Must Try Local Dishes in Jakarta
Part of the Jakarta travel guide — see every topic in All Jakarta Guides.
Jakarta has two food identities. The first is national: because everyone in Indonesia eventually comes to Jakarta, the city holds the best Padang, Javanese, Sundanese, Manadonese and Batak cooking outside their home regions, often at street prices. The second is Betawi — the cuisine of the city's original inhabitants, a creole of Malay, Sundanese, Javanese, Chinese, Arab and Dutch influences that exists nowhere else and is genuinely under threat from the city's own scale.
The Betawi dishes
Soto Betawi is the emblem: beef and offal in a broth enriched with coconut milk and, traditionally, buffalo milk, with fried shallots, tomato and lime — rich, sour and unlike any other soto in Indonesia. Kerak telor is a Betawi street snack cooked over charcoal in a wok that is flipped to expose the surface to the flame: glutinous rice and duck egg with fried shallot, dried shrimp and grated coconut, crisp on one side. Gado-gado, ketoprak and asinan Betawi complete the set.
The national spread
Padang restaurants stack their curries in the window and ladle them over rice; Jakarta's are as good as Sumatra's. Sundanese places from West Java do grilled fish, raw vegetables with sambal and sour sayur asem. Manadonese cooking from North Sulawesi is the spiciest food in the country. Batak restaurants do pork and andaliman pepper, which numbs like Sichuan pepper. Javanese gudeg and Balinese babi guling both have outposts here. It is the only city where you can eat the whole archipelago in a week.
Street and everyday
Nasi goreng and mie goreng from a cart with a distinctive knock. Bakso meatball soup, announced by a bell. Sate ayam and sate kambing over charcoal. Martabak in both forms — the savoury folded pancake and the thick sweet one loaded with chocolate, cheese and condensed milk. Bubur ayam for breakfast. Ketoprak, rice cake and tofu under peanut sauce. Almost all of it is 15,000–40,000 rupiah.
Sweet things and where to eat
Es selendang mayang is a Betawi shaved-ice dessert with slabs of coloured rice-flour jelly in coconut milk and palm sugar, sold from carts and increasingly rare. Es doger is the fermented-cassava version. Kue cubit and kue rangi are the street cakes. For eating: the Glodok alleys for Chinese-Indonesian, Jalan Sabang and Pecenongan for late-night street food, Blok M and Senopati for restaurants, and the mall food halls, which in Jakarta are genuinely good rather than a compromise.
Must Try Local Dishes at a glance
| The city's own cuisine | Betawi — a creole found nowhere else |
|---|---|
| Signature dish | Soto Betawi — beef in coconut and buffalo milk broth |
| Street speciality | Kerak telor, cooked over charcoal in a flipped wok |
| Why come here | The whole archipelago's regional cooking in one city |
| Street meal | IDR 15,000–40,000 |
| Late-night streets | Jalan Sabang, Pecenongan |