Good Czech cuisine and beer at Park Plaza food festival

Les Coffier, Contributor, Jakarta

How do chicken in paprika sauce with cream, leek salad with apple and carrot, or rabbit pie with mosaic from the Bohemian Forest grab you?

Well, these, and other interesting dishes, are available at a Rp 80,000 ++ per head all-you-can-eat buffet, part of the Czech food festival running until Nov. 3 at Kafe Musi, Boulevard Park Plaza hotel on Jl. S. Parman, Slipi, West Jakarta. The hotel is easy to find, as it is almost directly opposite Taman Anggrek shopping mall.

Kafe Musi is also an ideal venue for this event, as it has a dining room atmosphere much more intimate than its size would suggest.

This is the first time that the four-star hotel has put on a promotion of this kind, and it seems to have turned out quite successfully. I was there last Saturday, and the place was full. Chef Radek Prihonsky has been flown over from Zahrada V Opere (Garden in the Opera) restaurant, Prague. His restaurant has a very modern, stylish and crisp interior decor and is almost next door to the state opera house.

Although Radek speaks very little English, I was able to communicate with him through a combination of assistance from Park Plaza's executive chef, Ardi Dewandi (who speaks some German), translation (in English) from an attache of the Czech Embassy and Radek's ingenious little machine that looked like a pocket calculator but could translate words or phrases (this time, from Czech directly to English).

Czech food traditionally uses a lot of heavy ingredients, like cream, as the country is located in a part of Europe that certainly feels the cold in winter, and people need food that keeps them warm. Radek has "lightened up" the menu somewhat for the festival, but some of the old favorites, like dumplings stuffed with apples and scones with vanilla cream, are still on offer. Zahrada V Opere boasts a good selection of trout, salmon, scampi and calamari (squid), in addition to meat dishes.

For this festival, Radek has made adaptations to take into account the ingredients that are locally available and also local sensitivities, so, for example, trout has been replaced by carp and snapper, and there are very few pork items on the menu.

Let me give you an idea of the food available at the festival. A wide range of starters were on offer, including red cabbage, country potato and sauerkraut salads plus kulajda, a thick mushroom soup from Bohemia that had an interesting sweet-and-sour flavor.

The rabbit pie mentioned at the start was actually like a rabbit terrine (minus the pastry) and had a marvelously smooth, moist texture and subtle flavor that was ideal if eaten on brown bread.

Main courses included saddle of rabbit with garlic, blackened carp, poultry risotto with colored capsicums, lamb ribs with marjoram stewed in cream sauce and drabaky (goose with red fruit, cabbage and dumplings).

Desserts included gingerbread with plum jam, lace potato turnovers (stuffed with plum paste), flapjack with bilberries and whipped cream, and, for those who are already feeling full just reading this, a selection of sliced tropical fruit (without cream!).

Perhaps most memorable of all, a glass of Pilsner Urquell beer was included in the price of the meal. You may be surprised to know that Czechoslovakia (as it then was), not Germany, was the original home of pilsner beer and has a very long and distinguished brewing tradition.

I was in Prague in early 1999, and the first mouthful of Pilsner Urquell, served at this festival in special, tall Urquell glasses, instantly brought back pleasant memories of the few days I spent there, with its distinctive, slightly bitter, but by no means unpleasant, flavor.

In order to complement the Czech atmosphere, a four-piece stringed-instrument ensemble, Hodoninska Cimbalova Muzika, also from Prague, gave renditions of classical Moravian music with singing.

This was Radek's first visit to Indonesia, so he was still reeling somewhat from the culture shock, the sheer size of Jakarta and the glitz and glitter of parts of the city's business and shopping districts. He sometimes runs special food promotions (Thai and Italian, for example) at his restaurant in Prague.

He said that after spending a week with the Boulevard Park Plaza kitchen staff he was very impressed with their professionalism and now had another string to his bow: He will be able to add Indonesian to the range of exotic cuisine on offer to Prague diners!

Czech Food Festival runs until Nov. 3 at Kafe Musi, Boulevard Park Plaza hotel, Jl. S. Parman Kav 93-94, Slipi, Jakarta, phone: 5696 0888, fax: 5696 0777.