Medan Ciak: Fatty delights come with skinny price

Want to know if you've found a legit Indonesian restaurant? Check the tip jar. Here on this little corner where Strawberry meets Surry Hills, it's a silver dish filled with Australian and Singaporean dollars. I take this as a very good sign.

And on every table, it's either off-duty taxi-drivers still in their uniforms or nearby office workers stopping in for the restaurant's impressive nasi lemak.

Here, it's the "komplit" version – everything you could hope for on one plate, with a side order of blocked arteries, starting with coconut rice and dry, salty little ikan bilis. Those are the tiny crisp fish flavour bombs that you mix up with red peanuts, when ordering a dish of fat rice.

A deep-fried chicken leg, the skin tight against the flesh, falls away from the bone on impact. A perfect dry chicken curry, rich and nutty, sits next to a single boiled egg half, refreshed with rounds of cucumber. It really is a complete lunch.

The char kway teow shimmers with pork fat – the noodles a little paler and less wok-smoky, the sauce not all that tamarind-heavy than the stir-fried noodle dish you might be used to.

But what sets it apart is the fact that pork fat deeply flavours the noodles, giving them a light musky flavour, bolstered by thin slices of fish cake, shreds of omelette and whole prawns, lifted with slices of green onion. Add a little sambal at your own risk/taste.

But probably, to get a very decent idea of what this little canteen is all about, look to the mie pangsit medan – an "everything but the kitchen sink" dish combining thin egg noodles, sweet pieces of caramelised pork and bits of pork crackling topped with green onions and a soy sauce-soaked boiled egg.

Off to the side, you'll find a little dish of sambal, raw chilli and raw garlic. And then, the final razzle amongst all that dazzle, a little bowl filled with chicken soup holding a single wonton and a single pearlescent fish cake. It's the dish of funk, spice and push-me-pull-you flavour.

If you've been idly thinking "gee, there's a lot of pork fat on this Indonesian menu – what's going on?", you're not wrong. This is Batak food from Medan, where the population is mostly Christian rather than Muslim.

So it's a celebration of all things porcine, which seems to mainly come courtesy of a massive hot box at the front of the (otherwise very basic) dining room.

Best of all, nothing here tips over the $14 mark (that's the steamed rice served with barbecue and roast pork), so you can eat here with change from a twenty.

And in a city where a single dumpling can cost more than a week's worth of milk, that's a refreshingly delicious piece of news.