Everyone is family at Ibu’s Kitchen, a charming, homestyle Indonesian cafe in Tucker

On a chilly morning in Tucker, Rina Soejoedi is hauling bags of vegetables into a small storefront in a nondescript office complex off Northlake Road. The surroundings might be drab, but the business inside—Ibu’s Kitchen—is anything but: She enters a colorful space packed with Indonesian foods (coconut gel cubes, sambal spice packs, Kopiko coffee candies), a few tables, and a cooking area partially hidden behind a curtain. A logo on the front door depicts a smiling woman wearing a hijab and a large chef’s hat—that’s Rina, presumably. “All my daughter’s friends call me Ibu,” she says. The word means “mom” in Indonesian. 

The name of the cafe was obvious, she says: “Whatever Mom cooks, that is a good food.” Born in Indonesia, Rina opened Ibu’s Kitchen a little over a year ago with a business partner who’s originally from Malaysia. That means that—aside from a few American standbys like wings and burgers—Ibu’s offerings represent a blend of cuisines from the two Southeast Asian countries: homestyle Indonesian classics like nasi goreng, beef randang, and gado gado, along with a few Malaysian dishes like roti canai. 

But the menu, displayed on a series of blackboards hanging about the front counter, also boasts a variety of harder-to-find Indonesian dishes, among them siomay (fish dumplings), pecel (Javanese salad with peanut sauce), and gudeg (jackfruit cooked with palm sugar and coconut milk). Indonesian food relies heavily on coconut, peanuts, and shrimp and fish sauces, says Rina, who gets help in the kitchen from her head chef, Maria. A native of Mexico, Maria has been cooking Indonesian food around Atlanta for more than a decade, and knows her way around the cuisine—confidently explaining, for instance, the makeup of Ibu’s gado gado, a vegetarian dish of fried tofu, cubes of pounded rice, boiled eggs, bean sprouts, and carrots, all doused in a sauce of peanuts, coconut, and shrimp paste and topped with rice crackers.

Rina never thought she’d be in the food business. But as a child in Indonesia, she didn’t like school. “I don’t like academics, like boring people in a boring school,” she says. Her father insisted she study something. “I think, Okay, I just go to hotel school.” She learned the ins and outs of the hospitality business and had the opportunity to train in Switzerland. 

In 1998, an uncle of hers living in Atlanta beckoned, saying there was an opportunity to work here as a hotel chef. That didn’t pan out, but Rina still found work in the food industry, doing everything from running a halal grocery store to owning an Indonesian restaurant on Buford Highway (Tempo Doeloe, which closed in 2019). And she had a lot of other jobs in between. “I was driving a school bus, working in security. I drove Uber, Lyft. Everything.” She pauses. “As long as it’s halal.”

There’s a small Indonesian community in the metro area, and in the state around 7,000 in total, but Ibu’s customers are from all over, Rina says—many of them drawn by the Google reviews. “I keep asking customers, Why you come here?” They tell her, “I saw you have good review, that’s why we come.” Rina, meanwhile, is set to expand her customer base. Later this spring, Ibu’s Kitchen is moving to a larger space in Doraville that seats up to 60 people, and where Rina plans to serve Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican food—all halal. Currently she’s just waiting on DeKalb County to approve her business permit. 

A while after she’s unloaded the vegetables, a man walks in wearing a red and black jacket—a regular customer, Rina says—and asks for soup in a thick southern accent. “I don’t know what it’s called but I’ve seen the photo,” he says. “It’s an orange soup . . .” About 15 minutes later, he’s happily eating a bowl of laksa, a spicy, coconut-based noodle soup. 

Bringing happiness for her customers is a priority for Rita, who sees it as her way of fighting the doom and gloom of the news: “I know life is going crazy now, because the end of the world, you know. But we have to keep moving.” The news “wants everybody scared,” and when you’re scared and worried, she says, “you become sick.” She recalls a customer who came in one day with a cold. “And then he tried my lamb soup,” she says, and told her, “You made my day.”

A single mom, Rina says that these days she’s married to her business: “My customers are my family.”