Friday, March 18, 2011

MARTABAK!!~

So, we had dinner at a food stall selling street foods from Jakarta before going to Mosaic. The owners are an Indonesian couple and the reviews in the internet have been good this far. IMO, this is the best Indo food stall in Singapore so far, from price, foods offered and taste. PLUS, this is definitely a good alternative to all ayam penyets that are really popular in Singapore, which IMHO, don't taste like in Indo at all. They are more Malay-like.. or.. (OK, the NTU students from Jakarta may hit me now, cos my friends from that specific town love eating there!) well, simply they don't satisfy a Chinese-Javanese-stayed-in-South-Jakarta like me (and how many people with that combination are there here in NTU??). So if you want to know how Indonesian foods taste like, the best way is to go directly to Indo and eat there. =)

The good thing is this stall sells MARTABAK. Oh God. Love it. They also put pangsit, both fried and soup-made, in their menu but I had never encountered this type of pangsit filling before until I ate there.. I don't know, it was just different. Anyway if you're not familiar with these foods, I can't give the English names, sorry, so you have to try them yourselves. The closest names in Singapore would be Indian murtabak pancake and dumpling but the Indonesian's are different and unique that I completely refuse to call them Indonesian murtabak and Indonesian dumpling.

I don't have the picture of the pangsit (we ordered the soup one and the contrast was not good because they were all white, including the bowl, so I discarded the photo right away..) but these are what we call martabak. The first image is buttery-sugar martabak and the second one is martabak filled with the combination of rice chocolate, cheese and peanut.





They also sell siomay. This is inherently one kind of dumpling too.. Siomay is fish-cakes (I hope this definition is correct) topped with peanut sauce (you can add lime water on it if you like) and usually served with cabbages, boiled eggs, beancurd cakes and this bittery veggie called "pare". Anyway, the peanut sauce and the fishcakes are the most important part of siomay; if one of them don't taste nice then the dish is a fail. Back to basics, people. LOL. So I tasted the peanut sauce, it tasted nice. I didn't taste the fishcakes since my friend said that the portion was quite small so I didn't have the heart to take some =D But my friend said that this tasted nice =)



Anyway this is not the correct way to eat martabak, actually =D But there were only 3 forks for 4 of us so the one who didn't get the fork used this Chinese way for eating instead. Haha.



Anywaaaay *promo* just in case you want to give it a try, I'll give you the details =P

Jtown Cafe
220 Orchard Road
#B1-04/05 Midpoint Orchard S238852 (nearest MRT station would be Somerset MRT cos Midpoint is just across 313 Somerset)

Facebook page
Review 1 | Review 2 | Review 3


All photos were taken using haibara's Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Apparently, martabak in Surabaya is very different from martabak in Jakarta.
In Surabaya, we call the food in the picture "Terang Bulan".

Achelle said...

In Jakarta we have two kinds of martabaks. One is the one in the picture (the stall near my home sells thicker ones) and the other one is similar to Indian prata, only thicker and nicer in taste bcos it has more eggs..