I've been looking for a good rijsttafel for what seems like decades. It actually has been close to that long.
Now, before I get into what a rijsttafel is, let me remind you that I am far from what you would consider a proper food historian. Although I don't really believe that food history is anything but an entirely elastic dance with recorded truth, I would feel bad if someone cited me in a paper and got yelled at by their knowitall teacher with a MFA in "watching Food Network"...
Rijsttafel means "rice table" in Dutch. The story goes something like this: back in the days when Indonesia was a Dutch colony, once in a while the Dutch Colonials would decide that they had a hankering for some local food. Not knowing what the white people would want to eat, their staff would just arrange a huge number of dishes on a table, letting the colonials taste a wide variety of dishes and hoping that at least a few would strike their fancy.
Most proper Indonesian restaurants will offer a version of rijsttafel. I've had rijsttafels of up to 50 dishes. But I haven't lived in a city with a good Indonesian restaurant. Luckily, we spent the weekend with F+ Girlfriend (named so because she's the only teacher/professor I've ever known who has admitted to giving a grade of F+) and her hotel happens to be around the corner from San Francisco's best Indonesian restaurant: Borobudur.
I'm going to make a plug right now for F+ Girlfriend's hotel: The Mayflower Hotel. It's situated in a remarkably awesome location if you're a foodie. From the front door, turn right and you'll find yourself in the financial district. Keep going and you're at the Ferry Building. Turn right then left, you're in Chinatown. Turn right then right, and you're in SOMA. Turn left and you're in Nob Hill. There are so many phenomenal restaurants within a 1 mile radius I can't even begin to think about how long it's going to take to eat at them all.
A full writeup of the Mayflower will come in a couple weeks when I have the energy to roam the property and take enough pictures to do the place justice.
Back to the business at hand. We headed to the restaurant which was basically around the corner from the Mayflower. The group consisted of yours truly, Actual, F+ Girlfriend and her husband: Finnish Blues Boyfriend. Note that I wrote Finnish Blues Boyfriend NOT Finnish Metal Boyfriend. Apparently Finns can do crazy things with a guitar no matter what genre of music they're playing. We had the pleasure of hearing him play with Lady Mem'fis the night before at an art exhibition.
We arrived right at opening and were glad we did. The place was packed solid twenty minutes after we arrived.
All of us got the rijsttafel. Nine full courses of awesome.
Course #1 consisted of lumpia with a dipping sauce. The lumpia were pretty standard. On the other hand, the sauce was crazy amazing. I can only describe it as a best-outcome forced genetic pairing of satay sauce and thousand island dressing. F+ was freebasing this stuff as we waited for the second course.
Course #2 was a lemongrass soup. This was honestly pretty boring. It looked cool, though.
Rice was brought out to go with the main dishes. This was of the standard Asian restaurant medium grain blah blah blah variety rice. I don't know which distributors are pushing the use of this rice, but it sucks. It's too dry, isn't clumpy enough, has NO flavor and also isn't very absorbent. Using quality rice is not noticeably more expensive on a per-diner basis but is significantly better on the meal enhancing scale. Places that use this cheap McRice make me wonder what else they are skimping on.
Courses #3-5. The one of the left was a braised beef in chili sauce dish. This had a surprisingly complex flavor. The sauce had a sweet entry followed by a low burn, then ending with something like the aftertaste of a good natural oyster sauce. In the middle was a pretty standard chicken satay, although unlike most other places that serve chicken satay, this satay was actually moist. On the right was a tofu stir-fry. By my guess the tofu cubes were a combination of fried regular tofu cubes and cubes of dense pressed Chinese tofu. Both were cooked in a very interesting sauce that had slight plum notes. My favorite dish of this flight.
Course #6-8. On the left were chicken thighs in a very spicy sauce. These were phenomenal. Although there were two chili pepper icons next to the chicken on the menu, I didn't remember this until Actual laughed at my poor sweating visage. The middle plate was some sort of shrimp stir fry. It looked pretty standard but seasoning was spot on and really brought out the flavor of the shrimp. On the right was some sort of vegetable and brown sauce concoction which was much better than it looked. Note F+ Girlfriend's "Can I #$#$^#$ eat some food already" pose.
Course #9 was dessert. Black rice cooked to a perfectly viscous texture was the base. I've cooked black rice for a dessert before and it is extremely difficult. Undercook it and it is just foul. Overcook it and it turns to mush and your diner doesn't get the awesome individual grain texture. There's a three minute window when cooking black rice that will result in the perfection that was served to us. On top of the rice is a coconut milk mixture which was sweet and delicious. Although I'm sure it was just a phantom flavor, it tasted like some sort of genetically enhanced Nestle Quik was added to crank up the flavor even more. We loved it.
This is another rare "Run, don't walk there" reco from me!
