This article is written by a student writer from the Spoon University at Northwestern chapter.
“For the most part, it’s all stuff I learned from my mom,” Chris Reed, the co-founder and head chef of Bumbu Roux, explained.
Chris is half Dutch-Indonesian but has only visited Indonesia once back in 2016. “I need to know that I’m making this like it’s made there,” he said.
“At times, and I don’t truly believe this, but I will have an imposter thing going on, like do people not believe me?” he continued. He never learned to speak Indonesian and simply didn’t grow up there either.
“But when it comes down to it, I don’t think that matters,” Chris concluded. “I mean, these are things that my grandmother was cooking. These are the recipes she passed to my mom and my mom passed to me.”
His mom is Jane Reed. They co-founded Bumbu Roux together in 2008. The pair began by catering Indonesian food, just as Jane did with her own mother many years ago.
Her story begins back in 1945 when Indonesia celebrated independence, the beginning of freedom from Dutch colonial rule. But for Jane, it meant exile, as anyone with Dutch relations had to leave.
Her grandfather was Dutch, one of the colonists themselves, and his daughter, Jane’s mother, married an Indonesian working in the Dutch Air Force.
Jane was only three but she remembers. “We left with two suitcases,” she recalled, on a ship journeying for a month to the Netherlands.
It wasn’t easy. They left their family behind and arrived with nothing. Her mother had to give birth on the ship, with two young children on top of that and who up to that point in her life had never felt the bite of a cold breeze.
Her father, still working for the Air Force, eventually moved them to Germany. There was no Indonesian food in Germany at the time, and Jane’s mother could cook, so the solution was simple.
“She would be the one to go to if you wanted to have Indonesian food,” Jane said. Jane’s mother catered and Jane always found herself helping out.
“Then I met my husband,” she said.
He worked for the American army stationed there, alongside Jane’s dad. But there were a couple of bumps along the way.
First, her mother wanted Jane to have an arranged marriage with a man she selected herself. Second, out of all the people Jane’s mother would have picked, it would not have been a Black man from Louisiana.
“Then my mother had this crazy idea,” Jane said. She actually wanted Jane to go to the U.S.. “Then you can see for yourself that it’s not for you,” her mother had told her.
So she did, with one exception. “I went here and I never came back,” Jane revealed. “I didn’t tell them I was getting married until the day before. If they could have crawled through the telephone, they would have.”
But what was done was done. The man from Louisiana and the Dutch-Indonesian woman were married. Together, they had Chris.
Jane recalled how Chris always loved to be with her in the kitchen, even just to help her grab ingredients. She once overheard him declare as a child, “I want to become a chef.”
So he did. Chris went to culinary school and began working in restaurants. But he still always wanted to do his own thing, and Jane was ready to support him. “I realized there was an absence of Indonesian food around so I was like, I can fill that,” Chris said.
When they started catering, it was actually called “The Rice Table.”
It’s the English translation of the Dutch word rice table. It refers to a type of communal meal where many small Indonesian dishes are served alongside rice.
You can still find them hosting rice -baffles occasionally at Sketchbook Brewing in Skokie. They serve twelve to thirteen dishes including cattle (vegetables in peanut sauce), Egg Fried Sambal (hard-boiled egg in chili sauce), pork the semur (braised pork belly), yellow tofu (tofu) and chicken satay (chicken skewers).
Chris decided to pursue their business full-time in 2018. “At that point too, I started to try to incorporate more of the Cajun Creole stuff that I knew from my dad,” Chris said. It was a way to continue expanding their menu in a way that still felt true to himself.
He also thought it helped to introduce Indonesian food. “People always like the food but you have to get them to try it first,” Chris said. So he tried to make it feel more familiar.
“How can I sneak some shred (Indonesian spiced stewed meat) in?” Chris thought. “People like a sandwich. Well, let’s just make that with pulled pork, but made with all the spices you would make with rendang.”
In 2020, they got the food truck. The name got a revamp too. Bumbu is the spice base of Indonesian cooking while roux is the flour base of many Cajun and Creole dishes. Together, these two building blocks of their respective cuisines make Bumbu Roux.
The Pulled Pork Sandwich made it into the menu: bold spicy pork layered with bright pickled papaya coleslaw, cucumbers and fried shallots. So did the Cajun fries, dressed with a rich peanut sauce and tangy tomato hot sauce. On the Creole side, they serve a Shrimp Po’Boy Sandwich with remoulade.
Despite working with fusion food, neither Chris nor Jane is a fan of Americanizing their flavors or compromising ingredients.
“If you want to have real food, it has to be authentic,” Jane said. She admits that she cheats sometimes by using powdered spices, but not Chris. “He goes to every store to find the fresh stuff,” she said.
While Chris was modest, Jane did what any mom is best at, showing off her son’s accomplishments.
Jane explained that he’s not afraid to push the boundaries of recreating real Indonesian food. He’s made fried rice with chicken livers and soto (soup) with tripe. He once also made a dish with If (stink beans).
“The funny thing is, people just love it,” Jane said. “There’s not one time when he made something and people didn’t like it.”
You can find Bumbu Roux doing pop-ups at Sketchbook Brewing in Evanston and Skokie, and around Chicago. Stay up to date through their Instagram @bumburouxchi
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