INDO Restaurant & Lounge — Restaurant in Palo Alto

An Indonesian restaurant close to me? yayyy :)

I'm indonesian so I grew up eating indo food and it's rather difficult finding a restaurant that is close to me until I read about this place. None of the food is really authentic and I know better than to think something called Indo restaurant and lounge would actually make legit authentic indo food, BUT they do offer something very similar and it still tastes great.

The place is really big! don't be fooled when you drive by it on el camino, because it's actually really long. They have nice outdoor seating that can accommodate large parties and they have a nice bar too. The place is casual to fancy-ish. It's definitely better than your normal restaurant. check out the website and you'll get a feel of how it is.

I came here for lunch on a Thursday with my coworkers and it wasn't particularly busy. We had a large party of about 8 people and we were seated outside. The waiter was super nice and he was really attentive :) He joked around with us and made sure we got everything we needed! so service was great and now onto the food.

INDO SAMPLER: chicken satays, samosa, poh pia, tartare. The chicken satays were delicious, it had a nice grilled char taste to it and their peanut sauce was super yummy. The samosa was okay, it was really dense it potatoes but I thought the flavoring of the samosa was decent. Poh pia is like a vietnamese spring roll, except that it's filled with tofu instead of shrimp and there wasn't mint. It was okay nothing really that special about it. The tartare was okay, it was kind of weird because the tartare was sitting on one of those shrimp cracker so combined it was a really weird mixture in my mouth. not really that fond of it.

MIE GORENG: MY FAVORITE. I love fried noodles so this dish was it for me. It was really flavorful, sweet, and spicy. The egg noodles absorbed all the flavor and so every bite was delicious.

CHILEAN SEA BASS: The fish was cooked perfectly. Very tasty, it was pan seared to perfection. The portion is really small, it is intended for like one person maybe two if you felt like sharing. The dish had some vegetables that came along with it and it was on the bottom, it served as a bed of the sea bass to sit on, it was a tad bit salty but flavor wise was good.

BIHUN GORENG: this is like fried noodles but with vermicelli instead. The thing is with vermicelli it doesn't absorb as much flavor so I thought it was bland. But the crab meat was a nice touch.

LAKSA NOODLES: This was super yummy too! It's a noodle soup and the soup is coconut based so it was heavy. But it was packed with a lot of flavor and they had some really nice jumbo prawns in it. This is on their special lunch menu, so it's meant for one person but you can easily share this dish.

SEAFOOD GREEN CURRY: I really really liked this curry. It was spicy! It had a lot of flavor and it tasted soo good with the rice.

We also got Jasmine rice, coconut rice, and brown rice to go along with our food. You can pick out what rice you like but I think everyone really loved the COCONUT RICE because it had extra flavor.

The food was great, the service was wonderful, the atmosphere was nice so I would go back here again. It is definitely BETTER...

So I got to try Indo last night and the first thing that jumps to my mind is Not So. Why you might ask, the challenge for Indo a self proclaimed Indonesia fusion restaurant, it tries to cater to a wide range of taste buds . That might be good for potential revenue but not for the food experience. It's not that dishes are bad, but they are americanized to the 10th degree. The menu spawns across Indonesian, Thai some Indian and some Chinese dishes. Again I get the concept but you need to work on the authenticity. The food presentation was nice, the service friendly and most attentive but the flavours were just nowhere to be found. The green papaya salad was neither green nor did it have the unique crisp taste accompanied with a hint of fish sauce, chilies, tomatoes and peanuts. It was rather sad looking and left no joy on my pallet. For the main course I ordered the spicy basil chicken, a dish which you can get on most street corners in Thailand. I asked the waiter if the chicken was prepared spicy. He pointed to the papaya salad as a comparison. As a result I asked him if he could make that chicken really spicy. As you guys know neither Indonesian nor Thai kitchens are strangers to beautiful deep chilly flavors. Well I was promised and eventually the chicken arrived... It was so bland, not a hint of pepper or chilies. Certainly I asked the waiter if I could get a side of chilly flakes to spice it up. I was brought a small bowl and warned that this would be super spicy. Well guess what it was as bland as the chicken .. My heart cries out, if you claim to bring south east Asian dishes to the bay, then please try to bring the flavours along. I get that food is americanized in the US but do you really need to completely forget the heritage of the kitchens you...

I figured I'd make the most of my checkup at Stanford Hospital and check out one of my bookmarks in the area, which brought me to Indo for lunch. It was pretty dead when I showed up around 1130, but once noon rolled around, the place was packed.

While prices were a bit on the higher side, they did have a few lunch items that rang up for a bit less. A bit of perusing, indecision, and asking for feedback led me to go with their:

Roti Prata - Different from other roti I've had in the past, theirs was on the thicker and doughier side, but much, much more enjoyable. For those who've had the thicker variety of Taiwanese scallion pancakes, you'll know exactly what I mean. The yellow dipping sauce was also quite excellent, albeit on the salty side, so dip accordingly.

Papaya Curried Beef - Braised beef shank in a red curry sauce. Tender, flavorful, and fantastically delicious. But, like the roti sauce, this was also on the saltier side, and I found myself running short of rice the more I kept eating.

I can't entirely decide between a 3.5 and 4 for Indo, but I'll go with the higher for now, with the following caveat: the food is pretty darn tasty, but be prepared for heavy-handed seasoning.

Accessibility Info

Venue - A large restaurant split between an outdoor, tented seating area, as well as proper indoor seating. The tables are all accessible, but given the tight positioning of the tables outside in relation to the heat lamps, spacing leaves a little to be desired. It was already a tight squeeze when I showed up and the place was empty: when I left, I had to ask a few people to move in order to squeeze past.

Bathroom -...