Beef rendang is one thing: a slow-cooked Indonesian stew, with a coconut milk-based sauce that tenderizes the meat and fills it with flavor. But, according to the menu in my hands, nasi goreng rendang—the same dish, but piled into fried rice—was something different entirely. Something much, much scarier.
“NOT KIDDING VERY SPICY,” the menu warned.
I felt a twinge of fear. The man at the counter was telling me to order this very dish. He said, based on what I’d tried last time, it was my next step into the world of Indonesian cooking.
“Don’t worry,” he said, sensing my cowardice. “I can tell them to make it medium.” Medium as in less hot, right? His answer: “Medium is spicy for Americans. Normal is spicy for Indonesians.” Behind me, a customer finishing up lunch in his UT Southwestern scrubs piped up to agree: on a previous visit he had ordered the “not kidding” version and ended up with sweat dripping down his face.
The customer was right. So was Travis Prausa, the man at the till. He is half of the husband-wife duo behind Bali Street Cafe, which opened on Inwood Road in February. Linda Prausa works in the back, cooking the recipes she grew up with on Java, although she’s just as chatty and opinionated as her husband when she slips out of the kitchen. The first time I walked into the restaurant, she was in the middle of a lively roast—the comedy kind, dunking on the other Indonesian islands’ recipes, which, naturally, aren’t as good as hers.
Bali Street’s backstory is as endearing as its food. Linda Prausa is a longtime professional cook who worked at hibachi spots before getting the chance to return to her roots. Travis is a Mexican American from Far West Texas. He grew up, he tells me, eating “basic stuff.” He liked to put yellow mustard on his steak. “I came from something simple to something whoa-different.”
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Travis’ family ran Mexican restaurants for decades, and he decided as a young adult he wanted to get out of the restaurant business. He road-tripped across the west selling insurance, first met Linda as a possible sales lead, and gradually fell in love with both her and her cooking. “I don’t even want to eat a burger no more. I’m not craving the steak anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I can season it and make it taste great, but this rendang? It’s out of this world.”
That enthusiasm makes Travis the ideal pitchman and guide for a first-timer. He was in the same shoes not so long ago.
So I jumped in. I ordered the NOT KIDDING VERY SPICY. But medium, please.
Medium, for me, was just right. After a couple of “this isn’t that much” first bites, the heat slowly built to a pleasant burning hum, where it stayed. For some Americans it might be a stretch, but if you like a serrano salsa verde or a three-alarm bowl of chili, you’ll dig this. Especially because the other flavors are terrific. The fried rice includes ribbons of cabbage, strips of sautéed carrot and onion, fried onion on top, and slow-cooked beef that in some places melts into a sort of meaty sauce. In other spots on my dish, the beef remained in fork-tender morsels. A softened cinnamon stick, which unfolded easily between my fingers, showed both what other flavors go into the fried rice and how well they’d infused. The platter was big enough for two.
When the customer in scrubs got up to leave, I asked him what to order next time. He had no hesitation: ayam lengkuas, or galangal fried chicken. He was right. It’s a generous platter—a half chicken for $16, served with a scoop of rice, sliced raw tomatoes and cucumbers, and a cup of sauce—and the bird is absolutely wonderful. Its batter is thin but satisfyingly crispy. The chicken is boiled with galangal and herbs before it’s fried, which leaves the meat inside streaked yellow with seasoning. I didn’t consider boiled chicken the most romantic food on earth, but now I do. When the chicken hits the fryer for its final cook, a load of herbs go with it. All the crispy herbs and extra bits of batter float to the top, where cooks strain them out—and then all those little crispies are served on the final, plated chicken pieces, for extra crunch.
“They don’t waste anything,” Travis Prausa says.
If you’re not already sold on Indonesian fried chicken, consider the side cup of chile sauce. Made with chile peppers, sweet shrimp paste, soy sauce, and lime, it doesn’t taste much like ketchup but sits in the same sweet-savory-spiced flavor domain. The tang and gentle heat are irresistible. I put the sauce on my chicken, dipped the tomatoes in it, asked for a second cup, and dumped it all over the rice. If I carried a purse, I might sneak a tiny jar of this sauce into other restaurants.
If you’ve brought enough of a group, you can try some appetizers, too. Empek-empek is a bowl of fried fish cakes served on a handful of noodles, chopped cucumbers, and tamarind sauce. This might be a good accompaniment for a NOT KIDDING VERY SPICY dish, since the noodles and cucumbers have a cooling, mellowing effect. Travis Prausa also recommends (though I haven’t yet tried) the egg rolls, which he says have a European-style fluffy crust, a legacy of Dutch colonialism. He also tells me—and this I’m driving back for as soon as possible—that you can have your beef rendang folded into pastry pockets, traditionally called pasteles but rebranded for Dallas audiences as empanadas.
Gado-gado is as traditional as it gets, a home-style salad-like combo plate of cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, greens, hard-boiled eggs, tempeh, tofu, and Bali Street’s housemade peanut sauce. I must confess that I, personally, couldn’t handle the savory-sweetness of this ingredient combination. Don’t let my hang-ups stop you if it appeals to you. When I told the Prausas that the enormous portion of gado-gado surprised me, they admitted that every plate here would be much, much smaller in Indonesia, where a family is more likely to sit down to a meal with seven or eight small dishes.
Bali Street looks a little unfinished inside. A former mangonada and smoothie store, the front half of its kitchen space is still being used mostly for storage. There are too many tables, so some chairs remain stacked up during lunch service; on the walk to the restroom, you’ll pass some tarped-over equipment and a large work of art sitting on a cabinet.
But don’t let the appearance fool you. This restaurant thrives, primarily, on its busy catering work. Indonesia is the fourth-largest country in the world by population, just behind the United States. (Its population, according to estimates, is about the same as ours if you sever Texas and Florida.) But Bali Street Cafe is the only Indonesian restaurant in the Dallas area, and the local community depends on it for private events.
“We do catering all over,” Travis Prausa says. “All over. Being the only one is a challenge sometimes.”
Being the only one means every Indonesian customer comes in with expectations. It also means that most other customers don’t know anything about Indonesian food. This will be their first introduction to the cuisine, and it would be hard to imagine a better one. Not kidding.
2515 Inwood Rd., Ste. 119
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