Ride the Banana Boat

Sep05

Location: 5835 Temple City Blvd, Temple City, CA 91780. (626) 309-0209

Date: July 8, 2018

Cuisine: Indonesian

Rating: The real deal, but we could have ordered a bit more varied stuff

Sunday is SGV Chinese night, but tonight, while we did venture east to the SGV, we mixed it up a little with Indonesian! Of course we still got in the requisite 90 minute foot massage and a quick visit to the crack house.

Banana leaf is in Temple City very close to Bistro Na and Grand Harbor.

The interior is a touch updated.

The green menu!

Egg and Tofu Salad. Fried tofu and egg served with bean sprout and peanut dressing. Good peanut sauce but it’s very strong and pretty much swamped out the egg and tofu part.

Siomay Bandung. Bandung style chicken and fish cakes served with a peanut dressing — again, so much peanut it was hard to tell what was under there. Some lettuce and cucumber too.

Crunchy fried chicken. Fried chicken smothered in some kind of crispies, Jakarta style.

Traditional Smashed Combination Platter. Marinated beef, fried chicken, fried egg, fried tofu, soy bean and fresh salad served with fresh shrimp paste chili. Very fried. But tasty. I liked the tofu and egg particularly.

Pork Satay with more peanut sauce. This was the best of the satays, very tender and full of flavor.

Lamb satay. A touch tough.

Chicken satay.

Yellow chicken curry with egg and rice. Not a bad curry, but mild and kinda thin.

Garlic rice. Like the kind that goes with Hainan chicken.

Beef Rendang. Good stuff, but we had (at first) only one of these for 13 people!

Indonesian Fried Rice. Fried egg on top. Great fried rice.

Chicken Noodle. Steamed egg noodle with ground chicken, fried wonton. Really nice lo mein.

Traditional Smashed Fish. Java style whole fried tilapia fish served with fresh shrimp paste chili.

Indonesian stir fried meat with soy sauce. Sort of like 3 cup chicken.

Stir fried chili shrimp with sator and fresh shrimp paste chili (we keep seeing this sauce!)

Greens with garlic in “gravy.”

Indonesian Marinated Beef. Lots of flavor.

The Pastry Patriot (me) delivers on the 4th of Julato!

Red = Summer Strawcherry Gelato

White = Vanilla Custard Stracciatella

Blue = Old Black & Blue Sorbetto (blackberry, blueberry, and elderflower) with homemade white chocolate stars
Nice place, and solid homestyle Indonesian food. Quite tasty and a fun evening. We could have ordered a bit better as we did that thing where we had a round of stuff, it wasn’t quite enough to get around, and then we reordered. That rarely works out as the second round overwhelms. Particularly we reordered BOTH peanut sauce salads and it was just way too much peanut sauce. We needed more curries and maybe some banana leaf dishes. But we can just come back and try again. They were super friendly and really treated us right.