Food & Dining

Restaurants and food

• Breakfast A1 I eat breakfast at seven. My mother makes fried rice with an egg on top. I drink sweet tea. The kitchen is warm. The radio plays old songs.
• At the Warung A1 There is a small warung near my office. The owner is Ibu Wati. She cooks rice, chicken, tempeh and vegetables. Everything is in glass boxes. You…
• Cooking Eggs A1 I can cook one thing: eggs. I put oil in the pan. I wait. Then I break two eggs into the pan. They make a loud sound. I add a little salt.
• The Fruit Seller A1 Every morning a man sells fruit from his motorbike. He has bananas, papaya, mango and watermelon. He rings a bell. Everyone on the street knows the…
• Too Spicy A1 My friend Ari loves chili. He puts chili on everything. Today we eat noodles together. He says, "Try my sauce." I take a small spoon.
• Dinner with Family A1 Every evening we eat dinner together. My father sits at the end of the table. My mother brings the food: rice, fish, soup and vegetables. We wait for…
• Ice Cream A1 It is a hot day. My little sister wants ice cream. We walk to the shop. There are many colours: chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, green tea.
• The Night Market A1 On Friday night we go to the night market. There are many food stalls. I smell satay, corn and fried bananas. Smoke goes up into the lights.
• My Grandmother's Kitchen A1 My grandmother's kitchen is old. There is no oven. She cooks on a small gas stove. There are many bottles: soy sauce, fish sauce, oil. Everything…
• Coffee in the Morning A1 I need coffee in the morning. I boil water. I put coffee and sugar in a glass. I pour the water. I stir. The smell wakes me up.
• Learning to Cook from My Mother A2 Last month I told my mother I wanted to learn to cook. She was surprised, because I've always been the one who eats and never the one who helps. She…
• The Restaurant with No Menu A2 My friend took me to a restaurant that has no menu. It's a small place in an old house, with six tables. You sit down and the owner, an old man,…
• Eating Alone A2 When I moved to the city, I didn't know anyone, so I ate every meal alone. At first this was embarrassing. I felt that everyone in the warung was…
• The Wedding Feast A2 My cousin got married last week, and in our family a wedding means food — a lot of food. Her mother and five aunts cooked for three days. The kitchen…
• A Vegetarian at the Table A2 My best friend Rio became a vegetarian last year. In our town this is unusual, and his family didn't understand. His mother kept cooking meat and…
• The Food Delivery Habit A2 For six months I ordered food on my phone almost every day. It was easy: press a button, wait thirty minutes, eat. I didn't have to shop, cook or…
• Food from Home A2 I've lived in Jakarta for three years, but my stomach still lives in Padang. When I'm tired or sad, I don't want pizza or noodles. I want my mother's…
• The Bad Restaurant Review A2 My uncle opened a small restaurant last year. The food is excellent — everyone in the family knows it. But last week someone gave him one star…
• Fasting Month A2 During the fasting month, everything about food changes. We don't eat or drink from sunrise to sunset. The mornings are quiet. Restaurants close…
• Cooking for Two Hundred A2 My aunt runs a small catering business, and last month she got her biggest order ever: lunch for two hundred people at a company event. She said yes…
• The Sambal Argument B1 🔒 Premium In my family there is one argument that has lasted longer than any other, and it's about sambal. My mother makes hers with raw shallots and lime, bright and sharp. My father's…
• Working in a Restaurant Kitchen B1 🔒 Premium I took the job as a kitchen assistant because I needed money, not because I wanted to cook. I lasted two years, and when I left I could cook better than most people I know, and I…
• Why My Father Won't Eat at Restaurants B1 🔒 Premium My father has eaten at a restaurant perhaps ten times in his life, and every one of those times was because someone else insisted. He's not poor, and he's not unfriendly. He simply…
• The Market at Five A.M. B1 🔒 Premium For the last year I've been going to the traditional market at five in the morning, once a week, and it's changed how I think about food. I used to shop at the supermarket after…
• The Diet That Didn't Work B1 🔒 Premium In January I decided to lose weight, the way half the country does in January. I found a diet online — no rice, no sugar, no fried food, which in Indonesia is roughly no food — and…
• A Foreigner at Our Table B1 🔒 Premium My brother brought his colleague home for dinner last month — a man from the Netherlands, tall, polite, and completely unprepared for how my family eats. My mother had cooked as if…
• Food Waste in a Small Kitchen B1 🔒 Premium I run a small cafe, twenty seats, and for the first year I threw away roughly a quarter of what I bought. I didn't measure it; I didn't want to. But every night there was a bin bag…
