The cuisine in Indonesia varies greatly depending on what island is visited. There are thousands of islands in Indonesia, each of them have a slightly different style of cooking. There are national and regional dishes that are all unique and flavoured well. It is common to see people eating with their hands in an Indonesian restaurant; it is a large part of their culture to do so. A truly authentic Indonesian Restaurant will serve the food to you as they would consume it in their own culture. Indonesia is known as the “Spice Islands”. They grow an elaborate variety of spices savoury, subtle, and spicy. Spice is a large part of their cuisine. Many of their dishes are spicy, but are cooled some with coconut milk. Rice, fish, spices, and tubular root vegetables are the main staples in Indonesia. A few more recognised Indonesian dishes are karedok, gudeg, Rawon, satay, Babi guling, and pempek. Indonesian food is influenced heavily by coconut milk, soy sauce and peanuts. You will see a lot of different versions of curries in Indonesian cuisine. Clove, garlic, soy, chiles, ginger, and tamarind are common spices used to flavour Indonesian dishes. Their food is often confused with other cultures because these cultures, such as Thai or Malaysian cuisine, are their sister cultures.
Knickerless Nancy: the first shock-wok by Tim Hulse
In her heyday, Nancy’s Channel 5 TV show pulled in over half a million viewers. Here is an article from way back then. Please also check out http://www.youtube.com/NancyLamTV for her current videos. Happy Watching!
THREE weeks on from the launch of Channel 5 and what have we got? A lot of young people, that’s what. It’s the one thing you can’t help but notice – all the presenters are really young. Switch it on at any time of the day or night and you’ll find a young man in a bright shirt bringing you the latest news or a young woman with a big smile telling you the latest showbiz gossip. The main newsreader is even called Kirsty Young, which is surely more than coincidence.
And of course they’re all very nice and well-meaning, and they’re easy on the eye (although I have to say I have a difficulty with a news bulletin delivered by some callow youth wearing hair gel). But you do end up with the rather worrying impression that the gene pool has shrunk to the extent that the world is peopled by earnest youngsters with a mission to be polite.
Thankfully, being polite is the one thing Nancy Lam could never be accused of. Nancy presents her very own in-your-face Oriental cookery show every Thursday evening and she’s quickly becoming Channel 5’s first big star. With her brightly coloured hair, wacky glasses and toothy grin, she looks a little like Janet Street-Porter (if Janet Street-Porter were to lose a couple of feet in height and then contract some sort of serious thyroid complaint, obviously) and she has one of the most manic laughs you’ll ever hear (“ha-haa-ha-ha-haaaaaa!”). Each week she conjures up culinary magic in her wok, occasionally breaking off to chivvy her amiable Ghanaian husband, Ben, for the ingredients. “Quick Ben! Courgette!” It’s great entertainment.
When we meet for lunch in a restaurant in Soho’s Chinatown, Nancy’s hair is dyed in Channel 5 rainbow colours, something she did for the station’s launch, and she’s wearing a pair of her trademark specs.
So how many pairs of glasses does she have?
“Why don’t you ask me how many pairs of knickers I have?” Nancy responds, ever the one to be outrageous should the opportunity should arise. I have to confess this wasn’t on my list of questions, but at times like this it’s often best to go with the flow.
So how many pairs of knickers does she have?
“Not many pairs. I can’t bloody afford them! Ha-haa!”
This theme of poverty is one she returns to often. Nancy grew up in Singapore, where her father ran a small prawn cracker factory, and in 1970, when she was in her twenties, she set off for London. She spoke very little English, but this didn’t stop her training as a nurse. And it was while working as a nurse in East Molesey in Surrey that she met Ben. It was love at first sight, apparently, and they were married on Valentine’s Day, 1976.
So why move into cookery?
“Nursing was so badly paid.” She says. “And I love cooking.”
She started with home catering, then sub-leased a café in Putney and ran a restaurant there in the evening. Finally, in 1986, the pair opened their very own restaurant, Enak Enak, in Lavender Hill, south London.
You can see the restaurant each week in Nancy’s show. I haven’t been there, but it seems to be frequented by the sort of young people who present programmes on Channel 5. Nancy is famous for being rude to her customers, but she admits it’s a performance, all part of the business. I get the feeling she’s quite a shrewd cookie, despite the pleas of poverty. “I’m very serious when it comes to business,” she says. And she comes from a family of traders after all.
Nancy admits it’s sometimes hard to be the person everyone expects her to be, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. And she’s very happy to be here. As the meal comes to an end, she gets all sentimental as she lists the pleasures of her life in England. “I have a house, I have gardening, I have lots of friends, I have fish, and the fish when they see me, their mouths open…”
It’s time to go.
“That’s it?” says Nancy. “You happy with that/ Good, you can piss off now. Ha-haaa-ha-ha-haaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
Fifty Bucks – or the dragon eats you alive By Andrew Billen @ The Observer
This article is an oldie but goodie. It was written around the time Nancy had her Channel 5 TV series.
What you mustn’t go for – what you do not get – at Nancy Lam’s restaurant, Enak Enak, is a nice, quiet Indonesian curry. You don’t get shown to your table. You do not get your placement unobtrusively finessed by perfectionist waiters. You are not thanked and asked to come again by the maitre d’. Nancy tells you to park your ass over there. She throws the plates down as if they are gauntlets. And although the rest of the waitressing is by her daughter, and servile enough, at the end for the meal, Nancy emerges for the umpteenth time from the kitchen to give you the finger. The compensation is Nancy’s cooking, which, as half a million viewers of her Channel 5 show will have guessed, is good and refined and, therefore, not like her at all.
