Leila Chudori - Home

The cooperative was formed and the necessary capital secured from a variety of sources, including several French nonprofit organizations. Risjaf contracted the services of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and other skilled workers to repair what needed to be repaired, and while our Indonesian friends in Paris rolled up their sleeves to repaint the interior in white to give the restaurant a more spacious and airy feel Risjaf also designed and printed a flyer announcing the opening of Tanah Air Restaurant.

With free assistance and advice provided by two government-provided lawyers, Jean-Paul Bernard and Marie Thomas, Mas Nug and Tjai undertook all the steps that were necessary to establish our cooperative as a French legal entity. While they were doing this, I was busy training my two new assistants: Bahrum and Yazir, the sons of political exiles who liked to cook and shared the dream of going on to school at a culinary institute.

The four pillars of Tanah Air Restaurant decided to imitate the formula of the Dutch-Indonesian rijsttafel, with dishes on the menu from not just one but a variety of regions, each with its own culinary specialty — Padang, Palembang, Lampung, Solo, Yogya, Sunda, East Java, Makassar, Bali — combining the selections in packets based on the customer’s desire and taste. In the Western manner — knowing very well that our European customers would demand it — we also arranged the menu so that the dishes could be served in three to five courses, from starters to desserts. We translated the Dutch rijsttafel, or “rice table” in English, into French, offering customers a “ table du riz ,” Risjaf and Tjai studied making aperitifs and digestifs from a friend of Jean-Paul, an expert mixologist, who volunteered to give them lessons for no cost at all.

We planned to open the restaurant in December, and the closer we came to the date, the busier I was in the kitchen, with Bahrum and Yazir, trying out recipes, playing with the selection of dishes, making various modifications for lunch and dinner service, as well as planning a number of special menus for private parties and celebrations. Two weeks before the opening, our days and nights were spent trying the foods we’d cooked, looking for dishes that would make a lasting impression on visitors. We had yet to decide what dishes to feature on opening night, but we had purchased all the foodstuffs and spices we might possibly need, all the while keeping in mind Tjai’s strict reminder to be conservative in the amount of supplies we had on hand during the trial period: “Asian spices are expensive, you know, because most have to be imported!” Tjai, with calculator in hand, like a soldier with his rifle, was completely obsessive. I made a secret promise to myself that one day I would throw that calculator of his into the Seine.

One afternoon, Mas Nug came into the kitchen and started rifling through my recipe cards while whistling off tune. Exactly like an Indonesian spook, I thought, who doesn’t know the meaning of quality as he preens about his profession.

“Why are these names so boring?” He looked at the slate board on the kitchen wall. “‘Palembang dishes,’ ‘Padang dishes,’ ‘Solo dishes’… God, put some creativity into those names!”

I lowered my eyeglasses and looked at him without commenting. What kind of louse was this, suddenly showing up in my kitchen?

“What would you suggest?” Bahrum asked politely.

Mas Nug smiled and looked at me. Like me, Mas Nug was a decent cook. Risjaf could eat just about anything, but in the kitchen could do little more than boil water and fry an egg. As for Tjai, he could help cut up onions but only after donning a face mask and eyeglasses.

Also like me, Mas Nug had a discerning tongue and was always curious to try different things. Tongues weren’t just for discovering the inside of a woman’s mouth; tongues were also able to recognize that certain kinds of meats could be matched with certain spices, with certain kinds of wine, and that vegetables tasted better if they hardly felt a fire’s heat at all.

The difference between Mas Nug and me was pragmatism. Just as Mas Nug could imagine Agnes Baumgartner to be Rukmini, he could also see peanut butter as an adequate substitute for freshly ground peanuts, the basic ingredient for gado-gado and satay sauces. I, on the other hand, insisted on culinary authenticity: the peanut sauce for gado-gado or satay could only be made from peanuts that first had been fried with grilled cashew nuts and then hand ground together with red and green chili peppers and a dash of kaffir lime juice.

Neophytes that they were, Bahrum and Yazir were receptive to Mas Nug’s suggestions: Bahrum stood ready with his pen and notepad in hand, Yazir with a stick of chalk beside the slate board.

Mas Nug coughed before speaking. “This is the thing… Instead of calling Kalasan-style fried chicken ‘Fried Chicken from Central Java,’ why not give it a more poetic name, ‘Widuri Chicken,’ for instance. People don’t know what the word means and it doesn’t matter, but it sounds more exotic and unique. You can still cut up and fry the chicken just as you would for Kalasan-style chicken, but you change the recipe a little — maybe with a sambal sauce made of shallots and —Voila! — you now have ‘Widuri Chicken’ instead. That’s what will make Tanah Air Restaurant special. Or take our common everyday tofu dish that’s been stuffed with white fish and use red sea perch instead and then change the name from ‘Stuffed Tofu’ to ‘Rainbow Tofu,’” he suggested with a grin.

“Out, damned spot!” I screamed, banishing him from the kitchen.

Mas Nug burst into laughter and then turned to walk away, whistling off tune as he retreated from my domain.

Bahrum and Yazir looked at each other. Their fingers stopped writing.

“Good suggestions…” Bahrum started to say to me.

I stared hard at him. “I don’t believe in pretentious packaging like that. I don’t believe in formats. I don’t believe that presentation will make a diner forget the meal’s content. It’s the tongue, not the eye, that decides. Ingredients and taste are everything.”

Bahrum swallowed. “What do you mean by format?”

I sat down on the kitchen stool and ordered the two of them to sit down across from me. I leaned my head toward them. They leaned towards me.

“Do you two understand literature? Poetry, novels, short stories?”

“Well, I read,” Yazir said, “but I can’t create the kinds of work that all of you do here.”

Yazir looked for all the world like I was about to present him with a treasure map.

“For my good friend Mas Nugroho, presentation and format are very important, which is why we left the ‘look’ of this restaurant to him. But for me, cooking is as serious as writing a poem. Letters jump from my pen to create a word; the words then twist and turn, maybe even running into one another, as they search for a harmonious match so as to create a sentence that is both meaningful and poetic. Every letter has a soul and a spirit; every letter chooses a life of its own.”

Bahrum scribbled notes like a freshman college student. His ballpoint pen moved quickly, writing down what I said as if it were canon law. Yazir looked at me with a mixture of awe and surprise, no doubt wondering why I was talking about poetry in a kitchen that smelled of onions.

“And so it is with cooking!” I exclaimed, while lifting a shallot with the tips of my fingers. “This goes well with garlic, red chili, and shrimp paste. But this…?” I took a salmon fillet.

“Would this go well with shrimp paste?” I paused. “Frankly, I don’t know. I haven’t tried it yet. But what is certain is that they don’t know each other and haven’t yet learned how to be close to each other or to excite each other.”