Local Cuisine

Whenever I am home, with my relatives or my old friends in Indonesia, their common questions are “what kind of food do you eat out there in Arabia….?” Or during family functions usually they serve home-made traditional Indonesian Cuisine especially for me. In their mind, I must be craving for Indonesian food all the time as they also know that I don’t cook so good, as a matter of fact, I am a pretty crap cook!!!

To the ignorant minds, I must have eaten too many traditional “Middle East Cuisine” that made me hankering for the original Indonesian food… ha ha ha is that right? The truth is, I’ve been eating anything except traditional Middle East food!

The question is what is Traditional Middle Eastern Food? And where can I find it? In the City Center Mall, the biggest mall in Bahrain, with it’s huge food court, could I find any Arabian food counter? Sadly NO! Out of more than 20 food counters, I could only find one Persian food counter, the closest to the Arabian Food, with no Shawarmas to display. The other food counters are American Fast food, Italian fast food, Pizza counter, a couple of Thai food counter and a mixture of Indian/Chinese food counter. It seems that Arabian food is not at home in their own country….

What about traditional Indonesian Cuisine?

Photo 2 – Padang Restaurant, at every corner of Jakarta’s road. – uploaded by flickr by 536

Photo 3 – variety of Padang Food on a single table – uploaded first time by 88DB.com

Well I must say not so bad… in fact Indonesian food was doing well, despite the fact the Malaysian tried to take over our food, such as Padang Food (, it is still at home in Indonesia, Padang food was still there on almost every corner of the street in Jakarta…

When I went to Grand Indonesia, one of the newest Jakarta’s shopping Mall, to have lunch in its food court, there are plenty of different traditional Indonesian foods. Such as different type of Sotos, Gudeg, Empal, not to mention the most famous Nasi Goreng and Gado-gado, despite the invasion of foreign food.