Artha Rini. 10562 Metropolitan Ave., Kensington
Artha Rini opened her restaurant last August to little fanfare. Sharing a low-slung Kensington building with a carpet store and a medical equipment business, Artha Rini (the restaurant shares her name) is easy to miss. For DC’s Indonesian community, though, the opening was a big deal.
Artha Rini—like many Javanese people, she has just one name, with no separate first and family names—had already made a name for herself by bringing her slow-cooked jackfruit gudeg, chicken saté, and aromatic rawon soup to Indonesian events in the DMV for nearly two decades. Her restaurant’s all-halal menu features a rotating selection of her favorite dishes, jumping from island to island and between regions.
“I cook from Sabang to Merauke,” she says, referring to the opposite eastern and western extremes of Indonesia’s 3,000-mile-wide archipelago.
Nasi Padang, the Sumatran-style steamed rice plate with small portions of various side dishes and stews, is a good way to taste a few seasonal dishes at once. Beef rendang, the slow-caramelized dry beef curry, often makes an appearance. So does a saucy jackfruit curry, with chunks of the fruit so meaty and flaky they resemble swordfish steaks.
But some of Artha Rini’s best dishes are unique to her native Java. The most important ingredient in rawon, a spiced beef soup, is keluak nut, which darkens the broth to an inky black and adds a rich, chocolate-y fragrance. Artha Rini’s rawon comes with a plate of rice, a salted duck egg, and krupuk, super-crunchy cassava starch crackers. Crush one over the soup or dip it in, and it crackles like Rice Krispies in milk.
Food is the family business for Artha Rini. When she was growing up in the city of Semarang, her adoptive parents ran a catering company, and her grandmother operated a small roadside stand, or warung, selling gudeg, a deep brown jackfruit stew. Before immigrating to the US, Artha Rini worked as a recruiter for a Jakarta-based fast food chain that specializes in Japanese bento boxes.
Gudeg, which Artha Rini first tried at her grandmother’s warung, is still the dish closest to her heart. But with a cook time of more than 12 hours, and a narrow audience—typically only Indonesian customers order it—the family specialty only appears on the menu about once a month.
When she first came to the US in 2004, Artha Rini ran a daycare from her Silver Spring home. But cooking was her passion, and she soon caught some lucky breaks: a daycare customer got her a catering job at Voice of America’s Indonesian service, and later, she cooked for DC meetings of the International Monetary Fund the same year it held an annual conference in Bali. When Indonesian president Joko Widodo visited DC, Artha Rini sent catering to his staff at the Blair House.
The opportunity for a real restaurant didn’t come around until last year. Artha Rini had rented out a shared space in a basement commercial kitchen to boost the capacity of her catering business. When the landlord asked if she wanted to rent the storefront upstairs, she and her husband jumped at the chance.
“We loved it, but we didn’t have the money,” Artha Rini says. “ So we sold our trailer, we sold our car, and we used our life insurance.”
Her husband, Wirawan Ismudjatmiko, quit his job at the Algerian Embassy to wait tables at the restaurant full time, and on weekends, you’ll often find their sons helping out too. Ten thousand miles from Java, Artha Rini has managed to keep her family business alive.
