Jakarta's Best Sichuan Food Is In a Dying Red Light District

There was a time when openly telling someone you were heading up to Lokasari was sure to elicit some strange looks. The shopping complex, the kind of self-contained warren of small streets and bright lights that's common in Indonesian cities, is located in Jakarta's rough and seedy north end. Well, technically, it's in West Jakarta, but no one ever calls it that. And, for years, heading to "North Jakarta"—especially the area around Lokasari—meant you were heading out for a night of drug-fueled partying in a massive dodgy club like Mille's.

Mille's was a super sketchy club that was, in many ways, the epitome of North Jakarta nightlife. It was massive, a place with multiple dance floors and a confusing maze of hallways leading to what seemed like hundreds of closed karaoke room doors. It played mostly funkot, an annoying speed freak version of House music played at 220 BPM that you hear in shitty clubs and shittier taxis.

The decor looked like it was taken off a set of the movie Caligula, all Grecian columns, white stone horses, and weirdly sexualized Chinese guardian lions. Its entrance was hidden in a parking garage in the back of Lokasari. On the weekends, it never closed and everyone there seemed to be pretty high, pretty much all the time.

The club shut for good in 2016 after an off duty cop was caught in a raid with meth, Ecstasy, and heroin on him. It was the second time the club was sanctioned for taking a, shall we say, pretty permissive approach to drug use on its on premise in less than a year, so the authorities told the owners the party was over, forever. Today, the sign is still there, but that's about it.

Alright, so you might be wondering why I am wasting so many words describing a club that no longer exists. It's because Lokasari, and its reputation, is inescapably linked to the kinds of drug-and-sex nightlife that places like Mille's represented. But beneath all that hedonism is another side of Lokasari, a daytime side of the square, where restaurants serving some pretty legit. regional Chinese food are the real draw. And that's what recently drew me to Lokasari two times in the same week.

First some quick background: I used to live in China, and I have a pretty troubled past with Sichuan food—the same regional cuisine Lokasari's restaurants are famous for cooking up. Five years ago, I was in Chongqing, a massive city in southwestern China, when I bit into my first ma lak, or Sichuan peppercorn. That bite changed everything I thought I knew about spicy food. Now, I grew up—and still live—in Indonesia, a country where raw cabe rawit, or bird's eye chili, is basically a standard side dish. So I thought I knew spicy. Then I ate my first peppercorn. My mouth felt like I had just licked a taser. My tongue went numb. And for hours, it was hard to eat anything at all.

So, after that, I sorta kept my distance from Sichuan food for years. And then, one day, one of my editors was telling me about how he had been to Lokasari a bunch of times recently to eat Chinese food and that he couldn't help but notice how much the place had changed since Mille's shut down. I wanted to see it for myself and I also figured now was as good a time as any to re-confront my old nemesis, the peppercorn.

Hua Shen is one of the best Sichuan places in Jakarta, and it also didn't have a massive line when I showed up, so I went right inside and sat down. The restaurant's manager, a man named Firmansyah, told me that yes, Hua Shen did serve peppercorn and he suggested a mixed broth hotpot called Cia Po that was as rich as it was spicy. The hotpot was full of veggies, mushrooms, crispy lotus root, fish belly, and tofu. It came with a side of live shrimp you were supposed to throw, still squirming, into the lethally hot brew.

"People say it's cruel [to eat live shrimp], but that's what makes them taste good and fresh," the manager said with a chuckle.

He told me to taste the broth first. It was, honestly, pretty amazing. The Cia Po tasted like a fish broth, but full of flavors that complimented it so well that it was downright delicious. But as good as the Cia Po was, it wasn't not the real MVP here. That's the shrimp.

I bit down on a now dead, and very orange, shrimp covered in peppercorn. I felt the strange sting almost immediately but then the spiciness subdued a bit. It wasn't as mouth-numbing as the stuff I ate in Chongqing, which, for me, was a good thing. I honestly doubt diners in Jakarta would return if they lost all feeling of their tongues after every meal. The dish was definitely worth the trip, and in a complex that's really struggling a bit to draw a crowd, it's been able to keep not one, but two locations open (the other serves steamboat, another form of hotpot that looks like a soup so full of seafood that it's almost crawling out of it).

"We didn’t rely only on Mille’s," the manager told me. "There are other nightclubs, like Sun City, nearby. Where do they go after partying all night? Lokasari. Mille’s shutdown has impacted Lokasari, but we still have customers here."

Sadly, some of the other spots haven't been so lucky. Mille's was only one of nearly a dozen or so nightclubs and karaoke places in Lokasari, but it was, by far, the biggest. On a given night, it could draw more than 1,000 people to the square, and since it closed super late, if at all, its business spilled over into a whole economic ecosystem of salons, clothing stores, food stalls, and minimarts that orbited the club. So when it shut down, Lokasari lost its economic center.

"Most places shut down because they didn't have any customers [after Mille's closed]," explained Dwi Alfianto, a security guard who has worked in Lokasari for a decade. "If there were clubs around, it would be packed, but if without them, this area is a total wreck."

I asked Hua Shen's manager if the restaurant was ever affected by Lokasari's seedy reputation.

"We warn our customers not to bring or use drugs here," he told me. "We don’t want people to think that our restaurant is a stomping ground for drug dealers. This is very important for us, because not all customers come here with good intentions."

The thing is, he's right. And it's almost by design. Way back in the day, during the Dutch colonial years, Lokasari was known as Prinsen Park and it was still an "entertainment" district, but one where standup comedy and theaters were the main draw. In the early years of Indonesia's independence, Lokasari was home to the actors and filmmakers who gave birth to the country's cinematic industry. If the United States has Hollywood, and India Bollywood, then, for a bit there, Indonesia had Tangkiwood, named after Tangki village, a series of alleys in Lokasari that were known for its charismatic and mysterious residents, mostly wedding performers, who were very sheltered and rarely ventured outside of the village.

But by the 1980s, Lokasari took a turn toward the seedy, according to JJ Rizal, who manages publishing at the Bamboo Community. It was then that the city's then governor Ali Sadikin, a man who used now-illegal industries like casinos to develop the city into what it is today, transformed the entire Mangga Besar area into a legal gambling hub.

The brothels and sex shops hawking "vitality" pills and tonics soon followed, and, two decades later, clubs like Mille's continued this tradition by offering all kinds of then illegal entertainment in one massive club.

“Lokasari was a source of joy that eventually declined and is still searching for a new version of itself," JJ Rizal told me. "Its position has never been a stable one."

So can a fiery cuisine save a dying square? It's still too soon to tell. But judging by the lines outside some of the Sichuan spots, the answer to that question is leaning more toward yes.