Dorchester hotel features Indonesian culinary delight

Dorchester hotel features Indonesian culinary delight

LONDON (JP): Indonesia is an archipelago with thousands of islands, each with its own variety of delicacies, fruits, fish, vegetables and spices.

A hint of its culinary wealth has recently been provided to outsiders by Sri Owen's newly published book Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery (Doubleday) which combines recipes with travel notes and evocative line drawings. And it is now possible to sample many of these archipelagic delights in a most unlikely place: Nusa Dua.

Nusa Dua in south-eastern Bali, which in former times was avoided except for turtle-watching or high-risk surfing, is an arid limestone peninsula, ugly, infertile and sparsely inhabited. It possesses one of the world's most exquisite architectural assemblages, the temple of Ulu Watu, cliff-perched on its very tip 300 feet above the savagely lashing sea.

Now the nearby landscape of limestone rocks, scrub and mangroves, geographically and culturally almost separate from Bali, has become an almost Hollywood style paradise for the rich. A focal point made up of up-market hotels, and also, not entirely incidentally, the location of the most famous and esteemed school for training hotel staff (including chefs) in the Far East.

Paramount among the hotels for its architecture (much imitated), its gardens and its food, is the Nusa Dua Beach Hotel.

Currently, for three weeks, the fabled Dorchester Hotel, Park Lane, London, is holding a festival of the best in Indonesian food, especially Balinese, and it has imported to its Oriental Restaurant two master chefs from this hotel in an effort to convince the gourmets of London that Indonesian cuisine can hold its own against French, Chinese, Thai, Italian and Japanese as among the world's best.

I went there at lunchtime to a table decorated with Balinese carved wooden ducks and frilly arrangements of snipped palm fronds.

Spicy

Indonesian food is spicy, but the spices are not the same as in Thai food, which it most closely resembles. Yes, ginger, chilies, turmeric, coconut-milk, galingale and lime-leaves are used, but there was no sign of any lemon-grass, which is the predominant flavoring in Thai food (ground peanuts take over), and the proportions were different.

I started with Ayam Pelala (shredded chicken with chilies and lime), delicate and delicious, followed by Soto Ayam (Madurese chicken soup), a minced seafood satay and then Bebek Betutu (spiced duck cooked in a banana-leaf parcel), a dish I would gladly endure jet lag for to eat again. The meal was finished with slices of fresh tropical fruits served with an exquisite coconut-cream ice and coffee.

The choices are enormous and includes several varieties of Rijstafel, a meal consisting of rice served with a variety of accompanying dishes such as meat, seafood and vegetables, dating back to the coffee and rubber planters' palates of Dutch colonial times.

When the Dorchester's Festival ends on Jan. 28 it will be almost impossible to find these dishes in London, where there are no authentic Indonesian restaurants. You will have to go to Bali!

-- Nicholas Guppy