Surabaya: Food haven part 1

I'm honored to have a personalized local tour guide to help me enjoy Surabaya's local culinary. I present you: JJ Lin! Well not the popular singer, the real JJ Lin, but his real name is Jeremy, and he does looks like JJ Lin, with many confirmation from my friends. Yet, he's better than JJ Lin: shorter, wider, and fatter HAHAHAHA. So we call him JJ then? Alrighty.

JJ Lin driving

So JJ picked me up in Juanda International Airport with his car, and... can you guys keep a secret? He looks so manly while driving, if you cover up the stomach part with your hand :)). From Juanda to the city center it took like forty minutes if the traffic's OK, but Surabaya's traffic is a lot better than Jakarta. Still traffic jam everywhere, but phew, if you've gone to Jakarta, don't ever think you can get to your destination on time.

Let's start tasting Surabaya's food haven then!

First stop: Layar Seafood Restaurant

A plate of tempting crab with salted egg

For JJ, there's no "save the best for last" policy, thus he took me to Layar, an eminent seafood restaurant in Surabaya, to taste its best dish: kepiting telur asin or crab cooked with salted egg. I've never eaten a salted egg dish with a crab before, just prawns, but the smell was so mouthwatering. After the first bite of its tender crab meat, I was... in heaven. I couldn't stop opening the crab shell and grabbing the meat into my mouth. JJ helped me taking out the meat as I still couldn't bend my left elbow at that time. Voila, not long before the dish arrived on our table, there was no crab meat left, even the lettuce under the crab meat, which was supposed to be an ornament, also got eaten with the salted egg sauce. Mmm... yummy. I had a sudden urge to lick off the sauce from the plate XD. The sauce was just, brilliant, excelente. We just ordered this crab and hotplate kangkung, and no rice, cos we still have a long way to go, so we gotta reserve a big amount of space in our stomach.

Ayam penyet super spicy

I felt half full already, but we still continue our way to our next restaurant: Ayam Penyet Bu Kris. Ayam penyet is a traditional Indonesian dish consisting a smashed fried chicken, with sambal, tempe, fried tofu, cucumbers, and also the leaves of lemon basil. JJ was crazy, he knows that I love spicy dishes, so he ordered an extra hot penyet. I thought I can handle that, but oh boy, I was wrong. I was literally crying with all that sambal, I even ordered extra water, but it was really good. And the tempe, so freaking delicious. I always have this thing for East Java's tempe, so different from Jakarta's or any other place's. 

Leker

After wiped my tears and left the restaurant with redden face, and still trying to relieve the spiciness in my mouth, JJ bought kue leker or spinning crepe outside the restaurant. We shared the crepe in the car as we drove to our next destination. While eating the crepe, my mind surfed back when I was in junior high school where I used to buy this on my recess. I asked JJ where were we going next, and he said, if you really want to taste the ultimate food haven in Surabaya, then Pasar Atom is your place. So we drove there, and JJ started to pull me around the stalls. I forgot the stalls' names, JJ also didn't quite remember, but I got a few photos that I took that day while we were busy shoving delicious treats into our stomach.

Vanilla and chocolate ice cream

Yes, you are being deceived by its appearance. This is not an ordinary chocolate and vanilla ice cream. This is more like a traditional-made ice cream from Indonesia, its got this special sweetness, different from the usual ice cream. I don't really like the taste, though, think it was too sweet for me, but for JJ, he likes it a lot. He said this ice cream stall has been here since he was a kid, so he grew up eating this ice cream.