From spicy fried chicken to comforting (vegan) salads and sambals, Ah Beng Indonesia celebrates the deliciousness and diversity of the archipelago’s cooking.
While dining has been on the menu at Carousel since it opened in 1972, its current food options are comparable to what you’d find in any with-it food and drink precinct. You can get sushi, karaage and other Japanese treats delivered to your table by a bullet-train on a conveyor belt. You can get hand-pulled Lanzhou-style beef noodles at two different places. You can get gelato and waffles – still half-price on Tuesdays! – at hometown heroes, Gelare.
Best of all, you can get excellent and uncompromising Indonesian cooking at Ah Beng Indonesia: a perky, brightly coloured 40-seat halal restaurant in the rooftop dining precinct near David Jones. It’s not just a great Indonesian restaurant for a shopping centre. It’s a great Indonesian restaurant, period. So much so that the Indonesian government once anointed it as one of 100 eateries around the world championing the archipelago’s cuisine.
My colleague and The Age food critic Besha Rodell once cited Ah Beng as her fave shopping centre eatery and proof of Australia embracing that well-entrenched Asian expectation that malls can and should offer visitors good food. (“It felt like such a gift at the time,” she tells me via text message.)
But enough plaudits, let’s eat. Especially when there’s crunchy, stir-fried water spinach with a fire-engine red chilli sauce; fried and smashed chicken drumsticks known as ayam gepret; plus bouncy house-made noodles slicked in various sauces with heat levels ranging from punchy to weapons-grade hot.
While Ah Beng’s Jakarta-born owner David Wijaya isn’t afraid to gussy up the flavours he grew up with – he ran Monggo, a flash Indonesian restaurant in Mount Lawley, for 12 years before it closed last August – the recipes here have largely been left as-is and designed to taste as brash, fiery and sweet as they would in Wijaya’s homeland.
So none of the sambals (chilli sauces) contain training wheels, while the soto ayam santan (chicken soup with bihun noodles) is enriched with coconut milk: a Jakartan flourish that speaks to the capital’s cosmopolitan spirit. The salad of chopped, lightly blanched vegetables known as gado gado, like many dishes from West Java, features the region’s telltale sweetness, but only in service of creating richness and mouthfeel rather than just being sugary.
Although the menu includes set meal combinations – the nasi lidah laden with nicely chewy ox tongue and crunchy chicken skin is an offal lover’s fantasy – most diners opt for the nasi bungkus which gets them a bed of white rice subtly sweetened with coconut milk, plus their choice of meats and vegetables, wrapped in a banana leaf.
Outgoing staff will implore you to get the rendang, the Malay archipelago’s famous slow-cooked beef. It’s a little wetter and saucier than the dry, heavily spiced rendang synonymous with West Sumatra’s Padang region – Ah Beng’s nasi bungkus format is modelled on nasi padang’s choose-your-own-adventure system – but it’s still plenty tasty. So is the young jackfruit curry gudeg, richly flavoured and typical of Wijaya and his head chef James Kiing’s strong vegan game. The creamy, mildly spiced sauce gulai lends richness to everything from boiled eggs to braised tripe.
From a waste perspective, it seems odd to pack nasi bungkus for dine-in guests – why not just arrange everything on a plate? – but the way the rice, sauces and toppings inexplicably meld into a cohesive whole suggests the wrapping is as important as the gift.
Ah Beng flies its Indonesian colours in other ways too, starting with a rotating selection of kuih (snacks) such as kuih dadar (filled pandan pancakes) and kuih sarang semut (dense “anthill” cake baked with burned white sugar) that, in my mind, need a little steaming at home to really shine. Takeaway for the win. Otherwise, nostalgic snacks including Beng-beng chocolate bars and corn-flavoured chips are on-hand to send you off.
Perhaps there might even be a posse of Indonesian ladies there too, dressed in lacey Balinese kabayas, indigo-hued Yogyakarta-style batik and other traditional costumes: lunching, gossiping and hamming it up for an Instagram live stream. If you’re lucky, it’ll be National Batik Day – as it was on Thursday – and the group will rise and serenade the room with a soulful rendition of Indonesia Raya: Indonesia’s national anthem. I’m grateful that I get to hear them sing live and in person and not through those awful car park speakers.
The low-down
Atmosphere: a halal eatery serving an uncompromising, diverse array of Indonesian hits and regional classics with plenty of vegan options.
Go-to dishes: nasi bungkus.
Drinks: grass jelly, cendol and other nostalgic Indonesian drinks sporting enough milk and sweetness to combat the menu’s frequent bursts of spice.
Cost: about $50 for two people.
Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.
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Max Veenhuyzen is a journalist and photographer who has been writing about food, drink and travel for national and international publications for more than 20 years. He reviews restaurants for the Good Food Guide.
