It’s not that Seattle lacks Indonesian food. Capitol Hill’s Malaysian noodle house Kedai Makan has a few entrées, as does Beetle Cafe on the Ave, and there’s a limited selection at Bumbu Truck in Fremont. But if you want the sit-down Indonesian dining experience, you need to head up to the edge of the city limits—Aurora Avenue North and 137th Street—to Indo Cafe.
I only know about this place because my friend Anna, who grew up in the Netherlands, had been missing Indo food real hard. (The word Indo generally refers to the Eurasian culture that sprang from the Dutch East India Company’s 19th-century occupation of Indonesia.) While straight-up Indonesian food resembles other Southeast Asian cuisines, Indo food adds unexpected European ingredients: kidney beans, collard greens, fried potatoes. Bread and dairy. Mayonnaise. It’s the result of poaching another culture’s cuisine and then spending the next 200 years tweaking it in your own cuisine’s language.
