Philadelphia Weekly

Hardena Restaurant
1754 Hicks St. 215.271.9442
Cuisine: Indonesian
Prices: $5-$7.50
Hours: Wed.-Sat., 11am-8pm; Sun., 10am-8pm.
Smoking: No
Atmosphere: Modest and small. It's all about the food.
Service: Treats you as if you were a welcome guest in their home.
Food: Oh, what a little coconut milk, red chili and peanut sauce can do!

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Some secrets are just too good to keep. Hardena Restaurant is one of them.

Ena and Harry Widjojo's tiny three-year-old Indonesian eatery is inconspicuous, except for its bright yellow door. The sunny entrance faces the corner of Moore Street and Hicks Street-the latter being a narrow South Philly byway tightly packed with parked cars and litter.

Above the door is an indistinct green-and-red-lettered sign. Around the door are barred windows. During a recent visit a white plastic bucket stood out front collecting water dripping from an air conditioning unit overhead and making the business appear closed.

Hardena's dining room is smaller than an extra-mini mini-mart, and only slightly bigger than a breadbox. It consists of five fairly cramped plastic-clothed tables and an elevated L-shaped counter where customers help themselves to room-temp water from a dark blue Igloo dispenser while they wait for their food.

Laughing-eyed Ena, Hardena's chef and only server, is behind the counter. She's the one to talk to here. But if you want to know what to order-or if your Bahasa is rusty-you can always request aid from any of the more-than-happy-to-translate customers.

Co-owner hubby Harry says his patrons, mostly island expats, come "from as far as Virginia; Washington, D.C.; Maryland; Delaware; New Jersey; sometimes from New York; sometimes from Boston. They want to eat good Indonesian food, so they come."

Years back he and Ena had a restaurant in New York that won a four-star award from Gourmet magazine. Ask and they'll show you the article.

Regulars to Hardena come for two things. The first is satay, available on weekends only. These traditional snacklike kabobs are made with chicken, beef or lamb-five or six chunks that have been marinated, skewered, charcoal-grilled to order out back, and coated in a sweet-and-sour aromatic soy and peanut sauce. They're a must-order.

The other draw is the rijstaffel, a Dutch word leftover from Indonesia's colonized years. Rijstaffel means "rice table," which here means a non-self-serve buffet that goes something like this:

Ena spoons out large, fluffy mounds of fragrant jasmine rice from a Crock-Pot onto a disposable plate. She then turns to a spread of a dozen or so heated silver dishes, motions for you to choose three, piles them on the rice, and asks if you'd like any sambal badjak, a fiery red chili sauce made oceanic with dried shrimp. She charges you $5 and you look for a seat.

Deciding isn't easy, but leave it to Ena. She's an expert at balancing each trio, pairing hefty meats with lighter vegetables, and sudden heat with lingering richness to create a delicious melting pot of a meal.

She'll pile on the beef rendang, tender pieces of shoulder coated in a fire-colored curry-like sauce heated with long-hots tempered by coconut milk and candlenuts, just barely perfumed with turmeric and ever so lightly flavored with citrus.

She'll contrast the rendang with a scoop of soft green beans mixed with julienne of a white gourd, pink threads of saffron and cubes of firm, plain tofu. Then she'll add a portion of gray-brown bite-sized cubes of bone-on lamb that are lightly herb-touched. Pop one of those in your mouth, extract the bone with your fingers and look like a pro.

Other choices include gado gado, a warm and delightful salad of boiled cabbage, carrots, bean sprouts and Chinese lettuce topped with boiled egg and a just-sweet, slightly citrusy ground peanut sauce. There's also nut-filled homemade tempeh.

A meat-and-potatoes combo resembles a more fragrant pot roast, with dense slices of spice-coated potatoes and fall-off-the-bone beef. Sweet-and-sour fried sole is a Balinese preparation of thickly battered, thinly sliced dense white fish that's tastily fishy, and dressed in a lemongrass-tinged vinegar and pineapple sauce.

Tender collard greens substitute for too-hard-to-find cassava leaves in a rich vegetable stew flavored with garlic, onion, red pepper and coconut milk. Corn, carrots, celery and onion go into a light and attractive pancake-style fritter-Indonesia's own latke.

Of course there are stranger things on the menu: tripe soup, prefried whole fish that look like junior flounder, and funky ice and coconut milk dessert drinks that come in pink and green, and swim with grass jelly, lychee, tapioca, plums and jackfruit.