The holy month of Ramadan is a good time to get together with friends and families. Some groups will visit a dining place where they wait for the time to break the 13 hours fast at around 6 PM. After some hot drinks and light snacks the groups will take turn for mandatory prayer and continue with dinner and good conversation. More prayers follows and afterwards some light snacks, coffee/tea and more chats.

Our favorite place for breakfasting with friends and families is the Bimasena Lobby Lounge at the Bimasena Club in South Jakarta. During the fasting month, the 445 square meters Bimasena Lobby Lounge is decorated with 1001 Nights theme, flickering candles, shisha pipes, and Middle Eastern knick-knacks.

The cozy lounge can accommodate more than 100 people sitting on the floor with thick carpets and colorful sultan cushions and 50 seats on round tables.

Lavish buffet features all kinds of foods and drinks enough to satisfy most tastes. Servers in Arabian nights costumes swirled ready to help guests decide what choices to make. On some days, the venue that has 5 rotation of buffet menu, is reserved for groups and not opened for the general public, thus it is sensible to make reservations in advance.

On our recent visit, the Bimasena was on Menu 3 with a large selection for tajil, a step to immediately break the fast with light snacks and drinks. Those who like cold drinks are free to choose ice drinks such as iced tea, es blewah (thinly sliced cantaloupe drink), and es puter (traditional ice made with coconut milk instead of milk).

Some who would like to have warm snacks and drinks can have kolak (sweet potato compote) and hot drinks from the urn with choices of teh tarik and wedang ronde. Teh tarik as defined by infopedia is a drink made by cooling a brew of hot tea and milk through the process of pouring and “pulling” it between two cups or mugs to create a rich, frothy drink. Wedang ronde, also a hot drink, comes with chewy balls made of dough with brown sugar and crushed peanut inside.

The fried snacks corner presented the all time favorites: chicken martabak, Sumedang tofu, fried cassava and spring roll. The best way is to savor them is straight from the fryer, while still warm and crispy.

We stopped by the live station where a lady in a Jeannie costume without veil was cooking kue cucur, a sweet snack made of rice flour, brown sugar and coconut milk. Plates of market munchies ornamented the kue cucur table.

Trays of dates, the jewels of Ramadan, om ali (Middle Eastern pudding) and baklava (sweet phyllo pastry) maintained the Arabian Night theme of Bimasena Lobby Lounge.

The sunset prayer allows for some rest to hefty appetite after a day’s fasting. The soup station is the place to go to for steamboat soup with selections of meat, poultry, seafood, mushrooms and vegetables. It is like a personal menu where you can also choose tom yum soup, beef soup or laksa broth.

At the traditional cart labeled bakso loncat is meatball sausage in herb broth with traditional condiments.

The ambience at the Bima Sena Lobby Lounge is clearly the 1001 Nights, but the main course is truly international. With special arrangements for Indian, Egyptian and Korean, we opted for t he Korean style BBQ Beef Rib with the familiar steam rice and assorted Kimchee.

The Rice Station came with Nasi Kapau Minang, a rice dish of West Sumatera, Indonesia with assorted side dishes. Not far from Nasi Kapau is Nasi Kebuli, a Middle Eastern style fried rice.

Other live stations have chicken shawarma, teppanyaki and tempura. It was really hard for us to make a choice between roast smoked coriander crusted Striplin Angus beef and whole lobster Padang style. We ended up having bits of each and did not regret it.

Author Michelle Berriedale-Johnson, in her book Festive Feasts Cookbook has a chapter titled The 1001 Arabian Nights: Feasting with the Caliph.  In it she wrote, large plates of fresh herbs, salads and pickles are served with every Arab meal and would include spring onions, radishes, celery and lost of mint, parsley, coriander and tarragon. We had those in the form of fresh and crispy Mediterranean Salad.

Perhaps because tajil has so many choices, desserts can not compete with them, but we were delighted to have assorted French pastry, sweet choux and fresh fruits.

In the end, being with friends and families is what counts, but such gathering during the holy month of Ramadan feels more meaningful in 1001 Nights setting.

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Images: Omar Niode Foundation