Last Updated on March 6, 2025
Authentic Indonesian cooking
3.5 out of 5.0 stars
Toba is all about taking you on a culinary journey around the many islands that make up Indonesia with many dishes inspired by chef Pino’s own family recipes. The menu is designed for sharing and offers a large range of dishes, both instantly recognisable and unfamiliar. This comfortable restaurant is hidden away just steps from Piccadilly in St James’s Market between Haymarket and Lower Regent Street.
There’s a playful collection of signature cocktails and mocktails with an Indonesian twist. Described as an Indonesian refreshment, the Toba Blush is a mix of gin, ginger liqueur, lime and lemongrass all topped with tonic water. My companion’s choice, this was a tall refreshing glass with dryness from the gin and a nice kick from the ginger.
Meanwhile, I picked Pino’s Colada, a “creamy coconut Martini”. This sweet bourbon-based drink (combined with Bailey’s and coconut liqueur) hit me with instant warmth and a feeling of tipsiness.
Our patient waitress talked us through the menu and gave us lots of ideas about what to choose. We ended up going for many of her recommendations.
We both loved the Sate Ayam, a very good example of a chicken sate served with a generous amount of home-made peanut sauce. We liked the smoky char on the tender chicken skewers. This is one of the signature dishes on the menu, and we could see why. I can’t imagine anyone being bored of chicken sate, but for those wanting to branch ou,t Toba also offers ox-tongue skewers served with a yellow sauce.
For our second starter, we tried the Otak Otak, a dish that is native to Palembang in South Sumatra. Served with a spicy peanut sauce, Otak Otak is long tubes of fish compressed with rice, wrapped in banana leaves and grilled.
Next up were the mains, starting with smashed fried chicken with a special shallot sambal. Our waitress had made careful enquiries about our tolerance for chili. We both scored ourselves as “middling British” on the heat scale, so she proposed serving the Ayam Geprek Sambal Bayang with the sauce on the side. We should have heeded her warning more carefully. I was saved from trying the sambal by my companion’s reaction to the extreme heat, which once she’d started to recover was pronounced “stratospheric”. That said, the fried chicken was delicious on its own. Definitely a dish for fans of fiery spiciness.
Based on Pino’s mother’s own recipe, the Ikan Arsik was an amazingly colourful and fresh dish of flaky cod, green beans and juices rich in ginger and citrus.
The Vegetables and Salads section of the menu is packed with interesting dishes, making Toba a good spot for vegetarians. We decided to try the Terong Balado from Penang in South Sumatra. This was the dish of the day for both of us – spicy, juicy, almost melting aubergine, chunks of well-cooked tofu, loads of rich chilli sauce and crunchy Sator beans.
We finished our lunch at Toba with a couple of vivid green treats from the dessert menu. The Dadar Gulung, a pandang rolled pancake stuffed with coconut and served with a caramel sauce, had a surprising savoury element to balance all the sweet. Our other choice was the Kue Lapis, a layered rice-flour pudding, which tasted very much like a rice pudding but with a very different texture.
If you love peanuts, chilli (especially the hot stuff), and well-flavoured food, you will feel right at home at Toba. Good-quality ingredients and cooking, some familiar and some unusual dishes, all make for a good introduction to authentic Indonesian cooking.
Toba
1a St James’s Market,
St. James’s,
London SW1Y 4AH,
United Kingdom
Telephone: 020 7839 8659
Looking for something different? We also love Yaatra in nearby Westminster
