The menu is rambling, featuring dishes like tempeh, goat skewers, and calamari gilded by salted duck egg yolks, but the waiters are patient guides.
Evening in Elmhurst, Queens, and the windows of Awang Kitchen were awash in purple light. Inside, a party about 30 strong was winding down at tables pushed together along the wall, with balloons tugging upward from chairs and a woman on guitar leading the crowd in what sounded, in Bahasa Indonesia, like a hymn.
It was a gentler soundtrack than the hiss of cars outside on Queens Boulevard, and a lulling accompaniment to the plates that streamed steadily from the kitchen to my table in the corner.
Awang Kitchen opened in March in a new condominium built on the half-block lot where the Cantonese restaurant Harbor City once stood, flanked by golden lions. The chef, Siliwanga, known as Awang, grew up in Jakarta on the island of Java. (Like a number of Indonesians, he has only one name, confounding Western bureaucracy; in official records, his surname is listed as Nln, short for “no last name.”)
The menu is long and rambling, but the waiters are patient guides. One steered me toward tempeh, cakes of whole soybeans fermented until they stick together, which from past experience I had sworn to shun. Here, the cakes are cut into flat squares, divested of heaviness, dusted in coriander-laced tempura flour and fried briefly, so the inside stays soft. Their flavor lies somewhere between roasted chestnut and scorched earth. The cakes need no more than a dab of kecap manis (sweet soy sauce) , dark and viscous, pulling slightly at the spoon.
Tahu isi are craggy hulls of fried tofu with hidden caches of shrimp, carrots and cabbage. The hot peppers on the plate are not for show; you’ re meant to take a bite of tofu, then chile. It’s clarifying.
More long hots are broken down into a sambal for dendeng balado, flank steak sliced thinly and piqued with lime before a quick fry; and for duck, boiled to render the fat and then pan-fried so the skin crackles.
At first, I thought my favorite dish was calamari, airy from a dredging in tapioca flour and gilded by salted duck egg yolks, powerfully fatty and further enriched by butter. They’ re buried under a thousand shards of crispy garlic and shallots; the people at my table chased down every one.
Then came nasi tim ayam jamur, which Awang described as “what you make when you visit people” in the hospital. It begins with chicken and mushrooms, garlicky and soy-dark, layered at the bottom of a bowl and topped with rice half-cooked in chicken stock, then steamed so the liquids and spices run. This is inverted on a plate like a pineapple upside-down cake. A bowl of chicken broth is presented on the side with a slick of sesame oil, the better to heal you.
Goat skewers, nicely chewy, are paired with nubs of lontong, rice rolled inside a banana leaf and steamed until it takes on a faint woodsy flavor, like water drunk from a bamboo cup. Chicken is poached in coconut water for tenderness and a hint of sweetness. Catfish is saturated for hours in lemon and lime, then fried and smacked with the back of a spoon, so the sauce can find crannies and soak through.
Some dishes celebrate the animal parts that the West often snubs: beef tendon and liver in a tangle of flat rice noodles; gizzard and heart submerged in congee; creamy cow brain curry. But funk also appears in unexpected places, like an intensely marine fish cake with a batter of flaked Spanish mackerel and tapioca flour, sealed around a raw egg, boiled, fried and dunked in a sweet-sour soup of tamarind and brown sugar.
Awang spent years cooking at Japanese restaurants, and he has installed a sushi bar. I planned to politely ignore it — I came for Indonesian food, much more of a rarity in this city — until a plate arrived at my table unbidden, with dainty curls of fluke around strands of cucumber, light and refreshing.
On my visits, I saw Awang stop by every table, often with gifts, like es blewah, a sweet soup of cantaloupe, scraped into skinny strands with a special knife from Indonesia. One night, he brought us a small bowl of what he had made for a staff meal: a West Javanese version of laksa, heady with coconut milk and the color of crushed marigolds.
For a moment, my table was silent with happiness. But Awang shook his head. “I’ m missing two spices, ” he said with a sigh. “The original is more delicious.”
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