Bumbu Den, Jakarta

Just an interesting random aside before we go to the food part. I saw this sign as I was exiting a mall, it was right next to the "No Smoking" and "No Pets" sign. I don't know if this was supposed to reassure me or not but a good thing I left my Smith and Wesson at home haha.

Bumbu Den serves grilled seafood North Sulawesian style and their specialty here is charcoal grilled grouper (as seen on their card) in a spicy chilli salsa.

The orangy chilli salsa in the foreground is the one used with their grilled fish. It may look quite mild but it's really quite potent and very tasty when mixed with freshly steamed white rice. The other salsa in the background is more like a salad and is rather mild.

Soto ikan (Fish soup), a lot of people would be more familiar with soto ayam which is the chicken equivalent but I was quite surprised that this fish variant tasted very good too. It uses similar spices to soto ayam and somehow that complemented the chunks of fish meat very well.

We ordered the extra-large version for their grilled spicy fish. Despite being a large fish, it was still grilled to perfection. The flesh was flakingly smooth and supple and it was fully cooked as well without being too dry. Now I can understand why every table here has at least one of these as well.

A side-dish of corn fritters. Freshly fried, these savory crackers went very well with the rest of the spicier dishes. Although the batter was crispy the corn kernals still remained rather juicy, not bad.

We ordered their crab specialty and was quite surprised to see that it was cooked in some sort of chilli sauce. We assumed that a North Sulawesian specialty would be grilled as well, I guess we should have enquired first before ordering. This tasted only pretty average, I still prefer the sort we get locally. Now I can understand why we were the only table with this as well haha.

D