Avigayil Damm

One thing that I don’t like about my office is its location. It’s located on a main street, and it is in a very old building which does not have its own canteen/food court. So whenever we want to have lunch, we would have to walk into the back street of the building where plenty of small warung (little home-restaurants) are located.

Unfortunately the choices in these warung are quite limited and very often boring. There is this one place owned by a man named Musa, he always – ALWAYS – has the same choices of food and they are (almost) always displayed in exactly the same way. I can see it now: he would have three different kinds of fish: bandeng, kembung and tongkol. All three of them in balado or chili mix. Then he would have two types of fried chicken: the normal type and the one in chili mix. Then he would have chicken liver in brown sauce (I think it’s sweet soya sauce), and then omelette, boiled eggs in chili mix and then the salty duck eggs. He would also have fried tofu and soybean cake, small chilies (cabe rawit) to accompany one’s meal, sambal (mixed chili with onion, garlic and tomato), kerupuk (traditional crackers with a hint of prawn), and then of course the crispiest fried fish: the mujair. The only thing that could possibly be different each day would be the accompanying vegetables. Usually he would alternate between clear vegetable soup, lodeh (vegetable soup with coconut milk), and stir fried bean sprouts with beans. (Later on I discovered that you can only get the friend bean sprouts with beans if you come earlier in the day, say before 12. So that’s not really an alternate menu).

Anyways, at some point when I don’t feel like going out (which is almost every day), I ask the office boy to buy the lunch for me. He usually makes a round and asks everyone, and they would give him the money and their wish lists. Today I felt like having a special (and may I add, weird) grilled chicken from the Paramadina University’s canteen next door. So off he went.

What’s special about this grilled chicken is the sauce. I think they first grill it with soya sauce but then later serve it with some sort of gravy which seems to be made either with potato or sweet potato. Either way, it is very nice for a change. The chicken is also served with rice, some colorful crackers, and one salad leaf and two slices of cucumber. Yes, they try to give you at least some veggies. But nevertheless, I enjoyed it very much, almost so that I forgot to take a picture of it. If you look closely you can see I already had a go at the chicken before this picture was taken.