond (this fruity blond with an A.B.V. of 7% has a creamy white head - not air), because even though she is used to paying two bucks for a bottle of domestic, she already knows that beer is a religion, so she decides to go with the monks.

What happens next is a calling, a baptism by the holiest of liquids on earth. The Abbaye St. Martin Blond, in its signature chalice on a table, a cassoulet of rabbit in an earthen pot to the left and a cauldron of mussels to the right, speaks to her, preaches in an acceptable and comforting manner. She gravitates towards the discovery of this heaven where hops of only the highest order may frolic and calls to be accepted into this catechism of craft brew connoisseurs. Finally, her soul has found salvation and in an act reminiscent of Martin Luther, immediately posts 95 protestations, and more, against bad beer - those dribbles that are light, flavorless, and way below water, milk and root beer on the grand scale of beverages.

I am no longer the same girl, nine years later (I have not drank a drop of mediocre beer since, unless it was a sampling or out of professional necessity or courtesy - I would much rather not drink, if the choices available are paltry), but Abbaye St. Martin and Brunehaut (both crafted at the same brewery) beers continue to talk to me. More than that, they tweet me. They tell of the weather in Brussels, gossip about Internet freak shows, chuckle at the day's weirdest and most impossible news, and they know of an apartment in Paris you may rent for a long-term stay, and will whisper some local experiences for you to partake in. What more can you ask of excellent beers?

Ask not what your beer can do for you, but what you can do for your beer. It is not everyday that the owner of one of the world's finest time-honored brasseries rolls out the red carpet for a personal tour of his domain. I had stopped by Belgium before a business trip to Paris in September, and stayed with our lovely family friend Livia in Bruges. On a beautiful morning (oh, how facetious I am - every day in Belgium is a beautiful one, fine weather or not!), we rented a Volkswagen Golf and began the alleged 40-minute drive to Rongy. It's not easy to find good beer - lagers are everywhere, but you have to be willing to sip outside of the bottle, flip the barley over and swirl up a little storm in the glass. We drove from Flemish-speaking West Flanders to French-speaking Wallonia, got lost in Tournai, got to Antoing, got lost again amid towering mills, before finding ourselves on a perfectly-paved country road (all but yellow-bricked) that led us all the way to the doorstep of Brasserie de Brunehaut, corn slow-dancing on both sides now along the way. You can imagine how thirsty a two-hour drive with detours can be!

 The road to Rongy, Belgium.

See, beer and crisis go together like steak and frites, waffle and dark chocolate sauce, and Bruges and bridges. When Marc-Antoine de Mees bought Brasserie de Brunehaut four years ago, it was facing a crisis, and he was a crisis manager by trade. Like a dark Belgian ale, such as the fantastic Abbaye St. Martin tripel (three varieties of malt and three varieties of hops join forces to create a robust 9% A.B.V.), drawn to Flemish carbonnades, Marc-Antoine set to work making an institution since 1096 relevant to now. Innovations and solutions were needed without watering down tradition. In addition to operational overhauls and philosophy tinkerings, to keep his beers surging forward, Marc-Antoine went back to earth, planting his own barley and wheat, using pure water unique to his very own well - "It was like a dream to own a craft artisanal brewery," he says. The Brunehaut line, in fact, is organic and the first in Europe to be exported in recyclable kegs (seriously, in how many ways can beer make me happy?). And this is how Marc-Antoine came to describe his brewery as "both old and new." In fact, his Facebook status the other day proclaimed, "Alcohol may not solve your problems, but neither will water or milk."

 A man and his brewery.

After showing us around the brewery like a proud dad, we settled by the bar where Marc-Antoine poured generous samplings of almost everything in his collection for us, each in its own chalice, with the ideal proportion of head to beer and of course, that intricate Belgian lace. There are not many beers in this world that can set your heart a-whirl and your tongue a-twirl - the Abbaye St. Martin and Brunehaut lines are two of them for me. They say that alcohol loosens the tongue, but I beg to differ - in fact, my palate locks up while tasting fine beers like this. They get very defensive about flavors and aromas, getting plugged in to the nuances in hops and malts, picking up the beat in processes such as toasting, distillation and mashing, understanding the patience of fermentation. One of the reasons why I love beers is because they just go so damned well with food. I can't imagine drinking a one-size-fits-all beer that kills the taste of what you're eating. So what does Marc-Antoine do at his real home?

 Bar none.

