Medan Kitchen isn’t a kitchen; it’s a grocery store. It also isn’t a restaurant; like I said, it’s a grocery store. A grocery store that’s open afternoons, four days a week (Thursday through Sunday), when it’s mobbed by locals hungry for Indonesian home-cooking by a 75-year-old flavor master named Siu Chen, along with her two daughters, two sons-in-law, and two grandchildren — who can be found in this bit of Jakarta inside a former Chinese seafood café in the back of a Rosemead mini-mall.
It’s the darnedest place — and also the best, with a menu of many (so many!) Styrofoam packed dishes, that change on a more or less regular basis. A shopping jaunt through Medan will leave you eating Indonesian food for days; this is chow that’s very hard to resist.
And really — why would you want to? Siu Chen has been feeding friends and family since she arrived in the USA in 1998. She was happy to feed her many acquaintances until COVID-19 inspired her to expand her world to those of us who drive whatever distance we need to in order to confront long tables in the middle of the right hand of the two rooms that make up Medan, covered with boxes of dozens of dishes. Dishes that travel very well, and reheat even better — unless you can’t resist the aroma and decide to attack the chow lukewarm during the drive home.
As is true of the very best of down-home cooking, Siu Chen’s dishes taste good at any temperature.
Dishes are posted daily on the restaurant’s website. But really, with a selection of 50 or more packages to choose from, the menus are parenthetical — no matter which day you show up, there’ll be more than a few dishes that you’ll carry to the counter to pay for, have bagged, and take home. The temptations are many, and many more.
On some shelves on the right, there are packages of the sort of snacks that are just perfect with a beer (or three), and some weekend football — spicy peanuts with anchovies, spicy crunchy potatoes with anchovies and peanuts, spicy cassava chips, spicy tempeh chips with anchovies and peanuts, crispy sweet tempeh with crunchy potatoes and peanuts. The combinations seem near infinite.
But mostly, what the options at Medan consist of are pre-packed meals, some refrigerated, some on the tables — and pretty much overwhelming for those of us who know Indonesian cooking mostly as noodles done a zillion ways. One of the recent pre-packed specials consisted of noodles in shrimp gravy, with a hard-boiled egg, fried potatoes, fried shallots, fried tofu, sprouts, lime, chili, crackers and, as the menu said, “umami rich shrimp.”
The fried flat rice noodles include shrimp, fish balls, sausage, egg and vegetables. The rice wrapped in a banana leaf comes with beef rendang, spicy boiled egg, fried chicken, tofu with green chiles, spicy potato with anchovy and peanuts. The rice involves a choice of turmeric rice, white rice and coconut rice.
Perhaps the simplest dishes available are the numerous satays — the pork satay, as good as either pork or satay can imaginably be, comes with compressed rice cakes and peanut sauce. There are numerous dumplings as well — some crispy, some not, most with a complexity of ingredients. Even the dumplings look as if they were made by a skilled hand, one who knows their way around spices and textures and so much goodness.
Medan seems so simple at first glance, just a grocery store. But spend some time there, and it turns into a land of culinary wonders and joys. With, of all things, a microwave oven on the left side of the main room — I guess for those who want a hot meal in the parking lot. I resisted, because on the day I visited the Rams were playing, and I was looking forward to an afternoon of edible joys, and on-field sorrow. With a mouth full of spice, the butterfingers at the goal line was almost forgivable. Good food makes even ignominious defeat taste better.
Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email mreats@aol.com.
Medan Kitchen
- Rating: 3 stars
- Address: 8518 Valley Blvd., Rosemead
- Information: 626-782-7252; https://medan-kitchen-inc.business.site/
- Cuisine: Indonesian takeout and grocery
- When: Lunch and early dinner takeout, Thursday through Sunday
- Details: Soft drinks; no reservations
- Atmosphere: A brilliant culinary experience, with a multitude of often changing Indonesian takeout dishes — from plate meals to dumplings, snacks, and so much more, and a sizable following of locals who show up to get bulging bags of chow to take home. Utterly unique…and delicious.
- Prices: About $30 per person.
- Cards: MC, V
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