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Wednesday, January 21, 2004
toko oen (part 4)
the story of toko oen, the city's oldest restaurant, begins in 1922 in yogyakarta with a housewife who had time on her hands. liem gien nio was the wife of oen tjoen hok, a chinese-indonesian lieutenant, who wanted something to do after finishing her housework. she was an expert cook of dutch & chinese food, so she started making different types of cookies & selling them, with her customers including the chinese & dutch communities & the javanese nobility of yogyakarta. the cookies sold like, well, hot cakes. liem soon established a small cake shop, toko oen, at the strategic location of jl. tugu kidul in yogyakarta, with its name taken from her husband. the shop, with its delicious cakes & cookies, soon established a regular customer base. as more people came to try the cakes, the family opened another room where people could sit down & have a drink.
after 3 years, they expanded the restaurant again & hired staff to help them, including cooks making more substantial meals than cakes. the family considered opening branches outside of yogyakarta, & on april 16, 1936, toko oen semarang on bodjong weg, now jalan pemuda, served up its first meals to customers.
branches in jakarta & malang soon followed. bodjong, running from the tugu muda (youth monument) through to the harbor, was the main road in semarang, home to important offices such as the train bureau & post office.
liem's granddaughter yenny megaputri, who is a graduate in architecture from delft university & manages toko oen, said the restaurant, with its tall windows & high curved roof, was built in the jugendstijl (young style) that was popular in europe from the end of the 19th century.
what makes toko oen special is that it has not changed over the years. today it has a mall in front of it & modern shops as its neighbors, but toko oen has not changed. toko oen has always been famed for its rich menu -- beef steak, fried rice, satay, tutti frutti ice cream & many others. its interior is even more beautiful than its exterior. the windows have green curtains & there are checkered tiles on the floor. two big fans on the ceiling, like in the old days, fight the semarang heat. a grand piano has been a resident since 1936 & it still works well today. dutch cookies & cakes are displayed in tall glass jars, & its menus & crockery hark back to the 1930s. even the waiters, some of them are the sons of the men who first worked in toko oen, wear the peci (traditional black cap) & white uniforms of their forbears.
"if a chair is broken, we change it for a similar one," said one of the staff members. yenny megaputri said any change would be to the detriment of the restaurant's atmosphere. "i love old buildings so i will not make any change to this restaurant," said yenny.
the semarang restaurant is the only one in indonesia still run by the family, in 1958, toko oen jakarta & yogyakarta stopped running due to the absence of family members willing to take them over. toko oen malang is still running but under different management.
but yenny has made some strategic business steps. she opened 2 branches in delft & the hague respectively in 1997 & 2000. because of its history & its quaint colonial characteristics, toko oen is a favorite place to visit for dutch tour groups. some of them spent their youth in semarang; as they sit on the chairs in toko oen, perhaps they are reliving in their mind the days of their youth when they danced, sang & dined at this famous restaurant.
(source: http://www.semarang.nl)
*below are the pictures - outside & inside the building. u can see the old photo of the first owner and her husband hanging on the wall. and of course the beautiful lady. who? ME of course!! hehehe*
stelly @ 11:12 PM
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