"I mainly use our white organic to make fish sauces," says the guy who, like all true beer-drinkers, is also a gourmand and unlike all true beer-drinkers, actually carries his weight in the kitchen, making almost everything he eats from scratch. "I like our St. Martin Blond to cook white meat like chicken and rabbit (or to make pate with) and the St. Martin Brune for a beef stew. Nice with dark chocolate, too!"

I sampled the Abbaye St. Martin Tripel, even though I've had it before - after all, I was on home ground and it is my favorite type of beer, and for old times' sake, the Blond. I definitely love the Brunehaut collection as well - the Bio Blanche, Bio Blond and Bio Amber are all great-tasting, especially with the linger of sunshine and the light crisp of fall as setting. But I already knew which my favorite was as soon as I locked lips with it; Marc-Antoine, however, doesn't play favorites.

 Tap dancing.

"There are no ideal beers," he says. "There are beers adapted for different tastes, for different seasons, for different temperatures, for different moments in the day. They all have to be complex, but well-balanced." However, he doesn't like "beers with one taste hiding the others." There not being an ideal beer doesn't halt the pursuit for perfection - Brasserie de Brunehaut's walls are running out of room for beer awards and accolades from around the world.

"I am proud of the job our brewmaster and our people have done over the years," Marc-Antoine says. "We have gained the international recognition of our quality, which is a must to me. Everyday, I think about what to do to be better and better. No concession about it!"

 A beautiful head atop the signature Abbaye St. Martin chalice. See the guy in the red coat in the stained glass window design? "That's me," says Marc-Antoine. That's the brewmaster paying taxes.

After a few rounds though, you could maybe get Marc-Antoine to say this: "My favorite is St. Martin Blond - easy to share with friends in many circumstances. A bit like Le Petit Prince, do you know him?"

And my favorite? Well, it was Christmas in September for me. Like the Othello of beers, the Abbaye St. Martin Cuvee de Noel (8.5% A.B.V.) is a regal, noble prince of a ruby - crisp, pronounced with notes of caramels and holiday spices, yet subtle and pleasant to mouth. It dressed for the occasion with a beautiful lace and just like Christmas, it comes up on you without you realizing, but is full of pleasant cheer and warm, happy, fuzzy feelings. Just ho-ho-ho-some. I bought half a case of this to bring home, which I carried across two trains into Paris, and then onto a 13-hour flight home a week later. Ask not what your beer can do for you, but what you can do for your beer.

 Happy hop-hop-hoplildays!

One of the things I had wondered, with Rongy being just north of the border to France, why Marc-Antoine didn't dabble in wine as well.

He smiles and says, "I am Belgian, not French."

Marc-Antoine at the top of his world, with Europe's first recyclable export kegs (thanks for the picture!).

If Variety Is the Spice of Life...

Michelin Guide, please step aside.

At the start of the 14th century, Indonesia's King Hayam Wuruk would embark on royal journeys throughout his kingdom, visiting important ports of call and Silk Route towns. "Royal journeys" would be the officially stoic, bureaucratic term - what these really were were culinary expeditions of opulent proportions. Each taking up to 10 months to complete, and escorted by hundreds of troops, palace maids, horses, elephants and carriages, five important ceremonies also accompanied each audaciously over-indulgent odyssey.

First, a pre-expedition feast with the finest cuisine by the imperial kitchen was hosted as the send-off party. Next, the king would sample the distinct gastronomy of each district - not region, not state, not province, not town. District. Then, banquets would be presented by the local villagers after temple rituals. On the return journey, the same villagers served up an even more lavish ceremonial degustation when the king came by again. Finally, back in the palace, a blessing ceremony with more noshing was held to herald the safe royal return.

All this surveying of the land, frankly, makes Zagat look like a playground straw poll. To cover all this ground, King Hayam needed to travel across 17,508 islands in his archipelago state, all offering distinct spices which in turn led to an unthinkable variety of platter matters. It's no accident, but a compliment, that Indonesian cuisine is all about deliberate Machiavellian techniques of contrasting flavors (spicy, sour, sweet, hot) and textures (wet, coarse, spongy, hard, clingy, rich, thick, thin, wobbly, cloying), each playing savors against other flavors. In a country where Hinduism meets Islam and wealth never encounters poverty, it always takes two tastes to tantalize: cardamom and chilis, tamarind and tumeric, saffron and serai, ginger and galanggal, cloves and cumin. Sadly, this diversity - normally a beautiful thing - also reflects the disparate and warring natures of some territories against the ruling Javanese peninsula - you are what you eat.

