Kartika

Fifty-year-old rijsttafel den on the Overtoom; candlelit, walk-in only, zero nonsense.

Kartika has been feeding the Overtoom for over half a century, and the room shows its age in the best way: dim lamps, batik, wayang puppets watching you from the shelves like approving ancestors. You come for the rijsttafel, a dozen small dishes that land fast and disappear faster: rendang with actual depth, gado-gado, sambal goreng beans that bite back. The vegetarian version is a real menu, not an apology, which is rarer in Indonesian restaurants than it should be. No reservations, ever; you show up, you wait ten minutes with the smell of kruidnagel doing its work, you sit. It's the anti-Instagram Indonesian: nobody rebranded it, nobody added a DJ, and the couple next to you has probably been coming since the eighties. Order too much. That's the format.

Get the vegetarian rijsttafel and add the rendang on the side, best of both worlds.

Photo: Kartika

Photo: Kartika