Singing Batavia’s Praises

You could program it into your laptop: the better the cooking at a Los Angeles Asian restaurant, the worse the music you may have to endure. The lousiest Indian restaurants in the U.S. have ragas on their sound systems; and great ones, the sort of Hindi film ballads that make you long for Mariah Carey. The reggae sushi bars that blast cool stuff like Augustus Pablo and Yellowman are universally less fine than the ones nurtured instead by Kenny G. Three of four of my favorite Thai restaurants feature earsplitting live renditions of prom ballads as dinner serenade.

If you want to eat well in Los Angeles, you’d better be prepared to endure a lot of Kenny Loggins and Dan Hill, Olivia Newton-John and Air Supply. (If you have been lucky enough to forget about Dan Hill, you obviously haven’t eaten a decent plate of Malaysian nasi lemak in years.)

And if bad music is a reliable sign of good food, Batavia Cafe, a new Indonesian place in Chinatown, would have to be among the best restaurants in the world. Whether the restaurant is full or empty, whether at 11:30 in the morning or 8 at night, the restaurant’s laser-disc karaoke machine pumps soft hits, double-time.

Sometimes you’ll hear Indonesian translations of the Whitney Houston songbook and sometimes “Feelings,” the theme song from “Grease,” or the greatest hits of Dan Fogelburg. The restaurant is rather prettily decorated with batik tablecloths and ceremonial Indonesian umbrellas, wood-carvings and masks. It is also rather large, lozenge-shaped to maximize its oddly contoured mini-mall location, but you cannot avoid the mammoth Sony screen on which beautiful young Asian women moon into sunsets or mope past pagodas; cannot escape the giant speakers that reproduce every low-rent synthesizer sound in excruciating detail.

But even if Michael Bolton imitators make you break out in hives, you could do a lot worse than dinner at Batavia, where the iced coffee is good, the chicken satay is richly sauced with spiced peanut butter and garlic and the traditional steamed-vegetable salad gado-gado is garnished with fried tofu, tempeh fritters and sliced hard-boiled egg, slicked with a chile-hot peanut dressing and crowned with half a dozen shrimp chips, silly-looking things that jut from the top of the salad like varicolored jibs. The next great plate of otak-otak I run across may well make me change my mind, but this week, Cafe Batavia is probably my favorite Indonesian restaurant in town.

Like most local Indonesian places, Batavia serves dishes from all over the Indonesian archipelago, things sauced with the fiery chile sauces of northern Sumatra--any dish (stir-fried tofu; crisply fried pompano) with the word belado in its title will be blanketed with a sweet-sour chop of chiles and red sweet peppers. Other food is glazed with the sweet soy of central Java. Batavia is not precisely related to the late, fancy Ramayani Indonesian in Hollywood, which closed early this year, but the owner was one of the managers, and she carried over some of her staff.

Here you’ll find the best murtabak in town, crisp filo-like wafers encapsulating a sort of meaty Indonesian omelet; fried noodles, bakmi goreng , that have the firm, delicate texture of good pasta and the sweet smokiness that comes only from an extremely hot wok; kangkong, the hollow-stemmed vegetable sometimes called ong choy or water spinach, sauteed with shrimp paste, tomatoes and mountains of garlic into a mess that tastes better than any mere vegetable ought to.

Fried game hen, a stupendously good bird as good as anything from Zankou, has the brittle, spun-sugar crunchiness only Indonesian cooks seem to be able to coax out of chicken skin, the kind of skin you suspect would shatter if you dropped a thigh, but also sweet, juicy flesh laced with garlic and spice. The only shrimp thing on the menu is a stinky affair, sauteed with the infamously pungent pete bean and walloped with a megadose of fermented shrimp paste--enough to smell across the room, but with a taste mild enough almost to accentuate the perfume-like quality of Indonesian rice.

Desserts, as at most Indonesian cafes, are essentially exotic sweet ices served in malted glasses: the mellow brown-sugar drink es cendol , shot through with translucent green mung-bean squiggles that look a little like dried Prell; various ices scented with rosewater and es teler , a vanilla-flavored ice with young coconut, pureed avocado and an eye-watering bit of durian.

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WHERE TO GO

Batavia Cafe, 633 N. Spring St., Chinatown, (213) 626-6738. Open Wed.-Mon., 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Cash only. No alcohol. Takeout. Extremely limited lot parking. Lunch or dinner for two, food only, $13-$18.

WHAT TO GET

Murtabak ; kangkong tumis ; bakmi goreng ; fried game hen.