The Malaku, Indonesia's Spice Islands, were the center of the world spice trade in the 16th and 17th century, so after you toss in some Portuguese and Dutch colonialism for good measure, into that melting entrepot of international exchanges - a very grandiose version of the town hall pot luck - you get what eventually morphed into rijstafel, Dutch for "rice table" (or "smorgasbord," if you were an indignant indigenous annoyed at the glorified adaptation of nasi padang). Ironically, the epicurean extravaganzas laid before King Hayam were probably more rijstafel than nasi padang - like all bourgeois injustices, what was fit for the palatial pleasure of royalty overshadowed the humility of the minangkabu's daily staples and instead was more aligned with the dining practices of future colonial masters. 

Which is pretty much the experience at Lara Djonggrang, a beautiful restaurant named for a mystical princess in the wealthy southern part of Jakarta, but also a respite from the traffic, smog and relentless and endless concrete with its setting in a 200-year-old temple amid a lush and verdant garden, filled with antiques. Can this be real? By serving "Imperial Indonesian Cuisine," you feel rather removed from the makeshift wooden carts on flat rubber tires on the streets. Which is the real Indonesian cuisine, this authentic and loyal recreation of King Hayam's experiences, or that soto ayam (spicy chicken soup) in a cracked bowl with a buzzing fly on top? I'll tell you what - take them all, because you can. Megalomaniac it.

Here in Lara Djonggrang, as a Buddha watches you out of the corner of his eye to your left and Shiva glares down on your right, the superfluously sprawling menu is a literal rijstafel. Like an imperial edict, it beseeches, challenges and, you hope, orders you to eat everything in it. Very telling are the long descriptions accompanying each dish - the menu is sectioned off into appropriate courses, and even sate (satay) and krupuk (crackers) get their own spotlight. Actually, that's insulting. Nothing served here is a dish. Everything is a platter and even more than that, everything is a presentation. Fragrant coconut rice shaped like wayang kulit (local puppets) while adorned with bits of banana leaves and flowers. A bit of a schtick to some, but then again, a peaceful garden setting in Jakarta is also quite the fantasy.

 Eat, eat more, pray.

If the spices that inspire such cuisine is why the Dutch made Indonesia an important port in their spice trade, then they really have outdone themselves. I promise you that this heat-filled hedonism outperforms any of the herbs in Amsterdam, and you don't need to put on a lubricated latex cover to take in this oral pleasure.

So, let's not keep the Lara legacy waiting.

In the beginning, there was "Sate Daging Manis Kota Gede" (I do feel like I need to narrate the name of each platter like it was a work of artistic mastery - which they all are), grilled caramel-marinated tenderloin served with cucumber salad and red pepper, tomato and shrimp paste on the side. The recipe originated from a street vendor in Kota Gede, Jogjakarta during the earlier part of the 20th century, although I highly doubt that hawker was slicing up prime meat to sell on a stick. But, he might have if he was serving it to the king. I love satay, mainly because it's the only time you can get away with eating the worst possible meat castaways saturated in sweetness and grilled till the fat is charred. But this - if you ever felt that it was an insult to dice up great steak, then you need to unsheath one of these skewers from the large conch shell it's served in and keep it in your mouth for a bit while the most playful juices run down your throat.

Meat on a stick in a shell.

While masticulating on this fine specimen of grilled meat, tender to the tongue, we munched on "Krupuk Tempeh," thin crackers made from soy beans with bitterness playing along the edges deep-fried to a crisp. You dip this into the spiciest sambal belacan (fermented shrimp paste with chili) and let your palate play with fire. It's one of those instances when you have to live on the edge, even as crumbs make cliffhangers of the front of your clothes.

 I've got a hunch that the world needs crunch.

The first of our two entrees was "Bebek Betutu," a famous Gianyan dish of a whole tender duck cooked in traditional Balinese spices for at least 24 hours. There's no foul play on this fowl - there is no way on earth you can replicate how a duck stewed for one day and one night can fall off its bones seamlessly while carrying the intensity of each flavor instilled into its being. The web of bones can be intricate, so you have to navigate your way through the bird - this makes it even more flavorful as you open up each new section of the meat storing all these wonderful essences.

Righteously fowl play.

A spotlight-stealing sideshow.

The second was "Buntut Sapi Bungkus Daun Pandan," beef oxtail marinated in eight spices and wrapped in pandan leaves before grilled to silky, clingy, moisturized nirvana. This platter was a Shakespearan play in five pieces of oxtail - "Hamlet," I'd say, although there was nothing tragic at all, just an over-abundance of layered beauty upon literary complexity. As you unwrap the leaf to unveil the oxtail (Polonius spying from behind the arras?), you find this beautiful cross-section of meat that pulls together everything you enjoy savoring in meat - tendon, gristle, fat, bone. There is nothing rotten in the state of Sumatra, and madness need not be feigned - go crazy as you suck that oxtail dry. Moral corruption? Oh yes - this oxtail is criminal. There is just nothing legal about something so stratospherically out of this world.

