Eat your way through Jakarta: A guide to the city’s new fine dining scene

The “duck porridge” tastes familiar. Its flavours and textures ring a bell in my mental slot machine — the dark grassiness of charred kale (ding!), slices of meaty bird recalling the marshy scent of fresh earth, the bright pop of hoi sin sauce. It’s all warm and homespun, yet wholly new. That curious feeling, like I know this from somewhere, is exactly the kind of response the team at Esa hopes to elicit from diners.

Since opening two years ago, Esa has come to embody the rise of Jakarta’s fine dining scene. On Dec 6, 2025, Indonesia received the New Destination Champion Award 2026 from the French-based global ranking system La Liste. With it, Esa was named one of just two Gastronomy Ambassadors in the country, chosen as exemplary representatives of the nation’s culinary excellence. The other is Rumari in Raffles Bali, which also made its debut among La Liste’s World’s Top 1000 Restaurants for 2026.

As I would discover over my four days in Indonesia’s traffic-riddled capital city, Esa was just the starting point — Jakarta is emerging as a Southeast Asian culinary hotspot. These days, the gourmet traveller will find that the city has unveiled a different playbook, as young local chefs, trained in fine-dining restaurants across the world, return to remind us that there is so much more to the city’s gastronomic offerings than its kaleidoscopic range of street food.

“After COVID, many Indonesian chefs and front-of-house talents came back from abroad, and it changed the scene dramatically,” said food writer Kevindra Soemantri, author of Jakarta: A Dining History and co-owner of Esa. “As more and more (of them) explore food and flavours that are close to them (and) their identities, we have seen the rise of Indonesian cuisine, from fine dining to casual.”

Among them is Esa’s chef-partner Aditya Muskita, whose career has taken him around the globe, honing his skills in the kitchens of Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, Room 4 Dessert in Bali, Ralae in Copenhagen, and Olives by Todd English in New York City. In 2023, buoyed by the growing demand for fine dining experiences in Jakarta, Muskita, Soemantri, and hospitality veteran Jessica Eveline established Esa. They call the food they serve “New Jakarta cuisine” which, like at almost all modern dining institutions, translates to interpreting heritage flavours in contemporary style. To wit: the grilled dry-aged duck was inspired by the porridge topped with Chinese roast duck that Muskita often ate as a teenager working in his family’s wet market stall.

Jakarta may not boast as vast a collection of fine restaurants as Singapore or Bangkok, but it can still be difficult to decide where to spend your rupiahs and calories. Franco-Asian restaurant August is another good start. The sole Indonesian representative on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list began as a private dining experience by chef-owner Hans Christian and managing partner Budi Cahyadi. They opened the restaurant in November 2021, and by 2023, received the coveted American Express One To Watch Award, an accolade once conferred on now big-name restaurants like Florilege in Tokyo (2016), JL Studio in Taichung (2019), and Singapore’s Meta (2021). Earlier last year, August debuted on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants in 49th place and was named Best Restaurant in Indonesia for the second consecutive year.

Today, the moodily-lit 50-seat eatery in South Jakarta plies a busy trade as guests stream in to enjoy a languorous 12-course tasting menu of dishes like marinated Yamanaka scallops swimming in a pleasingly acidic pineapple pindang (a seasoned broth) and a delicious glazed toothfish with ginger flower relish and bilimbi on a bumbu kuning (turmeric-spiced) broth.

Not far away in the trendy Blok M district, chef Rachel Tjahja’s beautifully appointed Su Ma was also born from a thriving private dining business. By day, sunlight spills through a skylight, casting ethereal shadows across the floor and lending an irrefutably calm quality to the space. The earthy aroma of a daikon broth drew me like a siren song to the open kitchen counter behind which Tjahja and her team quietly put the finishing touches on elegant Chinese-Indonesian dishes.

Her gurami tahu tau si (fried toothfish with black beans and tofu) was a comforting salve, its flavours calling to mind classic Chinese family dishes passed around the table. So too the tiny brick of braised-to-yielding daikon, its natural sugars caramelised in the final broil — at once sweet, warm and savoury.

Equally comforting was the food at Kindling, set in a colonial-era bungalow in a leafy pocket of central Jakarta. Vallian Gunawan, the fresh-faced and instantly likeable chef-owner, toggled between the kitchen and bar as we settled in, bathing the room with his bright energy and familiar accent. The latter, we learn, is the result of spending his secondary school years in Singapore before training at fine-dining institutions like Odette and Saint Pierre. After stints in Bali, he returned to Jakarta in early 2024 to check out its nascent fine dining scene. What he found compelled him to move back to his hometown so he could contribute to its richness and colour.

In keeping with Gunawan’s culinary pedigree, the 42-seat Kindling delivers Asian flavours through French techniques. The Singaporean connection shows up in dishes like a silky chilli crab custard topped with bafun uni and anointed with a dab of sesame oil. Again, the flavours are familiar to my Singaporean taste buds, yet not in any way I’ve encountered before. There is dou ban jiang (chilli bean paste) in the beef tartare and chai tao kueh (turnip cake) parsed in tartlet form, complete with XO sauce, sakura ebi and Chinese sausages.

Having documented Singapore’s fine dining scene for over 20 years, I felt a twinge of wistfulness and envy creep in towards the end of my gastronomic jaunt across Jakarta. As our own dining scene shifts and surges in directions we cannot yet fully comprehend, and as we harrumph through the saturation of restaurants vying for our precious dollar, it was wonderful to witness a new fine-dining culture take shape in a city that holds so much potential with its enormous domestic market and unique pantry of ingredients that spring from Indonesia’s sprawling geography. This diversity, the affordability of its experiences, and the distinct sense of possibility currently makes Jakarta one of the most dynamic cities for one to eat their way through.