Middle Eastern food in Cikarang

Yeah right. Last night we went to a recommended restaurant amid traffic grid lock. Took us about 40 minutes from the hotel to restaurant normally would have taken 10 minutes - on a well developed road system that is.

The restaurant is called Al Hambra; it is branded as middle eastern food; but I don't really see much on the menu; saw Western, Chinese, Indonesia and a very small selection of considered middle eastern. Finding vegetarian for Audrey was a challenge in this town. The food wasn't as advertised. We had a hard time getting vegetarian food. O well. I did, ordered Indonesian food in this Middle Eastern establishment; oxtail soup and squid with rice. The oxtail soup was a mail all by itself; 3 huge slaps of oxtail. And it came with rice. That was labeled under "Starters". In this town, you have to roll with the punches when ordering. Cannot expect any sophistication like in more well developed areas. Audrey's salad came out totally different than from the menu; the reason: no more ingredients. So, they were hoping she didn't notice; yeah right! Had they known... There were no one in the restaurant; only us; it was a 3-story house. Guess everyone was too busy stuck in traffic. The town is an industrial one; so should not expect much. People were friendly though.

I think I can classify the area we are in as little Korea/China/Japan; there are so many Korean, Chinese and Japanese restaurants; but fail to find any authentic Indonesian food. Call this progress? We even found a bar called Cheers. There are some authentic Indonesian food if your stomach can handle the street side hawkers; as we inched forward to the restaurants, there were lots of street hawkers setup for business, right on top of pools of waters from the heavy rain earlier in the afternoon; with lamps stringed out from god knows where and pieces of clothes shielding customers from the exhaust. Customers sat on the hard wooden benches. Did not see any locals sampling; only saw three or four people on couple blocks along the street eating; not a good sanitary condition. Most I saw, sat in much more well "cleaner" and "hipper" restaurants - rib places!

I see progress but people are losing out on the traditional food. Everyone long for Western type of things; KFC and Dunkin Dougnuts, Nokia and Sony, Costco type store and Supermarket with frozen food. Well, let see what happen in Bali tomorrow. It will be interesting to see.