There are just some restaurants you wished did better. Performed better. Tasted better. And it’s not in a complaining way–maybe you got a good tip about the place, or you heard through the grapevine that the place was really authentic. But then, you show up only to smell the obvious stench of a failing business. This was what happened at Bamboo Village.
I read various reviews of this Indonesian eatery saying that it’s really authentic and good food. These were from actual local Indonesian people, so who was I to question? We walked into Bamboo Village on what should have been a busy Saturday night. The place was dead–there was probably only one other couple eating. This is a bad sign.
Service was mediocre–we weren’t even offered water after receiving our menu. The waiter seemed to make himself sparse. This is ridiculous, since there were only two occupied tables.
The entire restaurant was covered in bamboo. I am not kidding you when I say that the whole restaurant–the walls, the trim, the ceilings, the decorations. It was apparent that someone put in a lot of thought about the decor. Maybe a little too much thought.
I decided to order rendang, a traditional Indonesian and Malaysian dish that consists of beef boiled slowly in a thick coconut curry sauce. The beef is supposed to be fork tender, like stew beef. Bamboo Village’s rendition was as tough as rubber. I had to request a knife, and even then, the whole table shook with the amount of force necessary to cut it. In short, the flavors were nice, giving a wallop of coconut, curry, and lemongrass tones. But the texture was horrible.
Next up was the fried fish in sweet and sour chili sauce. The fish was cooked in a curious way. Instead of butterflying it whole, they seemed to have butterflied it on both sides. I’ve never seen this done before. The fish itself wasn’t too flavorful, and neither was the sauce. I expected a lot more acid and heat in the sauce. The flavors simply went thud as it hit my tongue. One of the only redeeming sauces was the hot sauce that we had specifically requested. This is the kind of hot sauce that doesn’t joke around. The heat hits you, and hits you hard in the mouth like a suckerpunch, reminding me of the taste of raw habeneros.
The last dish was the Indonesian fried rice. It was flavorful, and had fish sauce in it, but nothing to write home about (or blog about).
In the end, we were utterly unsatisfied. A place like Bamboo Village really has the potential to lure in customers looking for some exotic Indonesian cuisine. They failed on fundamental levels of service and quality.