 Oxtail not what you can do for your dinner, but what your dinner can do for you.

Dessert might have been a bit of a letdown, if only because we chose two that turned out to be relatively similar with just different ingredients - still, both were excellent. "Serabi Pandan Wangi Sore" is a traditional coconut pancake with sliced banana doused in coconut soup - you should know by now that I am a pancake purist, but you also know how you always have to fight the urge to douse your pancake in syrup, right? Well, what if it was dunked in a sweet coconut soup that wasn't overbearing like syrup, but when soaked into every single one of the pancake's crevices, is like fusing one awesome dessert with another? Two amazing desserts in one soup spoon, as one. That's a long-lasting marriage, until it enters the tunnel of love that is your gaping mouth. "Kolak Tegal Ayem" is sliced taro, banana and sugar palm fruit simmered in warm fragrant coconut soup - it's the same coconut soup as the other dessert, just with different ingredients. Or, an excuse for a second serving of that coconut confection and surely, there's got to be lots of vitamins in that taro, banana and palm fruit? Even if not, Lara Djonggrang is the kind of restaurant that is meant to stir the imagination, push your taste buds around so they don't settle into complacency, and whisk you away to that magic land where excellent eating transforms from fantasy to reality.

 Yet another pancake success story.

 Bowling for soup.

So go ahead and indulge in everything that's in front of you on that imperial edict of a menu, because they're making history in that kitchen. Everything we ate came to the princely sum of just a little over US$100, and that's including a glass of wine and two cocktails. And with the impeccable, attentive and gracious service, yes, we did feel like we were royalty in there.

Lara Djonggrang
Jalan Teuku Cik Di Tiro 4 Menteng
Jakarta Pusat, Indonesia
+62 21 315 3252
laradjonggrang@tuguhotels.com 

A Field Day With Nasi Padang

In a city where you don't walk on the streets for fear of literal daylight armed robbery, where sitting in traffic is a local past-time, where there is not much to do but troll shopping malls, and where entering any reputable building entails being subjected to a vehicle bomb sweep, metal detector and sniffing Rottweilers, nasi padang is the only sign of spontaneity and freedom.

Nasi padang originates from Padang in Sumatra, one of Indonesia's archipelagos, and is less a dish, more an experience. It has humble beginnings. You get a huge plate, or tray - basically, you want a receptacle that can hold a copious amount of food - of rice, preferably lined with a frond of banana leaf. At a typical nasi padang stall, you would then do this little dance in front of the long steam table of curries, stews, stir-fries, deep-fries and condiments simmering in cauldrons, heaps and layers, as you dart from dish to dish pointing excitedly at which ones you want scooped or plopped onto the rice. After this mountain of love has been completed with a generous serving of belacan, a hot chili sauce made of fermented ground shrimp, trickled with a twist of kalamansi lime, walk it as you balance it with sturdy hands, head held high, and sit it down at a table of friends or perfect strangers, and dig in. Yes, with hands. Using your right hand, scoop a bit of rice, then the nasi padang item of choice, and press it all firmly into a makeshift ball. Lift to mouth and using thumb, shovel it all in. Play it cool as steam blows out of your ears, blood rushes to your brain and fuzzy warmth invades your abdomen; feel free to drop the facade as you finally cannot stand it any longer and expostulate, "Sedap!!!!" (Delicious, in Malay or Bahasa Indonesia.)

In this exercise of choosing whatever your heart desires and eating to its content, there is no room for the brown smog mushroom lingering over Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. When we ducked into Natrabu, a 43-year-old plain, family-style nasi padang restaurant whose comely, spartan environs belie its gastronomy awards, after a 45-minute van ride over no more than three miles, sitting in gridlocked traffic completely stalled on the wrong side of the street lent itself to some great culinary karma. We hadn't even sat down before we were swarmed by waiters bearing plates and plates and plates and plates (and plates and plates and plates and plates) of various nasi padang dishes, which they professionally dispensed down the length of the table, covering every inch so some had to be doubly stacked.

 Get in line.

