OUR STORY

The name Indonesia was derived from "indos nesos", meaning islands near India, The country is in fact the largest archipelago in the world with thousands of islands, 17,508 to be precise, spread in an area between the Asian continent and Australia, and between the Pacific and the Indian oceans. The islands are inhabited by hundreds of tribes and thousands of sub-tribes with diverse cultures and languages. There is a national language spoken throughout the country, namely Bahasa Indonesia. It is thus appro - priate, that the country's motto is Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, which means: Unity in Diversity.

Indo Cafe marries traditional authentic Indonesian cuisine with modern innovation and presentation. At Indo Cafe, we strive to bring you the diversity of our dishes so that our customers can appreciate the vast selections of food from different parts of Indonesia. Come and discover the taste of Indonesia at Indo Cafe!

OUR FOOD

Pangsit Goreng

Deep fried chicken wonton served with sweet
and sour sauce

Tempe Mendoan

Soybean cake deep fried in Javanese batter served with spicy and sweet soy sauce

Bakwan Malang

Wonton, tofu and meatballs with fine rice noodles in a light broth

Bihun Bakso

Beef meatballs with fine rice noodles in a light broth

Ayam Cabe Ijo

Padangnese chicken with green chili sauce

Ayam Goreng Balado

Fried chicken simmered in our special spicy sauce

Empek-Empek Palembang

Traditional fried fish cake served with noodle, cucumber and homemade dark vinegar sauce

Ikan Goreng Lalapan

Deep fried fish with fresh mixed vegetables served with homemade chili paste

Rendang Sapi

Tender dry beef curry slow-cooked in our traditional
coconut sauce with egg and topped with crackers

OUR NEWS

Order Online >> May, 27 2020

You can now order our food online!

Vote for us in the Best of Western Washington >> July, 20 2013

Vote for us as the Best of West Washington in Asian Fusion category

More news

OUR REVIEWS

You Won't Find Indo Cafe's Unique Culinary Mash-Up—Indonesian and Dutch—Anywhere Else in Town >> June, 11 2020

t'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.

Anna and I started with quintessential nasi goreng (fried rice). Indo Cafe's is a classic version (sweet soy sauce, onions, protein of your choice). That said, they have a half dozen other nasi (rice) dishes, all around $10, with more exciting flavors and textures, like the nasi gila menteng (crazy rice), doused in a garlic-heavy "special sauce" and stir-fried with sliced sausage, chicken, and beef meatballs.

Indo Cafe also offers rijsttafel ("rice table" in Dutch), similar to a smorgasbord in that it encompasses a few dozen or more dishes and you bring all your buddies and everyone samples everything. Usual suspects include chicken satay skewers, spring rolls, rice balls filled with spicy beef, perkedel jagung (corn fritters), egg balado (a hard-boiled egg, deep-fried and slathered in spicy sambal oelek hot sauce), and bebotak (South African–influenced curried meatballs).

Born from colonial-era opulence, rijsttafel is something you see all over the Netherlands but rarely in Indonesia, so it's interesting that Indo Cafe has it. The full rijsttafel spread is only available by reservation, but the menu features mini versions—entrées served with rice, egg balado, stir-fried veggies, and a corn fritter, which I expected to be like corn bread, but was actually a deep-fried dollop of mashed-up sweet corn, kernels included.

Speaking of sides, the risoles ($6.50) are by far the best thing on the menu. A European dish that's been Indonesia-fied, risoles are bread-crumb-rolled, deep-fried crepe-burritos stuffed with chicken ragout, accompanied by peanut sauce. I want to make a helmet of risoles and eat my way out of it.

Anna's all-consuming obsession, meanwhile, is the pisang goreng (banana fritter, $3.25). Dunked in batter and deep-fried like a mozzarella stick, the banana becomes liquefied. A side of ice cream (vanilla, avocado, or durian) is recommended to cool down your mouth down after you bite into the molten fruit.

The other major player on the dessert menu is es teler ("drunk ice," $5.25), one of Indonesia's national drinks/desserts. A cross between a sundae and a booze-free frozen cocktail, it's decorated with jackfruit, long fat snakes of green rice jelly, and cocopandan syrup. Sometimes they do a chocolaty rendition with Milo powder, Cocoa Puffs, Rice Krispies, Oreos, chopped peanuts, and sweetened condensed milk. Talk about opulent.

