Torch ginger plays the leading role – NRC

We’ve talked about it before here: Indian food and Indonesian food are not the same. Indian cuisine originated in the Netherlands. The dishes have been largely reconstructed by Dutch-Indian immigrants from their memories with the limited ingredients that were available here and are therefore an echo of colonial dishes – which were not purely Indonesian to begin with.

That doesn’t mean that Indian food isn’t tasty, of course. But it is not Indonesian. Indonesian cuisine has received increasing attention in recent years, in cookbooks and also in restaurants. Since the beginning of this year, those looking for those real Indonesian flavors can also visit Nona Manis from Eduard Roesdi in Oegstgeest.

Roesdi has been cooking Indian for more than a quarter of a century in the Leiden shop Iboe Tjilik, where he started as a buffet employee. After studying Islam and Islamic law at the University of Leiden, he took over the tent. Over the past ten years, Roesdi developed a fascination with what he calls ‘Indonesian fine dining’ – Indonesian flavors presented in a modern, Western, gastronomic way. It became a love project that has now culminated in Nona Manis.

The guest can put together a three-, four- or five-course menu from eight dishes and two desserts. The order is determined in consultation and it always starts with two ‘appetizers’, such as an oyster with a nicely dosed sambal matah, a fresh, raw Balinese sambal with lots of lemongrass and lime leaves. Or a steamed fish cake on banana leaf with peanut sambal (otak otak), crispy chicken conversation (Indonesian KFC with some depth from the fermented sambal) or crispy eggplant (terong) with tomato sambal and a kalamansi used a little too sparingly.

The words ‘fine dining’ do create a certain expectation. You could make a point of having the same fish on the menu twice with the exact same garnishes, just a different sauce. That one of the choice dishes is nasi, and therefore a large plate of rice, which in terms of size and contents serves better as a side dish for sharing. And that the hollandaise with the scallops is quite a bulky butter sauce. Roesdi’s wife Renu, who works as a waiter, would rather not have him call it hollandaise – as with so much in life, this also shows: a man better listens to his wife.

Andaliman pepper

We also see many ingredients often. For example, the andaliman pepper is not only in the scallops, but also in the fish, and everyone had already received rice prawn crackers with andaliman butter with the snacks. But we shouldn’t make too big of a point about that. Let us not lose sight of the fact that it is really cool to get acquainted with the andaliman pepper (the citrus-fresh Indonesian sister of the Szechuan pepper). Just like the real torch ginger flowers that Roesdi imports fresh from Indonesia.

The cuissons are a nice feature of his ‘fine dining’ approach. Roughly speaking, most ingredients in Indonesian cuisine are fried or stewed. At Nona Manis we eat a juicy chicken rouleau and beautifully glassy fried scallops and a pink lamb chop. The beans in the gado gado also have a wonderfully crispy bite.

Roesdi also has a particularly nice touch. He works with many different and extremely aromatic herbs. Yet you can taste almost every element. The steamed fish cake (with a special elastic structure from the tapioca flour) is strongly flavored with fish sauce, without overpowering the little bit of crab on it. In the fried rice – which is made with a fragrant and colorful oil extracted from ginger and turmeric – all the fresh herbs come through crystal clear: celery leaves, parsley, coriander leaves, the sliced ​​torch ginger and the kemangi, or Indonesian lemon basil.

Roesdi may have gone straight into the kitchen after his studies, but he remains an academic who likes to provide explanations: the pineapple curry on redfish comes from the Riau kitchen, around the Strait of Malacca, where Indian traders first made contact with the archipelago, Roesdi explains. That is why, in addition to native ingredients such as galangal and ketoembar (coriander seed), you will also find Chinese (cinnamon and star anise) and Indian (cardamom) influences.

On the other redfish, the torch ginger plays the leading role, the flowers of which are eaten and not the rhizomes. It has a unique perfumed aroma, floral but not potpourri, not soapy like coriander, more fresh and ‘streakless clean’.

However, in both cases, the ‘French’ garnishes under the fish – celeriac, soy beans and quinoa – do not match the bumbu in any way. Where it does work well is with the gulai. The fine Texel lamb carries the rich, interwoven flavors of the West Sumatran curry (including tumeric leaf, galangal, lemongrass, lime leaf and salam leaf) with verve, the asparagus and oyster mushrooms find their place next to the fried cassava (which nicely soaks up the sauce). . Roesdi used the herbs from the sauce to create a dry rub for that beautifully roasted pork chop – a very successful gastronomic twist.

I don’t have room here to list all the special ingredients – such as pandan in the iced tea or the frogspawn-like crushed basil seed in the es campur to – to describe. But it is clear that you will have a particularly tasty and educational, entertaining evening at Nona Manis. Not all gastronomic twists turn out equally well, but Roesdi’s sense of taste is refined. With his fine dining variant, he mainly wants to show that you don’t have to be outside again within 45 minutes if you eat Indonesian food. He has undoubtedly succeeded in that aim.