Indonesian restaurant, IndoChili Tanjong Pagar Centre (Outlet Closed)

The IndoChili Tanjong Pagar restaurant is a traditional restaurant serving “Halal Authentic Indonesian Cuisines”. The restaurant is located in the basement of Tanjong Pagar Center and has easy access to the MRT station that has exits that lead into the building. We stopped by to try a couple of food items.

Although there were some modern touches in the decor, such as the blue chairs, the traditional Indonesian cuisine of IndoChili Tanjong Pagar is reflected in the restaurant setting. Wayang kulit figures line the wall, wicker utensils are used for decorations and some light Balinese gamelan music plays in the background.

IndoChili Tanjong Pagar Menu

The Indochina menu contains mostly the familiar Indonesian classic dishes. The iPad based menu and ordering system provides clear photos of the food. We only tried two items during out stopover that day – Gado Gado Siram ($6.80) and Sate Ayam Madura ($9.80). Here are some pictures from the IndoChili menu.

The Gado Gado was a plain dish. The vegetable items, boiled egg and lontong (pieces of rice cake) were smothered with a generous amount of the peanut sauce. Some pieces of keropok topped off the dish. It was not bad but not memorable. We would have preferred the peanut sauce to be less sweet and the peanuts to have more presence.

I found out subsequently that gado-gado Siram means the style of gado gado from Surabaya (East Java). Essentially, “gado” means mix. Gado gado is a one dish meal, not merely a salad. It seems that the Siram style of gado gado is to place the ingredients onto the plate and have the sauce poured over them. In contrast, the West Java version is to have the items all well mixed before transferring them onto the plate.

Our other dish was chicken satay Madura. According to the website Indonesianeats, there is no sate ayam Madura on the island of Madura. They just call it sate ayam (chicken sate). The word “Madura” is added to the dish by people outside Madura because most of the sellers came from Madura!

This style of satay is eaten with a sweetish sauce with bits of peanut in it. Quite unlike the peanut sauce that accompanies our usual style of satay. The sauce reminded us of yakitori sauce. We thought that this dish of satay served at IndoChili Tanjong Pagar Centre was very good. The chicken pieces were meaty and substantial. We had ordered these two dishes as starters. But they turned out to be more than sufficient and we did not order anymore food.