Indo Spice puts a new region on the map of South Philly’s Indonesian delights

An 8-foot-long wooden map of Indonesia spans a wall just beyond the entrance of Indo Spice on West Passyunk Avenue. It showcases just how vast the country is: It’s the world’s fourth-most populous nation, spread across an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands that range from Southeast Asia into Oceana, just north of Australia.

South Philadelphia, unsurprisingly, is not on that map. But it has become a favored destination for Indonesian expats seeking a taste of home. Just ask Jemmi Sjaf, who made the trek from Hackensack in North Jersey twice over the past two weeks to visit this charming new restaurant. The New York tour-bus driver even brought down his wife and mother for a recent Sunday lunch, along with a deep craving for the spice-forward, lime-splashed flavors of Makassar — the capital city of South Sulawesi Province, a hometown he shares with Benny Pangalila, the chef and co-owner of two-month-old Indo Spice.

As he sat down, Sjaf glanced at our table, laden with several rarely seen Makassar-style dishes, including an earthy bowl of coto Makassar — a tripe and beef-liver stew with roasted peanuts — and a vivid red fried rice laced with sweet pork sausage and tender curls of shrimp. He gave me a thumbs up and ordered the same. He was convinced he needed to return to Indo Spice after his first visit, when he devoured a Makassar-style noodle bowl called mie U.P. It’s topped with a fan of crispy pork belly and wontons and served with a side of potent orange sambal.

“This is the only place on the East Coast where you can find these particular dishes from Makassar,” Sjaf said. Other customers, the owners tell me, have travelled from as far as Maryland.

This corner of Philadelphia has maintained one of the largest Indonesian communities on the East Coast since 1998, when civil unrest caused more than 100,000 Chinese-Indonesians to flee their country. Philadelphia’s Indonesian population grew by 72% between 2011 and 2023, to 2,184, according to census figures.

You can taste the regional diversity in Philly’s wealth of Indonesian restaurants, from the slightly sweeter Javanese cooking of Hardena to the Medan-style Sumatran pork platters and bundles of banana leaf-wrapped beef rendang at Sky Cafe. At D’Jakarta Cafe (noted among the Inquirer’s 76 essential Philly restaurants), you can taste the melting pot flavors of cosmopolitan Jakarta (lamb satay, tamarind-glazed fried chicken, chewy green bok choy noodles) and the Chinese influences of West Borneo. There’s been a surge in new Indonesian options, too, to match the bump in population growth, from the risoles pastries, young coconut fritters, and deep-fried whole butterfish at yearling Warung Filadelphia to the next-gen modern tasting menus at Diana Widjojo’s Rice & Sambal. Forîn chef Ariel Tobing has also recently begun adding Indonesian and East Asian touches to the cafe’s breakfast items and lunch sandwiches.

Indo Spice, however, is the city’s first taste of Sulawesi, an island that sits smack in the middle of that archipelago. And it comes to Philadelphia by way of Scranton, where two of the partners in this restaurant, Pangalila and Gunawan “Gunner” Raharjo, first met.

Raharjo and Pangalila became fast friends at their church in Scranton, where Pangalila would often show up with food, like a platter of Hokkien mie stir-fried noodles lit with yellow sambal, or that soulful coto Makassar stew, whose gamey broth — enriched with fried peanuts, soy bean paste, and whole-animal tidbits — is crave-worthy once you’ve acquired the taste. Raharjo manages a wooden spool manufacturer by day and also owns Shinjiru Ramen near Camelback Mountain in the Poconos, as well as another forthcoming location in Wilkes-Barre; he suggested the two go into business together.

Pangalila learned to cook from his mother at his family’s restaurant in Sulawesi. In Scranton, where he delivered pizza for Domino’s for 15 years, cooking was “just a hobby” until the pandemic, when he began a private catering business. Raharjo’s proposition to open a restaurant in Philadelphia, though, was an opportunity to follow a passion that he and his wife decided he should pursue — even if it meant commuting back home to his family in Scranton only two days a month.

Raharjo converted a former clothing store into a simple but pretty 33-seat space with blond wood-strip walls, banquettes toned to the soft-green hue of banana leaves, and illuminated alcoves showcasing paintings of Indonesian monuments. A third, Philadelphia-based partner, Jefry Andrias, is the general manager for a crew of friendly servers eager to show off some of the restaurant’s distinctive specialties.

