Monday, March 2, 2009

Saung Mang Engking, Depok



Heard this place many times ago. But never got a chance to visit it since it located in Yogjakarta. Seem my parents love it to much seem it always become regular place to visit every time they were traveling to this city. Well, it’s only maximum three hour drive from Semarang, so it’s more like you drive from Jakarta to Bandung only.

Few months ago I knew that they open their branch in Jakarta, somewhere in Depok, but again, there are two places that I always try to avoid them in Jakarta, one is Bekasi and the other one is Depok, why? Because their heavy traffic Jam, and I have it to much! But this time I can not resist since it is a Sunday, and from few ‘googling’ and ‘Muliplying’ found that every pictures I found is very hard to resist. So here we go ……

Found the place is in the outer complex of Universitas Indonesia, the largest University in the country, and found the facts that It located just next to UI lagoon, so it bring our imagination to the very nice & clam place with lot of ‘Saung’ next to the lagoon, lot of fish pond like always traditional saung place, very large backyards, bunch of trees so that we may laying down rest our self and not need to rush to finish our meals …..






And it did! Just exactly the same as we were imagine about, just like my description on the previous paragraph, but only one miss, the place is very crowded in the lunch time. We need to wait almost 30 minutes before we have our ‘cabine’ or ‘saung’. Lucky there’s lot of interesting place to see before we can start to order our meal, so there’s no further complains to made ………………

Build on about 3.500m square meter of land, this makan place belong to “Engking Sodikin” a culinary businessman from Tasikmalaya, this place is build from about 13-15 palm leaves roof gazebos on top of very large fish pond or we may call it lagoon. It’s quite common “Sundanees” style of “kuring”.





One interesting place is a wooden bridge across the small artificial stream made from a bunch of stone that separate two lagoons, and have lot of red-carper fish, hundreds and you may feed them with fish pallet that you can buy in the cashier counter, so it will makes our kids busy for a while.

I and my wife also have a chance to sneak around in their kitchen for some photograph, just so see how they prepare food.




Now it’s about the dish itself, from my parent’s recommendation that we should try “Udang Galah Bakar Madu” so this is the first thing that we need to order, besides Gurame Cobek and Kepiting saus Padang, and few other side dishes.

The BBQ udang came in shaslick style, so you will find 3 stick of blue-prawn shaslick (four prawns each) covered with red sauce, nice, sweet but a bit spicy …

But from my opinion, the prime dish is their Gurame Cobek that a deep fried Garupa fish with spicy mixed red onion and various type of chili padi gravy pour on top of it. Very delicious but ‘Hell’ you can imagine how spicy it is, it will burn your tongue but will keep you eat it until the last fish bone. Very nice indeed.







Kepiting Sauce Padang is standard, quite similar with some street-stall seafood sauce padang except the freshness of the Crab it self is very good.

The deep-fried cumi and udang is also nice & crispy.

Well, more over, the dish cost is quiet cheap compared with what you have eaten. The place is good & clean, the dish is delicious and moreover your damage-rate would not so heavy, except the location is quiet far from our home.





One tip, just avoid to be there in the lunch time, since they are very busy, you may chance to have very chaotic dish delivery, your meal will be interrupted since you may have to wait your partial dish that may not be arrive in the right time.

Just be there, make sure you know what you want to order and make it in a single run!

While you wait your dish, there’s a lot of waitress running around bringing appetizers that you may call such as ‘Kaapertart’, ‘brownies’ and many others.





I forgot to record their address, but I have their GPS coordinate
Coordinates: 6°20'56"S 106°49'53"E

But it is very easy place to find, if you came from TB Simatupang TOL, just get out in pasar minggu gate heading to Lenteng Agung, follow the road until you find the UI Flyover, follow the flyover turn to Pasar Minggu, and just you head down from flyover there’s a small junction in the left side of the road you’ll find a small signboard about this place, just follow the direction and you may enter the security gate to go into the complex. It located inside the UI Complex next to University Dormitory.