Six years after it started as a lockdown side hustle in a sandwich shop, Kenangan has 64 seats and a pitched rattan ceiling on Little Bourke Street.
Kenangan is Indonesian for memories, and a lot of the ones on its menu belong to a mother-in-law from Bogor.
Back in 2020, the family behind sandwich shop Meet Sando started cooking Indonesian food in its kitchen after dark, partly to keep working through lockdown and partly because they missed the food they grew up on.
Kenangan
- 400 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne
- Lunch: 11.30am to 2.30pm, seven days
- Dinner: 5pm to 8.30pm, Monday to Saturday
- Weekday lunch: mixed rice plates from $18.50
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Giovanni Sutjiutama, Grace Liu, Alexander Liu, Hana Mahatmayanti and Nicholas Liu kept Kenangan going once restrictions lifted, and after building a following near Queen Vic Market they’ve opened a 64-seat restaurant at 400 Little Bourke Street.
That home cook from Bogor is Sutjiutama’s mother-in-law. Sundanese, Javanese, Balinese and Indonesian-Chinese cooking comes in from the rest of the family and the kitchen crew.
The iga bakar kecap ($34) is the dish I’d build the whole table around. Kenangan has served it since its early days: Angus prime beef ribs, pot-braised and then flame-grilled with a sweet soy glaze.
Order for the middle of the table. Everything here is set up for makan tengah, the Indonesian tradition of putting shared dishes in the centre and letting everyone reach in.
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Then there’s the sambal. The kitchen makes five in-house at $3 a serve: balado, matah, lalapan, ijo and terasi, the last of which carries three chillies on the menu’s heat scale.
I’d also load up on the cheap snacks before the mains land, like the bakwan sayur, a pair of shaggy vegetable fritters with peanut sauce for $8.50, or tempe mendoan in spiced batter for the same price.
Pastry chef Hana Mahatmayanti did time in the kitchens of La Scène and Dessance in Paris, yet her roti bakar ($12) goes back to the street carts of Indonesia: a thick slab of toasted brioche stuffed with chocolate sprinkles, hazelnut and cheddar. To drink, there’s es alpukat, a palm sugar-sweetened avocado smoothie.
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Melbourne has eaten Indonesian food for decades, and Warung Agus has been cooking Balinese in West Melbourne for more than 30 years.
The chains have turned up more recently. Sederhana, a nasi padang chain from Indonesia, opened its first Australian shop this year at 207 Queen Street, a short walk from Kenangan, while D’Penyetz and the pancake specialists at Martabak Pecenongan 78 trade side by side on Lygon Street. In March, Queen Vic Market handed a whole weekend to an Indonesian street food festival.
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There’s no shortage of people to feed: the City of Melbourne has a bigger Indonesian community than any other council in the state. What no chain can bottle is somebody’s mum’s cooking, and that’s Kenangan’s whole pitch.
Near the front, a lightbox shows the new branding’s cartoon kid in a cap and tie, waving from a yellow couch with a cat on the cushion beside them. Sutjiutama reckons a lot of Australians know Bali and not much else of Indonesia, and he sees food as the way across. Start with the ribs.
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