Kurniawan Hari, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Ramadhan is a time for Muslims to practice self-restraint in order to get closer to God. The temptation for fine food grows during this time, and many hotels offer special menus for Ramadhan.
The Ritz-Carlton Jakarta, for example, presents Middle Eastern cuisine in a food festival at Airlangga Restaurant until Oct. 14. For this event, Chef Munir Zakhour has been flown from Jordan to prepare the dishes.
Guests can savor food items like sajj (Arabic pizza), lamb ozzi (grilled whole lamb with Arabic rice) and mosakah (roasted eggplant with sauce), to name a few.
While enjoying the food, guests can watch tanoura, a spinning dance performance by an Egyptian dancer.
While The Ritz-Carlton Jakarta offers Middle Eastern cuisines, Four Seasons Jakarta presents the uniqueness of Indonesian fare for guests to savor during their breaking-the-fast meal.
""We'd presented Middle Eastern cuisine during Ramadhan for the past four years. This year, we want to present something new to our guests,"" executive chef Vindex Tengker said.
The program titled Breaking of Fast Throughout the Archipelago will run until Oct. 14 at Seasons Caf. For this event, the hotel is working together with culinary expert and The Jakarta Post cookery columnist Ibu Suryatini N. Ganie.
This program celebrates Indonesia's rich regional varieties and each region food based on their unique recipes.
""We also want to reintroduce recipes of the past to the present generation,"" Vindex said.
That is why during this promotion guests can find foods they may have never seen before.
To break the fast, guests can start with an array of thirst quenchers like wedang cao (special drink from Central Java with the fragrance of roses and the flavor of lime), kokteil jukung (a drink made of soya bean) and belaian pandan (screw pine scented drink).
There are choices of salad to follow such as lengko-lengko (stir-fried tofu and tempe), gado-gado (mixed vegetables with spicy peanut sauce) and selada solo (vegetables with chicken).
Of course, the most tempting is the main course. With the commitment to preserve traditional recipes, Four Seasons Jakarta and Ibu Suryatini present an array of dishes from palaces in Bali, Ternate (Maluku), Flores (Nusa Tenggara) and Cirebon (West Java).
These Royal Heritage recipes used to be served to the royal family in those regions and include serapah daging (braised spicy beef with shallot) from Ubud, Bali; satai kerang (clams satay) from Cirebon and nasi golong (rice with marinated fried chicken) from Central Java.
The Ritz-Carlton Jakarta tel: 2551 8888
Four Seasons Jakarta tel: 2523456
