The New Indonesian Restaurant on East Burnside Is a Love Letter to the Country

On the wall of Wajan, the new Indonesian restaurant on East Burnside, a large mural depicts the Kota train station in Jakarta. Kaki lima, or little food carts selling staples like Indonesian fried rice and noodle soups, park alongside the station while locals stroll past and bajaj, or motorbikes, zoom by. It’s a scene distinctly familiar to Feny, the owner of Wajan, who grew up in Jakarta; her restaurant is a tender portrait of her hometown and home country, from the paintings of Indonesian characters on the walls to the batik tables throughout the restaurant.

Wajan, which opens today at 5 p.m., is Feny’s first restaurant. While she and her partner Ross Grimes worked at Shigezo, she opened an Indonesian food cart, Wayang House: during the day, she’d make peanut sauce salads like gado gado and warm ginger drinks, then working a service at the restaurant in the evening. “It was a great experience, but I want to do things bigger,” she says. “I was so young and inexperienced, it wasn’t where I wanted it to be.”

So Feny returned to Indonesia and learned from the best — her mother. The two cooked together, honing in on recipes like her mother’s rendang, a spicy, complex beef stew she serves with an egg omelet and rice. She brought back her menu, a 101 course on the cuisine, complete with rice dishes like nasi campur and her favorite Indonesian fried chicken, smothered in crispy bits.

If Gado Gado, the other Indonesian restaurant that opened last week, is a remix of the cuisine, Wajan is the original: Dishes are deeply traditional and served the way they arrive in Java or Bali. Nasi campur, a rice dish with various condiments, comes with portions of deeply flavorful telor terong balado, or hard-boiled eggs cooked in chiles and eggplant, as well as curried jackfruit and fried tempeh. The restaurant will always have some type of curry, either a yellow curry with bone-in chicken or a green curry with shredded chicken, as well as its ayam goreng kalasan, her bone-in fried chicken covered in kremes, or seasoned crunchy flakes made with rice flour. Starting June 26, the restaurant will begin serving its full menu, including Feny’s favorites like burbur ayam — a rice porridge with turmeric broth and shredded chicken — and at least one noodle soup, rotating between a Jakartan-style mie kangkung and Sumatran-style mie bakmie.

The restaurant also offers a number of snacks, which work as appetizers or accompaniments to drinks at the wood-paneled bar: the teri kacang, peanuts tossed in a sweet-and-spicy sauce with anchovies, take the place of the traditional bar peanuts, and the bar’s selection of fried bites include stuffed-fried tofu and banana.

Grimes will be the one behind the bar, running the cocktail program. He wanted the drinks to feel true to the region, so he’s using Indonesian spirits like arrack for refreshing milk punches with port, as well as the Dutch spirits found in Indonesia — Genever is brightened up with pandan simple syrup, chartreuse, and lime, for instance. The bar also offers beer and wine, including Bintang, the Indonesian pilsner incredibly difficult to find in the United States. Non-drinkers have a wealth of options, including avocado chocolate shakes, a house roast from the folks at Indonesian coffee house Kopi, and Es Cendol, a green rice flour jelly (similar to the jellies found at boba shops) in coconut milk and palm sugar syrup.

The restaurant’s interiors are almost as immersive as the cuisine. Feny didn’t just bring back recipes from Indonesia — the restaurant is fully littered with batik and knickknacks from the country, hidden on bar shelves or behind tables. Grimes and Feny designed the restaurant together, using Mod Podge to add batik patterns to tables and paneling wood behind the bar. The restaurant’s roof is lined with wood abandoned from the Laurelhurst Cafe, which Wajan now occupies; the restaurant is meant to mimic the warungs, or open-air restaurants of Indonesia. With a paper-lined pile of nasi campur and a shot of arrack, it’s pretty damn close to the original.

Below, peek inside the restaurant before it opens tonight, and explore the full menu coming later this month. Wajan is open from 5 to 9 p.m. Wednesday through Monday, extending its hours by the end of June.

Dina Avila/EPDX

Dina Avila/EPDX

Dina Avila/EPDX

Dina Avila/EPDX

Dina Avila/EPDX

Dina Avila/EPDX

Dina Avila/EPDX

Dina Avila/EPDX

Note: In certain parts of Indonesia, citizens do not have last names; Feny prefers to use one name, which is why this story only refers to her as such.

• Wajan [Official]
• Previous Wajan coverage [EPDX]