Foodies,
Board and TWEC ™ members Mike Grammer and myself along with our friend Charles made our first venture to Little Sister, the only Indonesian tapas restaurant in all of Toronto. It was recommended to us by fellow board and TWEC ™ member Jay Shampur and we had quite a memorable first meal.
We started off snacking on shrimp chips with peanut sauce for dipping. Indonesian peanut sauce is quite different than any you’ve ever had at a Chinese or Thai restaurant before, due to the fact that traditional Indonesian cuisine forgoes salty soy sauce and fish sauce in favor of kecap manis, which is a sweet soy sauce that substitutes in palm sugar instead of salt. This does make quite a unique distinction overall and Charles noted the sweetness in the cuisine as it stood out to him. The cuisine as a whole balanced salty, sweet, sour and hot flavors but tended to emphasize the sweet and hot more, whereas Thai would emphasize the sour and hot and Szechuan would emphasize the salty and hot.
The meal began with a pair of traditional satays. Though you can find these in every kind of Asian restaurant, research shows me they in fact originated in Indonesia. We had the Satay Ayim and Satay Sapi. The first is chicken drenched in the aforementioned peanut sauce and the second is perfectly cooked medium-rare beef marinated in lemongrass, kecap manis and lime leaf sitting on a bed of pickled red onions.
But seriously, this was awesome. I asked our waitress to get the recipe from the kitchen which she assured us she would after we paid our bills. We never saw her again after this, of course. Well played in keeping the kitchen’s secret still a secret and forcing us to return for more.
