Chefs whip up Korean dishes at Aryaduta

Chefs whip up Korean dishes at Aryaduta

By Ati Nurbaiti

JAKARTA (JP): Korean dishes are not new to Indonesian restaurant-goers, who have found this a delicious alternative for their Asian palate along with Japanese and Thailand cuisine.

To eat in classy surroundings, as well as really liking the food, has been easier with these neighborly choices. But for first timers, entering a restaurant and wondering whether or not you will really enjoy the experience, with no way out until it ends, can be daunting for some.

The on-going Korean food festival at the Aryaduta hotel, until Feb. 3, requires less courage. It's a simple promotion in buffet style at the Aryaduta's Teratai Cafe Restaurant, held jointly by the hotel and Garuda Indonesia. There are even some Western dishes mixed in, for the more curious.

A beginner's knowledge is limited to kimchi, the salty cabbage dish that, like A in the alphabet, is the starter of Korean cuisine.

Kimchi has become well known to non-Koreans because it seems to be everywhere, somewhat like our sambal, which is a mix of red chilly and other spices.

To accompany the warm rice, the buffet, at Rp 34,000 per person, offers various dishes from fish, rib, beef (the barbecue is called bulkogee) and chicken to what Indonesians surprisingly recognize as their humble ikan asin (salted fish) served on shimmering dinner ware. The difference: it's not salty but dipped in a spicy sauce.

There is an unusual tasting dish of raw fish, cut to fit atop a rounded serving of rice, which turns out to taste nothing at all unless dipped into the special sauces. Accompanying the boiled fish and shrimp are an assortment of cooked, seasoned vegetables, which you can eat with thin noodles. Not everything thin is noodles; an element of surprise is found in thinly cut radishes.

Rice cakes are served with fillings mixed with ornately rolled seaweed and pieces of fish and meat. There were pa-jeuk, freshly fried battered snacks, using greens and oyster, which Indonesians found similar to bakwan, vegetable fritters.

Visitors are introduced to two kinds of Korean soups, a kind of porridge soup and a seaweed soup called mi-yeuk-kook.

Desert is disappointing because it is limited to su-chung-gwa, a refreshing drink made with persimmons, and you hunt in vain for what might be Korean on a table loaded with mousse and pastries.

"The variety of ingredients at the Korean supermarket was limited," chef Soo Chun Lee said. Chun Lee and his colleagues from the Hyatt Regency hotel in South Korea arrived late the night before the promotion opened on Jan. 26, dropped by one of the Korean supermarkets and dashed on to the Aryaduta's kitchen.

"At first we had to use the Japanese Kikkoman sauce," Chun Lee said.

Back up

Luckily Indonesia's Korean community came to the rescue and they now have the special sauces which Lee noted were lacking in the supermarkets.

It was also this community, consisting of Indonesian speaking Koreans, who provided the first day's guests with personal knowledge of Korean culture, namely a tea ceremony and dances.

Sang Seuk Shin, a resident of Lebak Bulus, says he is among the few number of men who can still perform the slow, complicated crane dance, called dong-rae hak chum.

He and the performers of the tea ceremony are members of woul hwa cha he, a group preserving the tradition of tea ceremonies.

"Our message is that people must not forget this tradition, which teaches youngsters to respect elders, in the serving of the tea."

Traditional etiquette should be learned when you enjoy Korean cuisine. "If you find something uneatable among the dishes, remove it quietly, do not cause any trouble," writes Woul Young Chu in the book Traditional Korean Cuisine.