New Wrigleyville Restaurant and Cafe Serves Twists on Chicago Classics Plus Taste of Home for Indonesian Community

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The first weekend of April is an exciting one in Wrigleyville: the Chicago Cubs have their home opener against the San Diego Padres on April 4, and the only Indonesian restaurant in the city opens on April 5. Rendang Republic is located just down the street from Wrigley Field, at 3355 N. Clark St., and while the neighborhood – with its packed bars and joints serving up hot dogs and burgers – may not be where you’d expect to find a restaurant serving up a rare-in-this-country cuisine, it offers a hungry crowd.

“I think the flavors are great and the food is great, so I just want to share the culture with everyone,” says John Avila, the chef behind Rendang Republic.

Avila and his business partner Syatrizal Hamdallah are hoping to draw in some of the neighborhood’s foot traffic with Indonesian twists on the sort of Chicago classics many baseball fans enjoy on game day. The restaurant’s focus is rendang, an aromatic protein dish with a flavorful, almost dry sauce that is one of Indonesia’s most popular meals. While Avila will offer his take on a classic rendang featuring beef, chicken, or vegetarian jackfruit over rice with sides and toppings, he also serves it on bread as a sort of Italian beef sandwich, topped with giardiniera, fried shallot, cilantro, green onion, and spicy sambal aioli. (Sambal is a chili paste similar to Sriracha.) 

Rendang Republic also has a hot dog – in this case, a chicken sausage from crosstown’s The Duck Inn, where Avila used to work. Fried shallot replaces a Chicago dog’s raw onion, a carrot-cucumber-shallot pickle mix known as acar acar serves as relish, the salad dabu dabu offers tomato, and cilantro, green onion, and sambal aioli round out the dragged-through-the-garden toppings, all on a poppy seed bun.

“It’s just perfect for this audience over here,” Avila opines.

But he’s not just aiming for people unfamiliar with Indonesian food. He also wants to offer a taste of home to Chicago’s small Indonesian community, which he says includes a lot of students. He discovered the work of one of them, the artist Luh Natalia Granquist, on Instagram, and invited her to paint two murals in the restaurant. “I want to create a space to have Indonesians to come, because they don’t have a place to hang out,” he says.

To that end, Rendang Republic will also operate as a cafe where people can spend a day, serving up Big Shoulders Coffee (with beans sourced from Indonesia’s Sumatra) and Volition Tea. The drinks highlight Indonesian flavors, too: the vanilla-like pandan features in an espresso and matcha drink, and an eponymous latte offers spice and coconut in a way that calls to mind chai.

Completing the fast-casual menu are additional approachable ins to Indonesian flavors: a fried chicken sandwich with some shared toppings from the other handhelds; fries flavored with spices inspired by the seasoning packets from instant versions of the stir-fried noodle dish mie goreng; and “Mama Betty’s” lumpia, or egg rolls.

“Mama Betty” is Avila’s Indonesian mom, who first inspired Avila to share Indonesian food with Chicago. When a career as a chef at various respected spots around Chicago suddenly came to a halt at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago, Avila launched a pop-up called Minahasa to sell the Indonesian food she cooked at home.

“I grew up eating Indonesian food and Filipino food,” Avila says; his dad was Filipino. (Lumpia are common in both Indonesian and Filipino cuisines.) “Throughout my whole professional life, she would always make egg rolls or some Indonesian food, and I would share it with my chefs and my team, and they’d be like, ‘Oh, this stuff is great!’” So he began cooking with his mom under the name Minahasa, mostly focusing on the food of her native North Sulawesi province.

The Duck Inn’s Kevin Hickey, with whom Avila has worked on and off for more than a decade, says Avila has become his own steward of his mom’s cooking and dishes. “You can taste his love and respect for his family and their culture in every bite of food he makes,” Hickey says. Their long relationship is part of why Avila is using a Duck Inn dog at Rendang Republic. “I love his hot dog, and I feel like it’s just right to do it,” Avila says.

Avila maintained Minahasa on and off over the years, running it as a pop-up and a food stall out of Revival Food Hall in the Loop for a time before joining with Hamdallah to rebrand as Rendang Republic and open their own restaurant.

Hamdallah has worked in the corporate food world in Chicago, but his family runs a popular chain of restaurants back in Indonesia. He’s from Padang on the island of Sumatra, where rendang originated. Rendang is technically a cooking method, in which aromatics and spices are made into a paste, cooked down, joined with coconut milk, and then cooked again for a long time until the oil separates and starts frying everything, according to Avila. He and Hamdallah traveled around Padang last year tasting various versions to refine their own.

“Each island has their own specific thing,” says Avila. Food in North Sulawesi tends to be loaded with spice – “as I’ve gotten older, it gives me indigestion,” Avila says ruefully – and feature pork, whereas other regions that are predominantly Muslim don’t eat pork. “I learn every time I go to Indonesia,” Avila says. “It’s just a new experience.”

While characterizing the food of a heterogeneous country with a population of over 280 million people spread across some 17,000 islands is perhaps even more difficult than trying to define American food, Avila identifies a few general characteristics. “Indonesia is the spice islands,” he says, home to peppercorn, clove, cinnamon, and nutmeg, among others. Those spices often mix with other bold flavors like chili, coconut milk, galangal, lemongrass, ginger, and turmeric. Many of those flavors can also be found in the cuisines of other Southeast Asian countries, and Avila says that those places influenced the food, along with India and China. “It’s just a melting pot of all those cultures,” he says.

That’s one of the things he loves about Indonesian food: its ability to showcase culture and tell stories. Rendang Republic allows him to do the same. “This brings me closer to my heritage,” he says. “I just wanted to connect with my Indonesian side more, so the food is what brings me closer to it.”

Rendang Republic opens April 4, and is open Wednesday through Sunday from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm.