Superlative Indonesian cooking in the posh heart of London
St James Market? Money market perhaps, many of the more upper class funders have plush offices around here. You’re not going to find any Del Trotter market stalls here, though.
The St James website describes it as ‘A hub of contemporary world cuisine and iconic brands’, and there are certainly quite a few restaurants, including Fallow which had quite a long moment in the social media sun a year or so back.
Toba did well too, opening just two years ago. Lots of rave reviews, but when we look at the menu now it seems some of the fancier dishes have gone and the menu itself seems to have seen better days physically, it’s rather dog-eared and worn.
The restaurant overall is not overdone decor-wise, but pleasantly simple and attractive. The kitchen can be seen and it looks very small, but then many kitchens in large places are small, the real estate always given over to customer tables.
Chef Pino Sinaga has worked at many top end restaurants such as Coya, Chiltern Firehouse, Annabel’s and Isabel. In December 2019 he started a food stall, Pino’s Warung, in Camden Market before opening Toba.
Given the location it’s not surprising the Indonesian dishes are said to be ‘elevated’, as the current cliche goes, (see also ‘taken to the next level’ and ‘kicked up a notch’). Is that a good thing? We will find out.
It’s lunchtime, so we forgo cocktails as we’d already had a pint around the corner in a pub anyway. The cocktails here are reported to be very good, but the only cocktails I drink are Bloody Mary (which is really just alcoholic soup) and G&T, so they’re mostly wasted on me.
Ah but chicken satays, yes please. These are superb. Thigh meat, as it should be, and a remarkably good smokey grill taste from a charcoal grill that must be running hotter than the sun.
I love the peanut sauce, some might say it’s a bit sweet, but I believe that is how it should be if authentic. A bowl of sharp, tangy clear dressing with carrots and cucumber was a good foil as were the crispy shallots strewn about.
Of course we’ve all had satays before, but the next dish, Martabak Telor, was new to me. It’s a savoury filling wrapped in a kind of pancake and then fried crispy all round. They do meat or veg versions at Toba, we had meat ones and they were rather lovely, spicy and lively and happily eaten with a rich dipping sauce.
Beef rendang. A classic dish of course, beef slow cooked for hours in a range of spices and coconut milk until there is almost no moisture left and the meat falls apart. Absolutely delicious, the flavours layered and the chili heat perfectly judged. All it needed was the simple white rice we had with it. Beef Rendang may well be the best ‘curry’ to not come out of India or Pakistan. A fantastic dish.
After that we went a bit subtler with Ikan Arsik, a superb hunk of cod fillet cooked with torch ginger, an Indonesian plant whose leaves are used as food decoration, and its unopened flower buds as an ingredient. Also in the mix was andaliman which is a close relative of Szechuan pepper, but with a milder numbing effect. This was an absolute delight and we used the yellow fried rice to mop up the wonderful sauce under the fish
I’d seen the green desserts go out to other tables and I had to try one. Green as in luminescent green, green as the Hulk, green as envy. It’s a dish called Dadar gulung and it’s a coconut pancake that’s a parcel containing more coconut that’s been cooked with palm sugar. The green is not artificial but comes from fragrant pandan leaves
It’s very sweet and whilst I don’t usually have a sweet tooth, I do like this a lot.
I liked Toba a lot too. Despite its location it has a friendly unpretentious feel (the staff are great) and whilst prices reflect the rent they must be paying, they are not extortionate for the excellent cooking which is both firmly traditional but at the same time smartly executed by people who clearly know what they’re doing.
1a St James’s Mkt, St. James’s, London SW1Y 4AH,