As I Was Saying ,..

...we were in Jakarta last weekend. And ate the most wonderful sate.

On our last stay in the city (July) we had work to do and not enough hours in which to do it. For us, 'work' often means eating so that we can photograph and write about it. It's not a bad gig to be sure, except when you (I) underestimate the amount of time a particular assignment will require, as I had on this trip. There we were, cramming in meals when we weren't hungry and longing for just one opportunity to eat what and where we wanted instead of what and where the story demanded.

At least four times a day we passed Jaya Agung, a sate place up the street from our hotel that seemed perpetually packed with diners tucking in beneath clouds of smoke rising from the sidewalk grill. Crowded local joints - that's our thing! But it wasn't to be. On our last night in Jakarta we were free, but by then I'd come down with a demon of a cold, and all I wanted was a couple of fresh fruit juices and an early bedtime.

I've often thought about Jaya Agung these intervening four months. This trip we finally got our chance to be one of those smoke-saturated diners, and it was worth the wait.

We don't know how long Jaya Agung has been around, but the place looks storied. It's a wide shallow shop open to the street, with a couple long tables outside and inside, a counter that jigs and jags around its corners - sit here and you'll be elbow-to-elbow with stacks of plastic-bagged melinjo and prawn crackers and other diners. The clock on the wall looks fifties-era. Some of the staff do too.

As is appropriate for a shop specializing in sate, Jaya Agung's menu is brief. There's skewered lamb (kambing) and chicken (ayam), a few soupy items including gule kambing (lamb) and various soto, and rice - steamed or pressed into lontong (rice cakes). We did an all-lamb meal: sate kambing and gule kambing.

The lamb soup might more accurately be described as a curry - it's hearty enough, at least, to slosh over rice. Rich and meaty, sweet from caramelized shallots, spicy in a way that makes the back of your throat tingle just a little, the meat drooping off the bones. Well enough good, but we devoted most of our attention to the sate.

                               Sate kambing, good and close

Talk about char. How do they cook the meat so thoroughly, yet insure that it stays tender enough to slip right off the skewer onto your tongue? And yes, that's fat you see nestled amongst those cubes of lamb. At one of the tables out front of Jaya Agung sit the Skewer Brigade; they're charged with threading lamb and chicken fast enough to fill the steady stream of orders. In between the mounds of lamb and chicken on their table is another of cubed lamb fat, to be alternated with meat on the skewer. Talk about self-basting.

 

Jaya Agung's a convivial place. The proprietress, who rules from an old wooden desk out on the sidewalk, gave us the hairy eyeball when Dave pulled out his camera but quickly softened, and even beamed and said 'Thank you' ('Thank me?' I thought. 'For what? Thank you!') when we left. Other patrons nodded and smiled. Dining here is like being welcomed into a sort of family, however briefly.

Jakarta residents are incredibly warm and gracious (are you surprised? we admit that we were, on our first visit), and they love to talk. Our neighbor at the counter mused that Jaya Agung must be a place with some history. He couldn't know firsthand because he'd recently arrived in Jakarta from Papua to work in the Forestry Department.

'What are you doing in Jakarta?' I asked him, half-jokingly. 'There are no forests here.'

He picked up a skewer of kambing, slid a piece into his mouth, and chewed slowly. Finally, he answered: 'That's a very good question.'

Jaya Agung, Jalan Wahid Hasyim No 56C (just up the street from Starbucks), Jakarta.

Comments

[Annie]

How does this sate compare to Kajang satay? I miss satay--I rarely order it here at the restaurants cuz it's just never as good and it's so humbug to make my own that I seldom do it. Oh, to be in the region again and be able to order the many varieties of satay...

[Christopher Harshawardhana Mitchell]

Gule is the closest approximation we Indonesians have of an Indian-style curry. Its spices often include things like cinnamon and cumin, as well as typical Indonesian ingredients such as galangal and lemon grass. I believe it is originally a dish from Sumatra, where the Indian influence on food is stronger.

Love the blog!

[C.S.]

"'What are you doing in Jakarta?' I asked him, half-jokingly. 'There are no forests here.'"

Robyn, you'll never make it in government, I'm afraid...

[Robyn]

Hi Annie - the difference, to my taste, is in the sauce: peanuty but not quite as sweet as Malaysian satay sauce.

Thanks Christopher - I wonder then if gule is equivalent to Malaysian gulai which is, essentially curry (of many types).

CS - I've never been known for my subtlety.

[Andrew]

Gule is actually pronounced Gulai in Sumatra. However, Gule in Jakarta is usually much lighter in coconut milk and less spicy than the Gulai in the Western and the Northern part of Sumatra such as Padang and Medan.

[Andrew]

Gule is actually pronounced Gulai in Sumatra. However, Gule in Jakarta is usually much lighter in coconut milk and less spicy than the Gulai in the Western and the Northern part of Sumatra such as Padang and Medan.

[Robyn]

Thanks Andrew. We've had gulai in Padang and yes, it is coconuty rich.

[Christopher Harshawardhana Mitchell]

The letters "-e" and "-ai" are more or less interchangeable in Indonesian, so gulai and gule are obviously the same thing.
As another example, the word for lemon grass is generally spelled "serai", but often pronounced "sere".
Malaysia and Sumatra are very close in terms of culture and cuisine - lots of flow back and forth between the two.

[Ed]

Was this lamb - or was this actually "goat"? They're both covered by the same word "kambing".

[Bayu Amus]

Nice blog!

The place mentioned is about 15 minutes walk from where I used to work.

But I myself doesn't favor that place a lot, since the meat is sometimes not tender enough / cooked through.

Another historical kambing-based food near the location is the "Nasi Goreng Kambing Kebon Sirih". Open at night time only, it's about 100m east of Jaya Agung. But then again, quality has been decreasing more and more each time I visited up to the point of pointless to visit.

But both places are still crowded with visitors, so I think it's me that's strange =D

Anyway, "kambing" is more refered to "goat" while "domba" is lamb. Though the scent is significantly stronger, Jakarta people loves kambing more than domba.