The Food Doctor Is In

You’re in luck. Here comes John Rijken, a cheerful guy who runs Sudi Mampir with his chef-wife, Mimin, and he has a colorful homily for you: “I work in a clinic all day. I do my best, but people get sicker when they see the bill. Here, when people come in, they’re hungry and cold. . . . Here I’m a food doctor, and I can always make people feel better.” He giggles and suggests some dishes that he likes. When he brings you a particularly stinky fermented-shrimp sambal , he giggles and wrinkles his nose.

“Oooh, I’m afraid of that stuff,” he says.

Sudi Mampir is a small place in an aggressively multiethnic mini-mall, near some excellent taquerias , across the street from a giant discount store and next door to a doughnut shop that also sells Thai food. Sudi Mampir serves the highly seasoned cooking of Western Java. It occupies a space set up for another kind of business--a deli, I think--and the travel posters and replica palm trees squeeze around massive, unused glassed-in counters and wall-size refrigerators. The requisite homey touch, a rack of Indonesian shirt-dresses for sale, takes up a corner near the rear.

One of the dishes John Rijken likes best is the appetizer martabak , which is a crisp crepe-like thing stuffed with a savory sort of minced-beef omelet, sliced into squares and served with a little dish of sweet-sour Indonesian pickled vegetables. It’s the Javanese equivalent of a good Thai stuffed roti or any number of Middle Eastern pastries. (Unlike many local Indonesian restaurants, Sudi Mampir conforms to Muslim dietary laws--no pork, no alcohol, Halal-butchered beef--and the Muslim influence sometimes shows in the spicing here.) Resaules , a Javanese transliteration of the French rissoles , is a tasty chicken empanada . Otak otak , airy Indonesian fish-cakes lightened with coconut milk, are shaped into slender oblongs, skewered, wrapped in scraps of banana leaf and grilled. The subtle, smoky flavor is superb.

Whatever else you order, you will be directed toward the fried rice, which is mushy and uninteresting, or the bakmi goreng , a sweet, dark dish of fried noodles with chicken, smoky and lightly charred like the best Asian fried pasta, fragrant with garlic and spice.

“You must try the bakmi goreng ,” says Rijken. “There’s lots of vegetables and love in them.”

Karedoc is a West Javanese take on the cooked salad gado gado , a melange of cucumbers and cabbage and Chinese long beans tossed with an unusual, almost vanilla-tasting dressing made with peanuts and the aromatic kencur root. The karedoc is topped with a crunchy layer of betel-nut crackers that makes the salad look something like a bowl of Product 19. Traditional Chinese medicine says kencur root is about the best thing you can take for a cold--bundle up and come on down.

You can order whatever fish you like, but what you will get will invariably be the house specialty, ikan pesmol , a whole, marinated tilapia fish, deep-fried, smeared with a fragrant sweet-sour paste stained yellow with ground turmeric, dotted with hot green chiles, worth the trouble of separating the flesh from the bones. Udang pedes , the best shrimp dish, is sauced with a red-chile/fermented shrimp saute.

Tahu pepesan , a peculiar bean curd dish, comes stuffed with hot green chiles, shaped into something that looks very much like a roll of liverwurst and steamed in a banana leaf, but the result can be very nice, tasting like an unusual, fiery hot green-chile tamale. It can also be, if it is served undercooked, sort of ghastly, with a cold center and still-frozen chiles. The house-made lontong --grainy rice cakes topped with an oily coconut-chicken curry, a lump of stewed beef and a deep-fried hard-boiled egg--are fresh and chewy, the best in town. Chicken, crisp-skinned and juicy in the Indonesian fashion, can be had in a Sumatran-style hot chile paste, ayam pedes a la padang , or crusted with citrus and spice, ayam goreng mantega .

Desserts include hot black-rice pudding and a winey, complex version of the brown-sugar/coconut ice es cendol , studded with translucent green squiggles of mung-bean jelly and much better than it sounds.

But you won’t be able to finish your meal the way I did the last time I went to the restaurant, with the sight of a cap-and-gown-clad Rijken in the parking lot, jumping up and down in the rain. “I’m a doctor! I’m a doctor!” he shouted. Mimin Rijken beamed alongside.

Sudi Mampir

12728 Sherman Way, North Hollywood, (818) 764-1892. Open Tuesday-Sunday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. No alcohol. Lot parking. Takeout. Discover, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $12 to $20; $3.95 lunch specials.