You Can Taste the History Of Belitung In This Bowl

Ibu Atep looks decades younger than her real age. We're sitting in her small noodle shop in Tanjung Pandan, the only city on the Indonesian island of Belitung, talking about what makes her soup so famous when she told me that her 48-year-old son runs another branch in the Jakarta suburbs. Wait, I thought… a 48-year-old son? How old are is she? Seventy-two, she tells me. The secret, she says is in the soup. She eats it every day.

"Maybe that's the secret," she says. "That and singing. I love to sing. It relaxes me."

Mie Belitung is synonymous with Belitung—an under-developed island off the coast of Sumatra with one of the most vibrant and entrenched Chinese communities in Indonesia. Chinese immigrants began to arrive in Belitung in the 1700s to work in the island's tin mines. When tin mining moved to neighboring Bangka island, many Chinese workers remained behind.

The island, like Indonesia as a whole, is still predominately Muslim, but the Chinese ethnic minority retains a strong sense of cultural ties with mainland China while still adopting local traditions and customs.

Mie Belitung is the island's ethnic mix in a bowl. Belitung is a fishing community, so the soup is loaded with seafood—like small shrimp and fried fish bakwan. The stock is made of Indonesian spices like galangal, candlenut, ginger, garlic, and red onion, while Chinese staples like tofu, egg noodles, and bean sprouts speak to the Chinese roots of locals like Ibu Atep.

Mie Belitung Atep might be the third most-popular thing about the island—after former Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama and the hit Indonesian film Laskar Pelangi. The walls of her humble shop are adorned with photos of the celebrities and politicians who stopped by to eat a bowl of her famous noodles. In one photo, a middle-aged Ibu Atep is in the middle of a friendly conversation with former president Megawati Soekarnoputri. The former president is smiling.

How did Mie Belitung Atep get so famous? Ibu Atep says the recipe came from her mother, a local Chinese woman who married an immigrant from mainland China. She experimented with the dish and eventually discovered the family recipe that made Ibu Atep a household name.

"There is nothing special in the family recipe," she tells me. "It's ordinary Mie Belitung. I'm not sure why it got so famous. Maybe it's just the right composition of everything."

The soup is pretty amazing. There's a delicate balance to the flavor. The stock is addictive, it's sweet, spicy, and tangy at the same time, with just the right amount of richness to hook you without being too heavy. The noodles are soft, but still chewy with just the right amount of flavor to balance out the stock richness. And everything else, the krupuk crackers and fried fish, adds a perfect amount of crunch to each bite.

"Mie Belitung has been around since God-knows-when," she says. "But only mine is sold under the name 'Atep.' I was a fat child, and my parents called me 'tep' [a word meaning 'fasto' in Hakka Chinese] and 'Atep' just stuck with me. I guess it's an appropriate name for a noodle seller."

Ibu Atep still arrives at her shop every morning to prepare the ingredients. She cooks everything herself, her skills honed to precision after 44 years of selling the same dish.

"I don't trust anyone else with my family's secret recipe," she says. "I wake up every morning to cook the stock and boil the noodles. For the noodles, the timing has to be just right to get the right texture. I buy them from my friend, who has been supplying me handmade noodle since I first started this shop [in 1973]. The toppings are easy to find in nearby markets. They just need to be warmed up, boiled or pan-fried."

The restaurant wasn't always this popular. When it first opened its doors, Ibu Atep worked from 7 am to 11 pm every day, rising at dawn to prepare the ingredients herself. Today, her work day is a bit more relaxed. Mie Belitung Atep is only open 12 hours a day—from 8 am to 8 pm.

The noodle shop put her three children through university, one bowl at a time. Today two of them run their own Mie Belitung Atep restaurants—one near the airport and another in Serpong, South Tangerang.

"I thank heaven for the increase in tourism to Belitung," she says. "Back in the day, the tour operators came to my shop and brought in Indonesian and international guests to try my noodles. Now the fame is its own draw. We've been popular with locals and tourists alike even before Laskar Pelangi. Before Ahok."

But she's already spent more than four decades working the restaurant's kitchen. Will she ever retire, I ask.

"Why should I," she says. "I've got nothing else to do."