Beyond Bali: Warung Siska showcases Indonesian cuisine in Redwood City
By: Sara Hayden
Tags: Food And Drink, Indonesia, Restaurant, Silicon Valley, Bay Area

Both of you have such extensive experience, and (Anne), your family has been doing this since the ’80s. How have you seen the dining landscape change, and appetites in general?

Le Ziblatt: When I opened Tamarine in 2002, many of my diners had never been to Vietnam. We were offering not only the cuisine, but also had an art gallery where we were importing, working with a curator in Vietnam.

Over the years, we were surprised to find that many of our diners were surprised to see the beautiful artwork, and that they wouldn’t be able to imagine had come from Vietnam.

In the last 10 years, Vietnam was really like this exotic new travel destination, whereas before it wasn’t really on anyone’s radar.

I think the Bay Area’s evolving, and we’re fortunate to have such a well traveled and highly educated demographic in the Bay Area.

What I’ve seen is an interest in very specific cuisines, and less fusion, which I think is something that has made the Bay Area very interested in Indonesian cuisine.

Siska Silitonga: Warung Siska is not the first Indonesian restaurant in the Bay Area, but for the longest time Indonesian restaurants were very specific to the Indonesian community. The awareness wasn’t there about Indonesia.

The way around it, cooks would name themselves as “Southeast Asian cuisine” or “Asian restaurant.” They didn’t dare to say, “This is an Indonesian restaurant,” because they were trying to attract a bigger audience. So when Anne, Ervan and I came together, we were so proud, and said, “Let’s say it’s an Indonesian restaurant. It’s the time.”

It’s maybe not your grandma’s Indonesian food. It’s my Indonesian food, using whatever I can find around here. We’re really just adapting, and trying to make our own food, our own version.

Le Ziblatt: Food also has an evolution. Saying that food is going to stay for hundreds of years and never grow and change, I think that’s not realistic.

What Siska has done a really wonderful job of doing is adapting the cuisine so that she can utilize wonderful ingredients that we have here locally, but she is very particular about making sure the characteristics of the cuisine are still true to their roots. I think that really makes a difference in bringing more people to the Indonesian table, so to speak, and learning more about the cuisine. That approachability factor is really important.

Chef and partner Siska Silitonga of Warung Siska sources local ingredients from around the Bay Area for her take on traditional Indonesian dishes, like the gohu crudo. Typically the dish calls for tuna. She’s been adapting with salmon. (Photo by Nathan Liang Photography)

Silitonga: Indonesian food, you can’t just say there’s one way. There’s so many types of cuisines from different regions. When we were considering the menu, we were considering 1) Ingredients — what would be easier to get here without sacrificing the flavors and also the Indonesianness.

And then 2) What would be approachable for both Indonesians and also non-Indonesians?

And 3) How do we introduce Indonesian food beyond what’s been introduced in the U.S., beyond fried rice or gado gado, our salad.

That’s fine — delicious food. But can we push the agenda further?

So that’s why the (menu’s) gohu crudo for me is very special. A lot of people are surprised. They thought Indonesian food, everything is fried, or whatever the conception is. But it’s actually raw fish, and we do eat raw fish because our fish in Indonesia is so amazing. We have ocean when you open your door, we live right next to the ocean.

Traditionally in Indonesia we would use tuna for this dish. It’s a raw tuna sliced, and then you would add coconut oil, a little bit of calamansi, and also a little bit of fish sauce, and then fried onions or fried shallots, toasted coconut and crushed peanuts. And on top of it you put a little Thai basil or lemon basil. So the acid and the coconut oil combine together, and the fattiness of tuna. Delicious.

Here in the Bay Area, tuna is not easy to get. Plus it’s not really local. What is in season right now is king salmon, so I tried this dish with salmon. And salmon has that similarity of fattiness, and also very sweet.

I tried it with the basic sauce: coconut oil we can find here, calamansi I substitute with lemon, which is subtle and sweet. And lemon you can find anywhere — probably your neighbor’s garden. It’s just delicious, so that’s what we put on the menu.

This is one example of many of how we create our menu.