Borneo Kalimantan Cuisine and Some LA Museum Eats

Today Ed (from Yuma) is finishing up his posts about a recent trip to LA. Tomorrow Kirk or Cathy will be posting about something different. That's what happens here at mmm-yoso!!!

Tina and I had a good time in LA. We saw interesting and sometimes amazing stuff in the museums, but this is a food blog not an art blog, so I’ll mostly focus on food. But I do want to give a brief shout out for the Mapplethorpe exhibits in both LACMA and the Getty. He was an incredibly talented photographer who took pictures of all sorts of things, even things like this:

Now let's look in a different direction:

Since we were comped two days of free breakfast buffets at the Hilton (don't ask) and had a lot of leftovers, we ate very little at the museums. But a lunch at an informal café at the Getty was pretty tasty. I had a half portion of a beef, radicchio, and horseradish sandwich with a cup of vegetable minestrone:

Really quite good. The soup was packed with vegetables and had the classic Italian flavors. I was quite taken with the sandwich – interesting combination of flavors. Tina's sandwich seemed more conventional to me, but she liked it:

The next day at the Huntington, we were feeling a bit peckish from walking around the grounds, so we went to the pavilion at the Chinese garden:

and both had a nice jasmine iced tea and a red bean paste stuffed pastry:

However, the main focus of this post is the meal we had at Borneo Kalimantan Cuisine on Garfield in Alhambra:

This small restaurant says it's the only restaurant in the entire United States featuring the cuisine of the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo. It has a couple tables in the front and then a row of tables along the wall to the back of the restaurant:

The menu had a page of appetizers, a page of soups and curries, a page of rice dishes, and two pages focusing on noodles. We tried to order some variety.

Our server was exceptionally friendly and welcoming, and after we ordered, he set our utensils on the table – two small plates, two forks, two soup bowls, and two soup spoons:

Our first dish, from the rice section, was Ayam Muda Goreng Penyet, which the menu described as Indonesian spiced chicken fried Singapore style:

The fried chicken had no breading but the outside was cooked crackly crisp. Its interior was moist, and while the chicken was very hot, there was no trace of oiliness. Tina and I also enjoyed the nicely sweet and mildly hot chili sauce. A perfect match with the bird.

The steamed rice was fine, and it came in very handy with the second item to arrive at the table, Borneo Oxtail Curry Soup:

While the menu said the coconut curry was spicy, most of the spicing was of the aromatic and sweet variety – a reminder that Borneo is in the same region as the fabled Spice Islands. There was one large piece of tail and two or three smaller pieces. All very tender and mildly beefy. The soup had some scallions and cabbage pieces, but my favorite of the vegetables were the chunks of fresh tomato that provided an acidic contrast to the creamy sweetness of the soup. Of course we ladled the soup into our bowls with the rice.

One page of the menu had been devoted solely to Borneo style homemade egg noodles, which could be thin, medium, or thick and chewy. Each type of noodle could be matched up with one of three types of toppings. We decided on Mie Karet Hakka, chewy egg noodles served Hakka style with red pork, marinated egg, fish ball, and fish cake:

The eggs were tasty, a good upgrade from regular boiled eggs. The few small fish ball halves and the plentiful slices of fish cake provided a nice light seafood flavor. The red pork lacked the porkiness and richness of good char siu, but all of these things – as well as some scallions, fried shallots, bean sprouts, and a thin stalk or two of gai lan (?) – were really just flavorings for the wonderful kinky chewy toothsome egg noodles:

A great noodle dish. It was served with a small bowl of seafood flavored broth on the side:

At first, we ate the noodles dry, sometimes dipping items into the broth, but toward the end of the meal we poured all of the broth into the noodle bowl:

It was good to the last drop.

We enjoyed the meal a lot. The clean bright restaurant, the friendly server and the 90s pop playing in the background created a pleasant atmosphere. The dishes we tried were various and tasty. Though the place is cash only, you gotta like the price tag:

Comments

[Caninecologne]

Nice post Ed. I have had this eatery on my list for several years for our SGV roadtrips. Now I definitely have to go!

I really liked Mapplethorpe's flower series. A controversial photographer who died too young.

[Ed (from Yuma)]

Thanks, cc. To some extent I wanted to do places that Kirk hadn't really covered. Plus the place had largely positive social media. As for Mapplethorpe, the flowers were something I'd never seen before, and I really enjoyed. At LACMA where I took almost no photos, they had the flower pictures that he had printed with some color process. Mesmerizing and gorgeous. Reminded me of O'Keefe, of course.

[janfrederick]

Ahhhh man. Nooooooodddddllllllessssssssss! :)

[Ed (from Yuma)]

Yes, jan, noonoonoodlllllssss. Different.