We each received a plate of rice, and a second serving for good measure, which were balanced on the little tin cups of water used for washing our hands between servings, as we please. Padang literally means "field," so it would be more than accurate to describe the scene as a field of dreams - if the minangkabau (people of Padang) build it, they will come. We didn't just arrive. We swooped into the 16 dishes that stretched over yonder in front of us - we didn't use our hands, but our fork and spoons were great stand-ins for talons. Don't get me wrong - it was a precise operation that was filled with the necessary sense of urgency and perhaps emergency (great food must be attended to - NOW), yet the procedure was precise, exact and filled with honorable intentions to preserve life as it must be - independent, blissful, light of heart and spontaneous. Not forced to always stay indoors because the streets are not safe in a country where corruption is the ruling party and your best national monument is a fading, crumbling obelisk. We were cooped up in that van (not to mention the harrowing hour-long drive from the airport on highways where lanes don't mean anything) and we have been released to live free or die hard from too many amazing spices and flavors. We were going to yippy kai yay it up.

 The Horn of Plenty.

This is a roll call of how we rolled: beef rendang (slow-cooked meat in coconut milk and spices, a ceremonial dish of the minangkabau), crispy silver fish with petai, chicken curry, squid curry, deep-fried slivers of fish (fried so hard they curl up), fried chicken, potato croquettes, curried collards, curried loofah, beef jerky with cress, cow brain curry, a really weird chicken dish that I could discern nothing of and therefore is not of note, fried pomfret topped with chili, fried cod topped with chili, and a side dish of crudites for dipping in belacan.

 Just the facts, ma'am - a selection.

Your sensibilities should have been perked up by "cow brain curry". Don't rub your eyes - that belacan will sting. You didn't read wrong. I was determined to have a bite of everything, so when I stuck my fork into what looked like a big piece of liver in a floridly orange gravy and a nibble-sized nugget emerged, I bit into it and wondered, how did foie gras come to be in curry? I mean, I am a huge fan of the Le Fooding movement and I am mildly intrigued by molecular gastronomy, but I am quite absolutely sure neither Alain Ducasse nor Grant Achatz would have ever thought of pairing pate with coconut milk. It was very, very rich and I am sure my likelihood to contracting gout shot up by about 300 percent, but like the beautiful treat from le canard, this gastronomical glory is not to be gobbled. I was done after a few nibbles - that was enough to linger me through the rest of lunch, although the euphoria lasted through dinner. Then we were informed that it was brain, and my doctor-to-be brother then proceeded to dissect the discourse with scientific explanations of why it tasted so smooth, why its consistency flowed so neatly into the boorish barrage of the curry's Aries personality. Well, I am glad there will be a doctor in the family when gout finally sets into my system.

The other highlight for me was the rendang, and I am not just playing favorites because it is by far my most-preferred nasi padang dish. Before you could even put it into your mouth, a rush of flavor aromatizes the chunk of meat - cooked to dryness so it absorbs every spice and herb it has been simmering in - and gushes into your mouth, ionizing your taste buds for an incoming assault of hearty, juicy chomps. Put it this way - if this rendang had been around during the days of the Wild Wild West, jerky would never have been invented. The rendang and the cow brain curry were the only two dishes that received encores at lunch. Like sincere performers who plied their craft with a passion, they received the applause and humbly allowed their work to be eagerly swallowed up by adoring audiences.

 A movable feast.

As the curtain began to fall over lunch, the stacks of cleaned-out plates began to pile up on an adjacent table. This is how nasi padang usually works in restaurants in Indonesia - you don't have to eat everything they lay out. Oh, you think I am joking but I am not (but you might be kidding yourself if you think there would be even one dish you're not going to taste or pick at). You don't have to analyze the sanitation of this practice, even as untouched glasses of sweet tea sit amid a smoker's paradise, then brought in to be taken out again when the next set of diners come in. It's just not worth your effort - you have better scores to settle. Whatever you touch is considered sold, and at the end of the day, you pay up based on the number of plates set aside. At this point, dessert is rather an afterthought but to demonstrate what I mean, a plate of gula melaka (brown palm sugar) paste with glutinous rice was set down once room was made on the table (and forcibly so in our digestive tracts), and so we ate it - very Pavlov. Then, platters of freshly sliced watermelon, papaya, pineapple and cantaloupe arrived, and we ate that, too. Ring ring! Salivate!

 I would not be surprised if this was what inspired the Stones' "Brown Sugar". If not, it should have.

Nasi padang restaurants are identified by the stacks of plates in the window, which seen from the street remind me of Chinese acrobatic acts with spinning dishes in mid-air. It's magical, really, the concept of liberation. And when we packed ourselves into the van to venture back into the gridlock, the drive back to the hotel through rush hour didn't seem to take too long at all.

How high can you go?