Breaking the fast with big buffet spread

My Best Friend's Wedding, that homage to all things Julia, opens with a flurry of activities as our heroine prepares to sample a culinary offering at a swank restaurant. The chefs wait with bated breath as Roberts, cast as a food critic no less, savors a sample and mutters her profound verdict that it is confident and dazzling, or something like that.

Does Tinseltown's take on the doings of the food critic translate to Jakarta?

Hardly. When Epicurus wants to try out a new restaurant or revisit an old one, it is done incognito, usually with a staple group of friends or colleagues to provide different perspectives on the taste, decor and service.

Which was the case this week when the motley trio set off to try one of the assorted breaking of the fast buffets at city hotels.

This time of the year always brings back interesting memories of Epicurus' first Ramadhan, spent as a 17-year-old in that sleepy West Sumatran city of Padang.

When people fast there, it is the real thing -- streets are eerily deserted in the afternoon, you would be hard pressed to find anyone smoking on the street, much less eating. The only restaurants open during daylight are behind discreetly opened doors in the Chinese section of town near the harbor.

Of course, metropolitan Jakarta is not Padang, or Indonesia, and some might argue the challenges in completing the fast here are greater due to the cosmopolitan makeup of the city.

But two of our party, a mother and daughter, were fasting in earnest. While it may not count for much, yours truly has been eating less during the day, or at least trying to, both in respect to colleagues who are fasting and as part of a New Year's resolution to be healthier.

This has brought a little success. Just as the rupiah has depreciated since the end of 1997, so has Epicurus to the amount of 10 percent, although this belt tightening still has a long way to go.

We had been in two minds whether to try a buffet, or catch one of the newly opened restaurants which may well be closed within a few months unless things pick up. Finally we decided to choose a hotel representative of the buffets available.

Price of the treats and location of the hotel were concerns here. The former because these straitened economic times are affecting all of us, and the latter because few of us want to brave the possibility of traffic jams as dusk falls on Jakarta's usually teeming streets.

After phone calls to different establishments, we plumped for the Coffee Garden at the Shangri-La, conveniently situated straddling central and western parts of the city, and with a buffet price -- Rp 59,000 ++ -- at the middle-to-upper range of those on offer.

In the spirit of Ramadhan, a huge chocolate mosque greets visitors in the hotel's lobby. In another nod to the fasting month, small cakes and coffee and tea are set up in the front of the restaurant for those who may have to wait for a table.

Two of us opted for the buffet, while the teenager, a vegetarian, took a la carte items of an appetizer of spring rolls and entree of spaghetti in Neapolitan sauce.

The Shangri-La's buffet never disappoints, tastefully set up in the round to allow for easier access and with good selections. Its salads, bread selections, sushi and fresh seafood, particularly the salmon, are always excellent, and were again on the night that we dined there.

Main dishes included beef in a pepper sauce, assorted fish and squid, lamb satay, ox tongue, with sides of both plain rice and nasi uduk (rice cooked in coconut milk), potato skins and soto ayam (chicken soup).

Once again, the universally tasty cuisine did not disappoint in the taste stakes, but the Ramadhan feel was, we all agreed, a tad lacking.

A trolley full of traditional snacks for breaking the fast -- kolak (stewed bananas or yams), ketan hitam (glutinous black rice) -- or the table ornament of little ketupat palm leaf casing for steamed rice somehow just didn't do it. An earlier start to the music, which began as we sampled dessert and coffee, would have been helpful.

We searched in vain for the substantial fare of Indonesian dishes like opor ayam (stewed chicken in coconut milk), incomparable rendang (beef simmered in spices) or sayur lodeh (chopped vegetables stewed in that old mainstay of coconut milk).

Desserts? Fruit, cakes, the cheese board, that notorious Japanese mochi cake (should it carry a warning about thorough chewing?) and an overwhelmingly rich chocolate mousse, were memorable.

The teenager, a self-confessed finicky eater, was none too impressed with her meal, judging the spring rolls to be too oily and bland and the spaghetti "watery" and unappetizing.

The bill for the food (we did not order drinks and the coffee came with the buffet) came to a whopping Rp 200,000 (US$30). The rupiah may not be worth what it was four months ago, but Rp 200,000 is still a hefty, some might even say obscene, price to pay, considering the times we are living in.

But if you are willing to shell out lots of moolah to break your fast, the Coffee Garden at the Shangri-La may be as good a place as any, if a big spread of food, not atmosphere, is your bag. And, unlike some hotels which set up makeshift prayer rooms, the Shangri-La has designated a plush meeting room on the third floor for the faithful.

-- Epicurus