September 18, 2002

By Paul Reidinger

MENTION THE WORD "paella" in front of a tiny Thai restaurant in the Richmond and you're likely to start quite a conversation. I did, and I did.

"They got paella?" one of the guys sitting on the bench in front of the restaurant asked me, tossing his head quizzically toward the door.

I shook my head. "Paella" was a piece in another conversational puzzle, one I'd been trying to solve with someone who'd stepped into the Thai place for some – no, not paella – larb, of the takeout variety, but explaining it all to perfect strangers seemed overcomplicated, so I didn't. Instead I listened as he and his friend mentioned an Indonesian place they liked.

"If you like this place, you'll like that place," they assured me, and as I did very much like this place – House of Larb, it could be called, but isn't – I sought out their Indonesian destination.

That place is called Bamboo Village, it is five years old but has just recently come under new management, its bright yellow awning must be visible from orbit, and its Indonesian menu is at least the equal of any other Indonesian menu in town, though of course for the moment that field isn't too crowded. The cooking, in its spicy Southeast Asian sauciness (with a few subcontinental and European influences thrown in), reminded me strongly of the food at nearby Straits Café. But then, Straits is "Singaporean," and Singapore is about as close to Indonesia as it could be without actually being part of Indonesia.

If you like spicy peanut sauces, you will find your bliss at Bamboo Village. The appetizers, in particular, are rich in them – from risoles ($3.85), a shell of batter stuffed with chicken, onion, carrot, and string bean and deep fried, to siomay bandung ($5.85), a kind of sampler plate of chicken dumplings, fish cakes, and cabbage, along with cubes of potato, tofu, and hard-boiled egg, the whole thing then bathed in a peanut sauce prettily jetted up with swirls of red chili-garlic paste.

Of course, you know a dish like that is going to be tasty just by looking at it. But what about cap cay goreng ($6.25), a huge stir-fry of scallops, squid, prawns, chunks of chicken breast, and bok choy? You see similarly anemic-looking dishes all the time in Chinese restaurants, and they're almost always as bland as they look, screaming out like lost souls for soy sauce and chili paste. I knew despair when the dish was set before us, because we hadn't even ordered it (about which service snafu more anon). But once we started in, we found ourselves awash in savoriness.

The mie tek-tek ($5.95) – a kind of supercharged pad thai – is also pleasantly deceptive. The tangle of egg noodles, carrots, bok choy, and chunks of chicken looks like something Grandma might have thrown together from refrigerator cullings. But the menu description does say "spicy," and at Bamboo Village, spicy means spicy. We asked for "medium" spice and found the dish agreeably incendiary; afterward, our lips glowed almost lewdly. Our server smiled; what we called "medium," she said, was what the kitchen considered "mild." She left us to imagine what "hot" might be like.

The one exception we discovered to the spicy = spicy rule was nasi dendeng ($5.95), a beef-brisketish, pot-roasty slab of meat slathered in a rust-red sauce that turned out to be tasty but not spicy as promised. That was all right, but the meat could have, should have been more tender and less dry.

There were a few outright iffy dishes. Dendeng balado ($7.45) – "crispy roasted beef with special chili sauce" – sounded more promising than it turned out to be, since it turned out to be, essentially, chips and salsa, with the chips consisting of slightly tough beef. The other offender of note was otak-otak panggang ($3.75), a kind of fish-cake tamale wrapped in banana leaves; we found no hint of the barbecue flavor mentioned by the menu, but we did find the tubular fish cakes to be rubbery to the point of being inedible.

The bigger issue at Bamboo Village is service. It is friendly enough, and efficient when the place isn't crowded. Lunchtime seems quiet, but the crowds arrive in force at dinnertime – just as the take-out orders start accumulating. It's all too much for a floor staff of two beleaguered persons, especially if one of those beleaguered persons is a young mother being followed by her toddler, squalling with the sustained distress one associates with airborne infants, who can't understand why he can't seem to attract his mother's attention. Truly, it takes a village (if not Bamboo Village) to raise a child.

We were lucky: we'd beaten the crowds and been served all but one of our dishes by the time the squalling began and the kitchen's principal output became plastic bags laden with takeout. But we waited as long for the last dish as we'd waited for the previous four put together, and of course our water glasses had run dry, and we did find our thoughts running to – well, if not paella, perhaps the wisdom of moving to the head of the line by ordering takeout.