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Best Selat solo in Sydney
“A Javanese beefsteak in a mildly sweet watery sauce—part salad, part soup, part bistro dish.”
What the real thing tastes like
Selat solo (Javanese for: "Solo salad") is a Javanese dish influenced by Western cuisine; it is a specialty of Solo city, Central Java, Indonesia. It consists of braised beef tenderloin served in thin watery sauce made from a mixture of garlic, vinegar, kecap manis (sweet soy sauce), Worcestershire sauce, water, and spiced with nutmeg and black pepper. It is served with hard boiled egg and vegetables such as string beans, potato, tomato, lettuce, cucumber, cauliflower or broccoli and carrot, and topped with potato chips and some dash of mustard, hollandaise or sauce gribiche on the side. Despite its Javanese name—Selat Solo—that denote "salad", its centerpiece is the chunk of beef (preferably tenderloin) that makes this dish hardly a salad, it is more likely to be categorized as a type of braised beef steak in Javanese mildly sweet watery sauce. Some might describe this dish as the cross-over between beefsteak, salad and soup. This dish sometimes also called as Bistik Jawa (Javanese be
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Selat Solo arrives as a mild contradiction: a dish named for salad but built around tender beef braised in a thin, sweet-savory sauce of garlic, vinegar, kecap manis, and Worcestershire. It's a Javanese answer to Western bistro cooking, where the soft meat meets crisp vegetables—green beans, potatoes, tomato—and finishes with a scatter of potato chips and a smear of mustard or hollandaise. Neither quite soup nor steak nor salad, it exists in that hybrid space where colonial influence meets home cooking.
Order it here when it has
- tender, quality beef centerpiece
- layered sauce from multiple sources
- vegetable variety included
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