All those who, when they enter her eight-table front room in Lavender Hill, south London, do not also enter the spirit of Enak Enak are doomed. An intense young couple at a window table on my left make the huge mistake of being more interested in each other than the food and get complimentary cold shoulder of Nancy. Bill paid, they are told to piss off. But I am in trouble, too, because the non-appearance of my date is becoming obvious. Nancy wanders outside to have a look for her. “Me tits is fwozen,” says Nancy, who speaks Cockney but retains her oriental way with her rs, or, as she would say, her arse. As the minutes yawn and I cannot bear to pretend to read the menu any more, I know there will no room in this room for my private anguish.
Soon the whole restaurant is apprised of my humiliation, although, to Nancy’s credit, once she has spread the word, she is nice about it and does not make a show trial of me. She actually offers to dine with me, provided I pay. The big-eating party of diners to my right assures me that this is the one restaurant in town where you can eat alone, by which they mean it is the one restaurant in town in which you will never eat alone. To prove it, a blonde woman on the table to my left offers me a forkful of her chicken with tamarind, which she correctly describes as delicious. Nancy cooks me a consolatory starter of BBQ prawns, which she marinates, cooks over charcoal and serves with lemon juice. These are succulent little objects, crisp on the outside, fluffy inside, and it is rude of me to note that, at £7.25, they are more expensive than most of the main courses.
“Wa? You fink dey are pwarns like a pwarn cocktail?”
So these are fresh, not frozen?
“Fwozen fwesh,” she says, and there’s an end on it.
Nancy Lam, the madwoman who looms, cleaver in hand, from urban billboards advertising the number 5, came out of Singapore 27 years ago and comes shrieking out of your television set on Thursday nights, shouting instructions on how to work lemon grass and cashews. But neither the cultural confusion of the Far East nor television’s compulsive generation of personalities quite explain Nancy’s provenance. My guess is that she was dreamt up by a D.C Thompson cartoonist who watched horrified as his creation, Nancy Lam, The Cook from Hell, upped, satay skewers and escaped from his strip cartoon into the real world, shouting “Enak Enak!”
Dressed rotundly in a batik print, goggled by a pair of spectacular spectacles and with a fright of spikey hair dyed all the colours of oil slicked in a puddle, she looks more like a cartoon than a person. But I may just be picking up on the heavy hints dropped by her apron, which bears the violent imprint of the Dundee comics stable, and by the Noddy green restaurant itself, which has Dennis the Menace effigies hanging around its walls like felons from scaffolds and papier Mache balloons made of Beano covers.
It is into this bizarre grotto that my guest innocently calculations, 15 by hers. The restaurant applauds her ironically, and Nancy gives her a dressing down before granting her absolution on the grounds of her youth and beauty as do I). The blonde tamarind-sharer looks put out. “Habba gwass of wine, love,” orders Nancy of my guest, who was hoping for a nice, quiet Indonesian curry.
There follows a quiet period of catching up and house-white drinking, while Nancy cooks us a mix of satay, prawns and pieces of spareribs, a starter that is just fine, although I find myself falling into Enak Enak’s prevailing orthodoxy of wild praise for its owner, as if Nancy is some dragon who may be appeased only by a series of sacrificial compliments. The main course is a real triumph, a completely succulent dish called rendang pieces of rump steak “cooked with exotic spices and finished with coconut cream”. Nancy asks if anything disappointed us and we say no, although (actually) the chicken with cashews nuts did seem a little on the bland side of delicate.
By now it is dark, the young lovers have gone and Nancy is full throttle of sexual innuendo and abuse, not all of it coherent; “She played with herself and it popped up” she paraphrases one diner who has mentioned, for some reason, the immaculate conception. “Doon wowwy about her,” she says, referring to the stranger who had offered me comfort and has now departed, “shewalesbian.” On my way downstairs to the loo, I rub against an apron augmented with a giant pair of plastic mammaries. The translation from Singapore to the modern mainstream West has loosed in Nancy a libido that would scare Naomi Wolf.
There follows a post-prandial joke interlude in which her Ghanaian-born husband, Ben prompts her furiously from the wings. Ask for the story about he passenger on Singapore Airlines with a sore tooth. A tine of Quality Street is handed round. I realise I have never met a woman more like a school boy.
With a pancake roll filled with coconut and brown sugar and a home made sorbet, dinner including wine, comes to £58.35, which seems excellent value, although Nancy tells me to tell you: no 50 bucks, no bother come. She started catering 12 years ago, and Enak Enak nearly went “up shit creek” in a series of recessions. Channel 5 may be making her famous but, she promises, it is not about to make her rich. With sufficient psychological preparation, you’ll really enjoy Enak Enak, a theme restaurant whose theme is Nancy.
Christmas at Enak Enak
We spent a lovely day at the restaurant eating Christmas lunch with family & friends. There were 12 of us. Nancy and Ben however cooked for what seemed like 30!
What was on the menu?
MAINS
Turkey (free-range from Waitrose)
Beef
Stuffing – the highlight! With chestnuts, liver, bacon
Roast Potatoes (I will report on the way we cook our crispy outside, soft inside roast potatoes in another post)
Boiled Maris Pipers from France
Parsnips
White sauce
Gravy
DESSERT
Apple Crumble
Mince Pies
Christmas Fruit Cake
Served with Custard
The Guardian Life & Style – A little place that I know
The only time I stray south of the river is to eat at this great Indonesian. Nancy’s an old mate – we go back 20 years. I love her satay and spare ribs, as well as the lobster with coconut milk, which she does as a special. It’s a real family-run restaurant, with Nancy’s husband and three daughters all working in the business.
By Marco Pierre White
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle