La Cucina Keeps It Classic With Home-Style Cooking

La Cucina offers rustic Italian fare in a cozy setting. (Photo courtesy of La Cucina)

Italian restaurant La Cucina offers home comfort along with its dishes. Situated in the busy area of Kemang in South Jakarta, the newly opened establishment began as an experiment between close friends Anjani Azwar, Nadia Zein and Dade Suwiryo. With a name that translates into “The Kitchen,” the pint-sized restaurant focuses on Italian cuisine but also offers a variety of other Western food.

For the founders, settling on Italian as the core of their offerings was a no-brainer. Anjani was formerly an assistant chef at an Italian eatery in the Netherlands, while Nadia says “We all love Italian food, don’t we?”

“Italian food sits well with everyone, no matter their nationality,” she says. “It’s because the basic ingredients are things that all tongues are comfortable with: garlic, peppers, tomatoes and loads and loads of cheese.”

The friends are particularly proud of the variety of their spaghetti dishes. La Cucina currently offers 10 types, from favorites like spaghetti aglio olio and spaghetti with creme and tuna, to spaghetti with smoked whitefish, which is prepared with a basil and lemon dressing.

For their vegetarian guests, La Cucina also offers the vegietale spaghetti, with carrot, zucchini, and broccoli.

Fresh herbs are a must in the dishes.

“The ingredients for an Italian dish are generally easy to come by in supermarkets and even traditional markets. Sometimes fresh herbs are a challenge to find, but even though they can often be substituted with dried herbs, we know that customers with a more sensitive tongue will be able to tell the difference. That is why we also try our utmost to get fresh herbs,” Dade says.

Nadia says other favorites include two non-Italian dishes: the roast chicken, and the Juicy Lucy burger.

“We serve the roast chicken either whole or half, with homemade fries and fresh coleslaw. It involves a two-day operation of marinating the chicken with fresh herbs and letting it sit for those two days. We then grill it in the rotisserie for a little less than two hours to get that juicy meat,” Nadia explains.

The burger is called the Juicy Lucy because of “the juiciness that our homemade seasoning gives to the homemade patty.”

“We did a lot of experimenting with each initial recipe, sometimes even reaching a point where there was nothing left [from the original recipe]. Getting to the right taste involves a lot of tinkering and experimenting,” Dade says.

Nadia says the initial ideas came from all over — their staff, the Internet, and their growing catalogue of cookbooks.

It wasn’t an easy undertaking for the three friends to start their own restaurant, and they cite finding the right interior decorators and contractors as being some of the biggest challenges, especially as they got closer to the launch date a few months ago. Fortunately, the homey, rustic look they settled on was not difficult for them to agree on, as they all shared the same taste.

“Looking for the right kitchen staff was also stressful,” Nadia says.

La Cucina now has two staff members working in the kitchen and two wait staff.

The restaurant is often booked for events like birthday parties. The founders have also held movie nights and book discussions. Recently, they also started doing an open mic night every second Saturday of the month to spice up La Cucina.

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