It is Pangalila’s cooking that is the major draw. While Makassar is his prime inspiration, there are favorite dishes from across Indonesia to which he lends his personal twist, like the hot corn fritters that pop with far more kernels than batter, or the skewers of tender pork satay glazed in the dark soy sweetness of kecap manis. Indonesia is nearly 90% Muslim, but its Christian community heartily consumes pork, like the cracklin’ chunks of crispy pork belly and sweet-edged char siu barbecue that are a signature draw for the mie U.P. (pronounced “Ooo-Pay” and short for Ujung Pandang, another name for Makassar).

One of my favorite dishes is the Taliwang grilled chicken. I love it for the dark shine of glaze — sweet soy blended with candlenuts — that covers the leg, and for dusting of crunchy fried shallots in the style of Lombok, not far from Bali. But I especially love the chef’s original touch, a contrasting side salad of sour and spicy mango slices tossed in sambal belacan that garnishes the plate. It’s one of seven fresh sambals — a chili-based condiment essential to Indonesian cooking (and other cultures) — that Pangalila makes for the menu; they vary in pepper-fired pungency, texture, layered shades of sweetness, color, and levels of fermented funk.

If there was any doubt that Indonesian sambals can pack a flame-thrower’s punch, there’s a good reason they’ve nicknamed the mini-beef meatball appetizer “911.″ Depending on how incendiary the tiny chilies are running that day, after a bite of one of these garlicky little orbs, you’ll likely be reaching for a sip of cold BYOB beer — or, perhaps more soothing, a house-made “Happy Soda” of seltzer water mixed with coconut and pandan syrup.

One of the most memorable bites here is a frequent special from Manado, in North Sulawesi, called babi rica-rica. It was billed as “very spicy” but didn’t actually overwhelm, because Pangalila has begun dialing it down to a “7 out of 10″ for his Philly audience. The gingery, slow-stewed pork is seasoned with a tea-like shrub also called rica-rica, and served alongside a chunkier sambal of fresh tomato with chili and onion called dabu-dabu (think Indonesian pico de gallo) and a mild cup of kidney bean soup.

One always has the option here of asking for sambal on the side. This was our cautious move with the smashed chicken (nasi ayam geprek), a Surabaya-style chicken cutlet that’s crushed post-fryer with a pestle, fracturing its surface into crunchy, craggy bits that are all the more adept at trapping the garlicky sambal eventually spread over top.

The soups in general were outstanding, whether served in a cup of cleansing broth on the side, as with the mie U.P. or the restaurant’s signature chicken and mushroom noodles, or in a big bowl as the main event, like the rawon empal beef soup turned black and herbaceous with woodsy kluwak nuts. A similar black soup from Makassar called konro is an occasional weekend special served with whole beef ribs and grated coconut.

Makassar, a port city, is also known for its seafood, and Indo Spice serves some of the best $17 whole fish in town. Most memorable is the ikan saus kuning, a deep-fried tilapia submerged in a rich coconut sauce warmed with chilies and crunchy shallots dyed golden with turmeric.

One mild disappointment was that this restaurant representing Sulawesi does not serve coffee, perhaps the island’s most famous crop. I was also bummed not to visit Indo Spice on a day when they still had a famous Makassar dessert called es pisang ijo — ripe plantains wrapped inside pandan green pancakes, served with coconut porridge and shaved ice. No doubt, it was the result of our relatively late arrival for dinner at a restaurant that stops cooking at 8 p.m.

There were other worthy sweets to cap our meal, including a pink shaved ice with banana and coconut (es pallu butung), a tall glass of sweetened coconut milk with jackfruit and black cubes of glass jelly swirling among the ice cubes at the bottom. My highlight sweet was pisang epe, a trio of ripe plantains that were caramelized with palm sugar in a hot press, brought from Indonesia, that almost makes the fruit a soufflé.

I’ll be back for those bananas wrapped in green pancakes, and so much more. I might even see Jemmi Sjaf again, who promised Pangalila that he’d return once more from Hackensack — this time to show his son the red rice and mie U.P. noodles. Indo Spice, it seems, has put South Philly on this Makassar expat’s map.

1421 W. Passyunk Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19145, 267-790-1100; online menu

Open Thursday through Tuesday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Closed Wednesday.

Entrees, $13 to $17.

BYOB