Indonesia matriarchs woo VIPs with spicy power lunch

JAKARTA (Reuters) - With its busy, backstreet setting, plain wooden tables and hastily lunching businessmen, Natrabu is not a restaurant where you would expect to run into prime ministers or visiting foreign dignitaries.

But this little eatery is where Malaysia's former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, stopped off in January to sample an array of Padang dishes -- the closest Indonesia has to a national cuisine -- after paying his respects at the bedside of ailing former president Suharto.

"He is a fanatic about the food here," said Myrna Sutan, who manages Natrabu with her sister. "Sometimes, when he is flying to another country, he stops in his plane to pick up food."

She said government bigwigs often bring foreign visitors to her restaurant for a taste of the best of everyday Indonesia.

Padang is Indonesia's original takeaway food: a heap of rice with a spicy coconut curry or fish cooked in chopped red chilies and packed to go in an eco-friendly banana leaf.

Invented by the Minangkabau people in West Sumatra, who number four million today in a country of more than 200 million, Padang food is known for its strong flavors and liberal use of spices such as chilies, coriander and cumin. In matrilineal Minangkabau society, grandmothers and their female heirs lead the clans.

Sutan's Padang dishes are based on recipes handed down by her late grandmother, herself a Minangkabau, who used to rule the restaurant's kitchen.

"Grandmother was complaining about the taste (to the chef) every day while she was alive," Sutan said.

"Every day she was in the kitchen. This is too salty, no -- like this!"

WILY WOMEN, SPICY FOOD

Natrabu also serves one of Indonesia's best-known dishes, beef rendang, which should be slow-cooked for hours in coconut milk, spices, ginger, galangal, lemon-grass, and turmeric until the flavors are dry-fixed into the tenderized meat.

Other dishes include fried chicken, potato cakes and the restaurant's signature crunchy carp skins and curried fish head.

Like Spanish tapas or a Middle Eastern mezze platter, Padang food can be picked at in small portions in eateries found on busy streets across the archipelago.

Sutan believes Padang food is popular because it is quick: "In Indonesia, everybody is always rushing".

Named after the largest city in the Minangkabau region, Padang restaurants are recognizable by the ready plates of food stacked in the front windows.

The roofs of typical Padang restaurants, which curve up at either end like buffalo horns, are a reference to the founding myth of the Minangkabau, which centers on a fight between a fierce Javanese bull and a Minangkabau calf.

The starving calf ran straight for the bull's underside, looking for milk. With knives attached to its horns, it tore open the larger buffalo and the Minangkabau were victorious.

Minangkabau itself means "victorious buffalo", and the myth is believed to represent a struggle between the stronger, patrilineal Javanese culture and the weaker but more wily matrilineal society of the Minangkabau.

Natrabu is packed at lunchtime, the waiters and waitresses rushing from table to table with up to seven plates balanced on their left arms.

In the evening, they double as entertainers, performing traditional Minangkabau music and dance.

One element of the restaurant, however, is not related to Minangkabau culture -- its name.

Natrabu stands for National Travel Bureau: Sutan's father decided in 1958 to open a small kitchen at the back of his travel agency in order to feed hungry travelers as they waited for their tickets.

Fifty years later, Natrabu has grown into a chain of over 20 restaurants in Indonesia and recently opened its first overseas branch in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Perhaps Jakartans won't be seeing quite so much of former prime minister Mahathir after all.