Eating Out

The great restaurateurs of Indonesia are, as one might expect, the Chinese. Some of the most memorable meals I have ever eaten have been in the district of downtown Jakarta called Glodok, which is famous for Chinese food. But I have also eaten well in unassuming little restaurants in small towns, often called simply Rumak Makan Canton (‘rumah makan’ means literally ‘eating house’). As a young student I was rather shy of such places because they served pork and cooked their noodles in pork fat. Contact with the West corrupted me to the extent that I realized pork was actually rather good to eat. I worked as secretary first to one foreign professor, then to another; then I found myself with an English boy-friend. I have pleasant memories of several tiny restaurants in the side-streets of Yogyakarta, where my husband and I spent a lot of our evenings together before we were married. They were rather public places to go courting, but a good deal less so than the local cinemas, where the row behind us was invariably filled by his or my students.