The megacity that invented nasi goreng — Dutch colonial Kota Tua, the world's largest mosque, and street food from 17,000 islands
Jakarta is one of the world's great underrated food cities — 34 million people in the metro area, speaking 700+ languages across 17,000 islands' worth of regional cuisines, all concentrated in a single sprawling capital. The national dish is nasi goreng (fried rice with kecap manis — sweet soy sauce — egg, and crackers) but it barely scratches the cuisine's surface: Padang food (West Sumatra) is the most complex spiced cuisine in Southeast Asia, gado-gado (peanut sauce vegetable salad) is eaten everywhere as a daily meal, and the martabak (stuffed fried pancake, sweet or savory) sold by stree…
The site was a Sundanese kingdom port (Sunda Kelapa) trading pepper with Indian and Portuguese merchants when the Dutch East India Company (VOC) conquered it in 1619, renaming it Batavia after a Germanic tribe — and proceeding to build the most profitable colonial entrepôt in the world. For two centuries Batavia was the headquarters of the Dutch colonial empire in Asia, trading nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and eventually coffee across the globe. The independence movement led by Sukarno declared Indonesian independence on August 17, 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender — the flag in Sukarno'…