• The Coffee I Grew Up With B1 🔒 Premium My grandfather drank coffee the old way: ground fine, boiled with sugar in a small pot, poured into a glass, and drunk after the grounds had settled. The glass was never washed…
• Opening a Food Stall B1 🔒 Premium My wife and I opened a food stall outside our house three months ago. Just a cart, a gas burner, a menu of four things — fried rice, fried noodles, a chicken soup, and iced tea.…
• Eating with Your Hands B1 🔒 Premium My colleague from Singapore watched me eat lunch with my right hand and asked, carefully, whether it wasn't unhygienic. I'd been eating this way my whole life, so I'd never really…
• The Recipe I Can't Write Down B2 🔒 Premium I've tried, on several occasions, to write down my mother's recipe for beef rendang, and each attempt has ended in the same frustration: the recipe on the page bears no resemblance…
• Street Food and the Fear of the Unknown B2 🔒 Premium Foreign visitors to this country arrive with a single, overriding fear, and it isn't crime or traffic or the heat. It's the street food. They've been told, by guidebooks and…
• Why Restaurants Fail B2 🔒 Premium I've now watched four restaurants open and close on the same corner near my office, over about six years, and I've developed a theory that I hold with the confidence of someone…
• The Long Table B2 🔒 Premium There's a tradition in my grandmother's village that I didn't understand until I was an adult, and I'm not sure I understand it fully now. On certain days — a wedding, a death, a…
• Feeding a Picky Child B2 🔒 Premium My son is six and eats, at the current count, eleven foods. Rice, plain. Fried chicken, but only the leg. Bananas, but not if they have spots. Noodles, if they're the right shape.…
• The Ethics of the Buffet B2 🔒 Premium The hotel where I work serves a breakfast buffet, and I've watched it for four years with a growing unease that I've only recently been able to name. Every morning, for three…
• Cooking as Therapy B2 🔒 Premium The year my marriage ended, I cooked more than I'd cooked in the previous decade combined, and it took me most of that year to understand why. I'd assumed, when I noticed the…
• The Halal Question Abroad B2 🔒 Premium Travelling as a Muslim in a country where almost nothing is halal is an education in how much of eating is trust. At home I don't think about it; the food is halal because…
• The Death of the Family Dinner B2 🔒 Premium When I was a child, dinner happened at seven, at the table, with everyone present, and the rule was absolute enough that I never questioned it. My father came home from work for…
• Learning to Taste B2 🔒 Premium I spent thirty years eating without tasting, and I only discovered this when a friend who'd trained as a chef sat me down with three bowls of the same soup and asked me to tell her…
• The Grammar of a Meal C1 🔒 Premium Every cuisine has a grammar, and like the grammar of a language it's invisible to native speakers and bewildering to everyone else. In mine, rice is the subject and everything else…
• What the Supermarket Took C1 🔒 Premium The supermarket arrived in my town when I was twelve, and I remember the excitement precisely: the automatic doors, the cold air, the aisles of things in packages that had never…
• Hunger, Remembered C1 🔒 Premium My grandmother did not talk about the hungry years, and so I learned about them the way one learns most things that matter in a family: sideways, from what she did rather than what…
• The Restaurant as Theatre C1 🔒 Premium A restaurant is a theatre in which the audience is also the cast, and I say this having spent eleven years on both sides of the curtain — six as a waiter, five as a regular…
• Coffee, Colonialism and the Cup on My Desk C1 🔒 Premium There's a cup of coffee on my desk, grown three hundred kilometres from here, and I drink it every morning without thinking about how it got there, which is, I've come to think,…
• The Slow Loss of the Home Cook C1 🔒 Premium My mother cooks every day. Her mother cooked every day. I cook perhaps three times a week, and my daughter, who is nineteen, has cooked — by her own cheerful admission — a total of…
• The Last Meal Question C1 🔒 Premium Ask anyone what they'd eat for their last meal and you'll get an answer faster than to almost any other question about their life, and the answer will almost never be the most…
• Salt C1 🔒 Premium I've been thinking about salt, which is an odd thing to think about at length until you notice that it appears in almost every sentence we use about value, about character, about…
• Feeding Strangers C1 🔒 Premium There's a practice in my faith, and in most faiths, of feeding people you don't know, and I've spent a good deal of my adult life trying to understand why it appears everywhere —…
• The Kitchen at Four A.M. C1 🔒 Premium For nine years I baked bread commercially, which means that for nine years I began work at four in the morning, and I've been trying, since I stopped, to describe what that hour…