http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/dining/hungry-city-sky-cafe-in-elmhurst-queens.html 2014-12-11 16:57:38 Hungry City: Sky Cafe in Elmhurst, Queens Lily Tjia, the chef and owner of Sky Cafe in Elmhurst, Queens, specializes in northern Indonesian fare. === Half the diners at Five years ago, Lily Tjia, the chef and owner of Sky Cafe, was cooking quietly for her neighbors in the growing Indonesian community of South Philadelphia, running a semi-secret catering company out of her home. Open a restaurant, her customers urged, and in 2010 she did, on West Ritner Street, naming it after her American-born granddaughter, Skylar. Soon visitors from New York started demanding a restaurant of their own. And so last year Ms. Tjia entrusted It does not look like a franchise in the making, with bamboo decals on the window and a dining room that fits barely five tables between walls half-tiled in yellow and sopped in dimensionless light. Nor does it look that different from the space’s previous incarnations as restaurants devoted to the palm-sugar-heavy dishes of Indonesia’s south. But Ms. Tjia is in the kitchen and that is all that matters. Her lontong sayur arrives in a bowl heaped with beef rendang, moon-white blocks of spongy rice cake, half a hard-boiled egg holding up a fever dose of sambal tauco (fermented soybean chile sauce) and garlic crackers pocked like coral and tasting like crunchy air. The soup underneath is red-gold and creamy from coconut milk, with a consoling heat. That beef rendang has been braised in coconut milk to a blissed-out state, as if the meat can’t wait to disperse itself. Elsewhere on the menu, it’s the anchor dish in a kind of mini-rijsttafel, or “rice table,” the Dutch colonial banquet, flanked by curried labu Siam (chayote), a hard-boiled egg slashed with sambal and a crisping of slivered potatoes, peanuts and more of those tiny gleaming anchovies. (Cucumber and garlic crackers, served on the side, seem incidental.) Ms. Tjia makes her own earthy egg noodles for mie komplit, another gorgeous pileup, of fried won tons, shredded chicken, two soy-blackened eggs and a fan of morning glory. A smaller bowl of chicken broth comes on the side, with exactly one beef ball and one fish ball, both of which I suspected were bounceable. You may add the broth to the noodles or not; I found them better without, as the broth sapped some of the noodles’ character and made them more blandly Cantonese. Ms. Tjia’s son, Edy Yu, runs the floor. When my table ordered emie, egg noodles in a gravylike sauce of dried shrimp and shrimp stock, he insisted, “You won’t like it.” (I later discovered, in At the other extreme, there were petai, or stink beans, looking innocently like favas, paired with a shrimp-paste-based sambal that did nothing to disguise their bitterness and whiff of brimstone. At meal’s end, you can raid the shelves at the back, stocked with treats like kue nastar, cookies loaded with pineapple jam, and lapis legit, a cake of exceedingly thin layers, each poured and baked before the next, made, as per tradition, with But if you’re yearning for summer in this bleak season, you want es sekoteng Medan, a rubble of ice, barley, basil seeds and nubs of longan and litchi. The secret ingredient is orange peel, boiled and fermented until it turns deep red and has almost no flavor at all, just a scent, as of some half-remembered flower.