Great Gado Gado at Noodle House 88

My biggest surprise was a dish of stir-fried bean sprouts with pieces of dried fish. I never thought of bean sprouts as anything more than flavorless filler. But here was a plate of mung bean sprouts stir-fried with garlic, chiles, soy sauce and black pepper and dotted with extremely salty dried fish. The sprouts were cooked, but still crisp, and each one crunched between my teeth with a lovely bitter flavor that melded with the oil, garlic and pepper like a big warm mouthful of cooked salad.

The most wonderfully bizarre dish that Oseland ordered was called soto. The yellow soup looked like coconut milk curry with chunks of beef and pieces of the stomach lining you get in menudo floating around in it. Oseland told me the broth was scented with a variety of aromatics including kaffir lime leaves and daun salam leaves. (I had never even heard of daun salam before). It was served with a little plate on the side that held green chile sambal, lime quarters and bitter fried melinjo chips. (I'd never heard of those either.) The wild combination of flavors was sensational — if you like spicy coconut milk curry and you like Mexican menudo, go try some of this stuff.
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Indonesian cuisine is among the most ancient on the planet. Thanks to ideal agricultural conditions and easy sea travel, villages, towns and kingdoms arose on the Indonesian island of Java in the earliest days of human civilization. The Javanese were trading with India and China several centuries B.C., while the bounty of spices attracted Arab traders and with them, the Islamic religion.

At a time when pepper and cinnamon were more valuable than gold, the Europeans became obsessed with the Spice Islands. Cutting out the Arab middlemen was part of the cause of the Crusades and the reason Columbus sailed West to get East. Colonized as the "Dutch East Indies" in the 1600s, the area was ruled by Holland for over 300 years, until the Japanese invaded during World War II.

Today, more than 230 million people live on the 17,000 plus islands of Indonesia, and they come from a staggering variety of ethnicities. Their national motto is often translated "many yet one," which is awfully close to our own E pluribus unum.

Noodle House 88 calls itself a "Chinese-Indonesian" restaurant. I asked Oseland what that meant. He explained that the Chinese ethnicity is common in Indonesia, just as it is in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia.

But Chinese-Indonesians are different, Oseland explained. They are sometimes discriminated against in Indonesia. Hence they were forced to assimilate. Their food tastes typically Indonesian — except for the noodles. Like most Indonesians, they eat a lot of rice, but Chinese-Indonesian cuisine is also famous for its noodle dishes.

On a lunch visit, I sampled an egg noodle salad, a combination of noodles, vegetables and peanut sauce that cost $5. It was so tasty, my dining companion and I fought over it with dueling chopsticks.

Oseland and I also sampled another noodle salad called rujak juhi. Oseland said it was usually called mi gado gado in Indonesia. It consisted of gado gado salad tossed with the kind of curly egg noodles called mi in Chinese and Vietnamese cuisine. The flavor reminded me of Thai noodle salads I love to eat in the heat of a Houston summer. And I plan on frequenting this place regularly when the weather turns warm.

As Oseland and I left the restaurant, I asked him what he thought. I was a little shocked at his response. "Home-cooked Indonesian food is my favorite," Oseland said. The menu at Noodle House 88 includes Indonesian street food classics mixed up with some more formal dishes, so it's a bit of a mish-mash. "But it's better than anything I've had in New York and almost as good as the best places in L.A.," he said. "I'd say it's among the best Indonesian restaurants I've been to in the U.S."

Odds are you haven't been sitting on the edge of your seat waiting for some good gado gado. But the next time the urge for a culinary adventure strikes, check out Noodle House 88 and its otak otak, soto, and spicy noodle salads.