This is one of Indonesia’s most famous dishes, some reckon the country’s national dish. I love the version they make near Citywalk Sudirman, where a whole bunch of carts congregate from late morning onwards. Every part of the salad, including the peanut sauce, is made to order, and the taste is rich and zingy. In Indonesian, ‘gado’ means to ‘consume without rice’ but ‘gado gado’ means ‘mix mix’. And this salad is indeed an incredible mixture of heaps of different ingredients. Snake beans, rice vermicelli noodles, rice cakes, bean sprouts, corn... everything gets stirred together and coated with the tasty peanut sauce. I love to perch on a plastic stool and watch my favourite gado gado guy make his salads on an enormous old stone cobek; it’s mesmerising. Even though a huge queue invariably forms, he still makes just one serve at a time. Never in multiples. To make the sauce, he grinds palm sugar, chilli, garlic, salt and peanuts together on the stone; this might sound ‘basic’ but the way he does it, it looks like art. The pragmatic chef in me always thinks it’d be far quicker to pre-make it in bulk but this is the way they roll here – everything made with intricacy, care and precision. Mind blowing. Once the sauce is smooth, he cuts up the rice cake, mixes it into the sauce with all the vegetables and some tofu and vermicelli, then places the whole thing on a plate. You help yourself to enormous rice crackers from a communal box then dig in.