The Best Indonesian Food Is Found Aboard a Dutch Navy Ship

April 1, 2015 / 10:35 am
By Karon Liu

When chefs talk about where they’ve done their stage—the culinary equivalent of an internship—you can pretty much guarantee that it becomes a dick-measuring contest of who can blurt out the most Michelin-starred names: noma, elBulli, Maaemo, some place that sounds like IKEA furniture. But in Toronto’s midtown, far away from the downtown west-end where most buzzy restaurants are, is chef Michael van den Winkel, a tall, bespectacled Dutchman whose stage sounds more impressive than the moss-topped plates put out by René Redzepi: He was learning to cook Indonesian food while enlisted in the Dutch navy.

“In Amsterdam, every Dutchman knowns Indonesian food and had it in their childhood,” says van den Winkel, who co-owns an Indonesian snack bar called Little Sister with his wife, Jennifer Gittins. “Indonesian food is well-rooted here, like how the British have curry.”

Indo-Dutch relations go back 400 years when—yup, you guessed it—the Netherlands colonized Indonesia during the spice trade. It wasn’t until World War II that Indonesia declared independence, and after all those centuries of occupation, it’s hard for the Dutch to shake off their cravings for a big steaming bowl of nasi goreng. So while the Brits have their curry and the Canucks have their poutine, the Dutch opt for chicken satay as the go-to takeaway.

In fact, those creamy, nutty, and spicy flavours are so entrenched in Dutch culture that the navy gets treated to a weekly rijsttafel (“rice plate” in Dutch) that consists of dozens of little plates of vegetables, skewers, sambals, fish, meats, and egg dishes paired with lots of rice. It was here 30 years ago that van den Winkel learned how to properly make shrimp paste from scratch and perfect spice blends.
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At the time, van den Winkel was required to do a stage as part of his hotel management studies as well as enlist in the military for a year. Unlike his peers who went off to work at high-end hotels, van den Winkel joined the armed forces to serve his country (and his school) as a cook as part of a unique stage program his school had with the navy. “I did it out of laziness, to be honest. I didn’t even know we’d be cooking Indonesian food in the navy,” he says. “I thought I could do my stage and my military service in one go so that I’d save myself a year. I had no desire to be in the military.” You’d think a dad would be proud to see his son enlist, but in van den Winkel’s case, being a naval cook is less than stellar in the eyes of a father works in the restaurant trade. “My dad didn’t like this at all. He wanted me to go into the nice fine-dining restaurants like he did, but this was my first choice.”
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Nonetheless, a 19-year-old van den Winkel spent his first two months in basic training, learning how to shoot and row before he started his rotations: three weeks of making pastries, three weeks of baking bread, three weeks of butchering, and his favourite part, three weeks of learning Indonesian cooking from an Indo-Dutch instructor. “The day-to-day is pretty boring. Sometimes you’re frying eggs for a thousand people, so I learned how to krack eggs pretty well,” he says. “On Mondays and Tuesdays we made the typical Dutch meals: boiled potatoes, kale, blood sausage, red cabbage.”

Boring stuff, he says, except on Wednesdays. That’s when they make the rijsttafel. “We opened the meal to the public; it was what we were known for,” he says, with sudden flicker of glee in his voice. “On Monday we did the chopping, on Tuesday we made the spice mixture, and on Wednesday we had 500 people to serve by noon.” Other than those Wednesdays, as well as a few military galas in The Hague where he cooked Indonesian food for top-ranking military officials, he describes his 14-month stint in the navy as “relaxing” since there was no war to fight. He recalls the hardest part was getting the bumbu right, a thick seasoning paste made from grinding a hodgepodge of ginger, turmeric, garlic, lemongrass, toasted coriander, cloves, and shallots with a motar and pestle, and then cooking the mixture in oil before adding fresh bay leaves.

After graduating, and regaining his status as a civilian, van den Winkel cooked at various places; a naval hospital, a Dutch expat’s pub in Côte d’Azur, a rich Norwegian’s yacht, and a French restaurant in the British city of Bath where he’d go on to marry the cute girl at the brasserie next door. The couple moved to Toronto in 1995 and opened their first restaurant, a Mediterranean-style bistro called Quince. Wanting to drum up business during the slow seasons, van den Winkel brought the rijsttafel out of retirement and made it a semi-regular event at Quince, gaining a loyal following since no one else was serving Indonesian food at the time, let alone a 23-dish feast. Appetites for the sold-out event became insatiable, so last summer he and his wife opened Little Sister, a snack bar where tamarind-braised pork (sambal daging) falls apart with the slightest graze of a fork and the shrimp coconut curry (udang kari) coats your tongue with a sweet and slow burn. Since opening, every critic’s suggestion is to simply order everything off the menu.

“Sometimes it pays off not listening to your father,” says van den Winkel. “If I did, I wouldn’t have done my stage at the navy and I wouldn’t have learned to cook Indonesian food. I think I did pretty good for myself, and at least I got something useful out of the navy.”