W

hen in Semarang or Malang, I always try to revisit my favorite restaurant that serves European, Chinese Peranakan and Indonesian food, to get transported to the past and enjoy the flavors of yore.

Not just the menu, but the building, interior and almost everything in it are old, preserving what is believed to be good-old-time ideals that appeal to both nostalgia seekers and builders.

But what I liked most and had almost every afternoon there as a child with my father was ice cream.

It has different varieties on offer '€” one of them was even decorated with fireworks. My favorites were vanilla (that was essentially, well, vanilla, with a touch of sweet rum) and mocca, in which I found the familiar flavors of Van Houten chocolate powder mixed with sugar and black coffee.

My familiarity with those particular flavors, cultivated by the frequency of my visits for years, has bred, instead of contempt, some delightful attachments associated with a pleasant afternoon getaway routine.

Thus, despite exposure to other old-fashioned ice creams to modern and ethnic (Indian, Turkish) ones, I continue to like the one I shared with my father, the taste of which remains unchanged until now.

As for the one in Malang, I like its ice cream and beef steak whose yesteryear, colonial taste is very much the same as the one from Semarang, although the beef is local and the only option is to have it well-done.

Ironically, my most recent dinner in the Malang restaurant was only a candlelight dinner. Nothing was served except a candle that they lit following a sudden power outage after I placed an order.

At first, the darkness and the candle lights provided me with an opportunity to observe people'€™s behavior. The moment the lights went out I saw a young Western couple sitting across from me kissing each other briefly.

Most other guests seemed undisturbed by the blackout and continued eating or waiting for the food they had ordered, while some recent entrants walked out to dine elsewhere.

After a 10-minute wait with no sign of the power coming back, I started to get annoyed. I soon found out they had no power generator nor any interest in acquiring one.

'€œPower outages like this have happened many times before and have no effect on our capability to prepare food,'€ said the female cashier cum receptionist, when I questioned their ability to cook food in the dark.

She asked me to continue waiting, assuring me the order I had placed was being prepared. About 15 minutes later, however, a male waiter approached me, apologizing they could not cook the food because of power outage.

How could such an establishment behave like that? The tyranny of staying true to their idolized concept of maintaining no change has made them an obstinately stick-in-the-mud business coasting on their past reputation, believing the never-dying past would make people come back despite the old-school inconvenience.

I immediately went to a nearby hotel, where its fine dining restaurant, with its more modern and stylish look, makes the old restaurant next door look outworn and decrepit.

Still in the mood to savor the Dutch food I missed at the old restaurant, I ordered the so-called '€œUnd'€ beef galantine only to find it was a frozen one heated in a microwave oven, as confirmed by the waiter who served me.

No wonder it tasted so dry and grainy, a far cry from the succulent, freshly made one I had as a child in Semarang.

In the back of my mind, I wonder how such a high-end establishment could operate like a food-court eatery.

These unpleasant experiences made me realize that to reexperience a preserved past is to understand the constraints under which its human agents labor and the inevitability of changes brought about by the passage of time. After all, everything happened as it had to happen.

Otherwise, it'€™s time to render the irreplaceable flavors of such a preserved past expendable and replace them with the freshest picks of the present.

Nevertheless, I still have an option to fall back on whenever I long for those by-gone flavors again whenever I visited Semarang. And it will surely be for the ice cream.

'€” Arif Suryobuwono