Food & Eating

If you eat in Indonesia, you eat rice. Noodles, cassava and potato all turn up on the table, but a meal without rice barely counts as one. The phrase makan nasi, "eat rice," is simply the everyday word for having a meal. Fried chicken and fish supply most of the everyday protein, especially on Java, and vegetables come fried or boiled in their own broth, ready to be spooned over the rice.

Seafood is excellent and everywhere: sea and freshwater fish, crab, prawns, squid, octopus, eel. Chilli goes into almost everything, and a side of raw chilli, chilli paste or sambal usually arrives regardless of whether you asked. It is milder than Thai food but still capable of raising blisters on your tongue. Start moderate; tolerance builds fast.

Meat, and a few surprises

Beef is available but pricier than the everyday cuts, and butchery here does not match Western supermarkets: expect tenderloin cut to order, a tougher sirloin, or organ meat, of which beef heart is genuinely popular. Indonesia is majority Muslim, so pork is scarce in small-town stores, though the larger supermarkets in Jakarta and Bali keep a dedicated pork section for the country's substantial non-Muslim and foreign-resident populations. Goat and, less often, lamb are common; chicken, in every part imaginable, is everywhere.

Traditional markets will show you things most newcomers have not eaten before: lung, brain, intestine, whole rats on a skewer, snake. In Manado, bat is a standard menu item and the wings are the good part. Cobra blood and gall are sold as an aphrodisiac. None of this is exotic to the people selling it; it is just food. Try it before you decide it isn't for you.

Fruit

The fruit is the easiest culture shock to enjoy. Alongside apples, mango, banana, pineapple and papaya, expect rambutan, duku, manggis, salak and durian, plus varieties with no English name at all. Papaya, coconut and banana are available year-round; rambutan, mango and duku are seasonal. Peaches, plums and cherries, by contrast, are the exotic imports here, and few Indonesians have tried them.

Alcohol

Islam forbids alcohol, and it plays a correspondingly small role in daily life for most Indonesians, though plenty do drink. Retail sale is genuinely restricted, more so than the old picture of "beer in every supermarket" suggests. A 2015 regulation banned alcohol sales, beer included, from minimarkets nationwide, Indomaret, Alfamart and Circle K among them, with Bali carved out as an exception. Beer is still legal in full-size supermarkets and hypermarkets. Wine and spirits above 5% ABV are more tightly held: legally sold only through hotels, restaurants, bars, licensed liquor retailers, and duty-free shops, the latter restricted to departing or transit travellers and accredited diplomats, not residents on a weekly shop. The legal drinking age is 21.

Local options include arak and some very sweet grape concoctions, an acquired taste. Imported wine is well established now, not a novelty, with licensed retailers such as Batavia Liquor and Jakarta Wine & Spirits delivering in the big cities, but expect to pay for it: a mid-range imported bottle runs around IDR 300,000 (roughly US$18-20), reflecting import duty, VAT and excise. Bars, hotels and nightclubs serve alcohol at a similar premium, and some venues scale back or close during Ramadan.

Where you eat

Everywhere, and increasingly without leaving the house. Warung makan, food carts and wandering vendors sell a limited, repeating menu: eggs, vegetables, soup, chicken, fish, satay, rice. Point at what you want. Mobile vendors still do the rounds, the bubur (rice porridge) seller in the morning, the bakso and mie goreng carts through the day, the fruit man with his peeled, sliced offerings and peanut sauce, usually for well under a dollar, though bringing your own plate is not a bad idea. But the phone has changed as much here as anywhere: GoFood, GrabFood and ShopeeFood are now the default way most residents order, from street vendors and fast-food chains alike, and Indonesia's delivery market is worth billions of dollars a year.

Fast food

The familiar names are all in Jakarta and other big cities: McDonald's (still run by the same Indonesian franchisee, PT Rekso Nasional Food, despite persistent rumours of a change of ownership), Pizza Hut, KFC, Burger King and Dunkin', which changed franchisee in 2025-26 and dropped its old domain along with it. All localise the menu (rice with your KFC "kombo," no gravy in sight) and all are on the delivery apps.

Contributor: patrick

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