Gado-gado in Jakarta: what it is, how to order it, what to avoid

Overview

First, an honest word about ownership: gado-gado is not Jakarta’s alone. It is eaten the length of Indonesia, it is one of the handful of dishes the country formally names as national, and you will meet a version of it in almost any city here. What Jakarta has is a specific local reading of it — gado-gado Betawi — and a claim to being the kind of dense, sauce-heavy street food the city does particularly well. Order it here as a Jakarta thing, not as a Jakarta invention, and you have it right.

The dish itself is a composed salad, not a tossed one. A plate of vegetables — usually blanched or boiled rather than raw: long beans, cabbage, bean sprouts, spinach, sometimes chayote or bitter gourd — is laid out with boiled potato, fried tofu, fried tempeh, a hard-boiled egg, and slices of lontong, the compressed rice cake, and then the whole thing is dressed in a thick peanut sauce and finished with crackers and fried shallots. The name is usually glossed as something like “mix-mix”, a medley — which is a fair description of a plate that is deliberately a jumble of textures held together by one sauce.

That sauce is the dish. It is ground from fried peanuts with palm sugar, garlic, chilli, tamarind and — in most Jakarta versions — a little terasi, fermented shrimp paste, which is worth knowing about if you do not eat seafood. The best of it is pounded fresh in a wide stone mortar when you order, which is why a good gado-gado stall has a cook working a pestle rather than a bottle. The Betawi version tends to be richer and a touch sweeter than the sharper peanut sauces of Java further east.

What to order

The single most useful thing to know is how to tell gado-gado apart from the dish sitting right next to it on the same cart. Gado-gado is the vegetable one; ketoprak, its constant neighbour, is built on rice vermicelli and bean sprouts with tofu and lontong and no green vegetables to speak of. Both wear a peanut sauce, both are Jakarta street staples, and a reader who wanted a plate of greens and got a plate of noodles simply ordered the wrong word. If you want the salad, say gado-gado; if you want the noodle one, say ketoprak.

Beyond that, the choices are about the sauce and the assembly:

• pedas or not — the chilli is worked into the sauce, so ask for it hot or mild when you order rather than adding it after.
• disiram versus on the side — you can have the sauce poured over everything (siram) or served alongside to dip and mix yourself. Poured-over is the default and the more common.
• lontong or rice — the rice cake usually comes as standard; some stalls will do it with plain rice instead, and some let you skip the starch altogether.

The garnish that should be there: a scatter of fried shallots and a cracker — kerupuk, the big pale prawn cracker, or emping, the smaller bittersweet melinjo one — stuck upright in the sauce. It is eaten with a spoon and fork, mixed together at the table so every forkful catches some sauce.

What to avoid

The failure of a gado-gado is nearly always the sauce, and the tell is whether it was made or poured. A cook grinding peanuts in a stone mortar to order is the thing to look for; a squeeze-bottle of pre-mixed, uniform, glossy sauce is the thing to avoid. Bottled sauce reads sweet and one-note, sits too smooth, and tastes the same on every plate because it is the same sauce a lazy kitchen also ladles over satay. Freshly ground sauce is coarser, a little uneven, and tastes of the garlic and tamarind as much as the sugar.

The vegetables are the second tell. This is assembled food, so at a slow or tired stall the blanched greens can sit grey and waterlogged in a tray for hours; a busy cart turning plates over quickly is serving them closer to fresh. If the potato is cold and claggy and the tempeh soft rather than crisp, the plate was built long before you arrived.

And do not assume it is vegetarian. The shrimp paste in the sauce is standard, and the egg is usual — a genuinely meat- and seafood-free gado-gado exists, but it is something you ask for (tanpa telur, without egg; and a check on the terasi), not something you can assume from a plate of vegetables.

Practicalities

Gado-gado is light-meal food, not a snack and not a feast — the sort of thing eaten at midday, when a plate of vegetables in the heat is exactly right, though the carts run into the evening too. It is sold from roving glass-fronted pushcarts, from market stalls and from simple warungs; the sit-down cafés and malls do a tidier, pricier, usually blander version. The give-away of a good one is again the mortar: a cook assembling and grinding to order, which takes a couple of minutes and is worth the wait.

A plate at a street cart or warung runs roughly €1.50 to €3; a café or mall version can be double that, and the money buys air conditioning and a chair rather than a better sauce — if anything the street version, ground fresh, is the better plate. It is cash at the carts and stalls, as the city guide notes for street food generally, and the notes wanted are small.

One last orientation, because the word travels. What you are handed as gado-gado shifts by region: the Padang version leans spicier and sometimes adds noodles, and further east around Surabaya the peanut sauce is cooked rather than ground raw and loosened with coconut milk. The Jakarta plate — boiled vegetables, fried tofu and tempeh, a thick fresh-ground sauce over lontong — is the one you will actually be eating here, and it is the one worth having.