Sunday evening

Blueberry Pancake House and Bar – the on-site restaurant at our Jakarta Pusat hotel features a warm ambience and beautiful furnishings on top of sumptuous dishes.

The furnishings really are beautiful; rich, warm, deep mahogany woods and deep ruby décor. The greeting waiter was friendly and pleasant (two different things?) and spoke English. Now that’s not a prerequisite for a waiter in Jakarta but it certainly is a bonus. Sports channel TV’s played Bolton vs. Liverpool but that could be excused as Man U had played the previous day. I guess, though, they could have showed replays of the real footy. As we approached the door a lurking weird-o tagged along behind and joined us at the bar. I snagged a menu and we escorted ourselves to a table of our choice. The weird-o tried to inject himself in-between myself and Martini, who was oblivious to his presence, but I cut him off with a lithe body-swerve and he slid, Gollum-like, out into the dark night.

The menu was interesting, starting with sweet pancakes, and then moving to savoury pancakes, then crescendo-ing to a carnivore’s delight with multi-choices of good, teeth-sharpening, protein-over-dosing steak and other succulent meaty things. I chose pepper steak and had a rare old time ascertaining what cut it was going o be.

“Steak,”

“Well, yes, it would be, but what cut? Fillet? T-bone? Sirloin?”

“Ah, you want sirloin? This said while crossing out the order for pepper steak.

“No, I want pepper steak but I want to know what kind of steak.”

This continued and was eventually brought to a conclusion by Martini intervening in Indonesian and telling me, “Tenderloin.” Now, that wasn’t too difficult, was it? I told you he spoke English.

Now to drinks; the menu listed Guinness but the Blueberry Pancake house and Bar must have had a reciprocal agreement with Ya-Udah because Guinness was “off” but the local brew, Bintar, was on and was “more”, so a large one of those, please.

As we were waiting for service, Martini said,

“Don’t look. Don’t look. At your one-o’clock there’s a strange …”

I cut her off, “Yes, I know, a weird-o looking through the window at us.” Then I told her the body-swerve story. We moved on to brighter topics. Shortly after I noticed someone weird at a table facing us on the far side of the room; our weird-o had returned. Laptop before him, EPL footy in direct vision, he was behaving himself as all self-respecting weird-o’s should but I didn’t see him eat. It did cross my mind that it was Haloween and, maybe, just maybe, he suffered from a case of pernicious anaemia and ate people, but I let it pass.

Martini had ordered ox-tail and it came in a sumptuous stew, cooked to perfection but with just, slightly, minuscule-ly, fractionally, less herbs, spices and seasoning than would place it firmly in the total, all-over perfection bracket. My steak came on a sizzling platter shaped like its donor cow, along with a large side plate of veggies and French fries. These were proper fries; crispy outside, slightly firm and floury inside, and of a size which begged to be dipped, uncut, into either the ox-tail stew or the pepper sauce. When I had finished it I observed that I could order exactly the same and eat it again. Not because the portion was too small but because it just was so, so tasty.

Definitely a place to return to (to which to return?) and maybe next time I’ll try the blueberry pancakes. Need to get rid of the weird-o though.