All of this is to say that, unsurprisingly, you don't have to pine for Indo food from your hazy Dutch childhood to be enthralled by it. We barely made a dent in Indo Cafe's expansive menu, but I'm committed to trying every single thing on it. Maybe all at once, on my birthday, when I plan to enjoy the full rijsttafel menu.

The Stranger >> July, 30 2013

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. Indo Cafe offers rijsttafel ("rice table" in Dutch), similar to a smorgasbord i Read More...

One of a Kind >> July, 30 2013

Indo Cafe Monopolizes the Indonesian Cuisine Market

It's hard to believe that a city the size of Seattle has only one of anything. Sure, there's only one Space Needle, but this is a town with a dozen Fortune 500 companies and four major-league sports teams. There are four map stores in Seattle. There are three Shakespeare companies. And yet, somehow, there is only one Indonesian restaurant: the Indo Cafe, nestled in the back of a cheesy little strip of stores just a block from Northgate Mall.

Indonesia's a funny little country, made up of over 14,000 small islands—a loosely affiliated republic whose cuisine is almost as fragmented as its geography. To specify an Indonesian cuisine is problematic—most of the islands can agree on the use of fish, coconut, and chilies, but regional cuisines run the gamut: There's a strong Thai influence in the north, and centuries of Dutch colonization and decades of Japanese occupation have both left their culinary marks. The menu at Indo Cafe reflects this culinary diversity, celebrating it through a widely varied series of dishes that share only the sense that they were all conceived by the seaside, under a hot tropical sun.

I wonder if dishes like "Monte Cristo sandwich" and "steak and eggs" sound as funny in Indonesian as "empek-empek palembang" sounds in English. Thankfully, the menu included lots of pictures, and the Indonesian wait staff—we had three servers working with us throughout the night—was earnest, helpful, and honest, steering us away from dishes they thought we might not like, or dishes that were inappropriate for dinner, or dishes that would be difficult to share. When we told one of our waiters that it was our first visit to the cafe (and, in fact, our first visit to an Indonesian restaurant) he put his hand over his heart, and sincerely told us how excited and honored he was to introduce us to his cuisine.

We started the meal with the risoles ($4.95), a lightly breaded pair of Dutch-inspired egg-roll pockets stuffed with a slightly sweet chicken ragout. They were light and delicate, served with a plum sauce that heightened the sweetness already present in the meat. There were unusual flavor harmonies working in the risoles, tastes that had my guest and I looking at each other with a "Wow, what's in that" expression.

The siomay campur bandung ($5.95) was just as intriguing as we attempted to dissect it down to its components in our mouths. There was a fish ball, lightly spiced and wrapped in some sort of won ton skin, and a chunk of tofu stuffed with ground chicken, most interesting for its use of tofu not as a meat substitute but as a textural ingredient to be used in concert with various meats. Slathered over everything is Indo's house-made peanut sauce, light and sweet (if a little straightforward and characterless).

The empek-empek palembang ($6.95) was pretty much completely foreign to our Western palettes—a fish cake with a chewy, almost rubbery texture (think red-snapper-flavored Starburst) served with a sinus-clearing hot sauce and noodles. While we didn't finish this dish (to be honest, we ordered it for the name), it did add to the culinary portrait of life by the sun-drenched beaches of the islands.

With the entrées, my guest and I ventured deeper into the proteins on the menu, exploring the rendang sapi ($8.95) and the bakmi goreng jawa ($7.95). The rendang (sirloin tips cooked in coconut milk and served with long-grain polished Indonesian rice) was perfectly spiced with a rich blend of sharply peppery notes, sweet clove and nutmeg, and other unknown but earthy flavors. Unfortunately the meat itself was overcooked almost to inedibility; we found ourselves licking the dry rub off the chunks of sirloin and leaving the meat itself on the plate. The bakmi (chunks of pork mixed into Javanese-style noodles) suffered a similar problem. While the noodles and spicing were both dead-on, the chunks of pork were far from the mark—we ate around them to explore the noodles without having to deal with the slightly funky (and unidentifiable) pork products.

There's an intriguing dessert menu that begs to be explored (full of fruits, gelatins, and something called "black grass jelly" for $2.95) and a surprisingly deep beer and wine selection (for a strip-mall restaurant, anyway).

Follow one simple rule at Indo Cafe and you'll be fine: Order it only if you can picture finding it on the beach of an equatorial island in Southeast Asia. No cows. No pigs. No sheep. Lots of fish. Lots of fruit. A little chicken. And a little black grass jelly.

by THADIUS VAN LANDINGHAM III