Arguably the most exciting tenant at SCBD Park, an open-air dining precinct within Jakarta’s swankiest business district, Esa is the brainchild of chef Aditya Muskita, culinary author Kevindra Soemantri, and seasoned hospitality professional Jessica Eveline. Its off-white interiors with blond-wood ceilings and floors provide a subtle backdrop for playful modern Indonesian dishes that use high-quality ingredients, 70 percent of which are sourced locally.

Tasting menus here showcase what the founders call “new Jakarta cuisine,” born of the city’s inherent multiculturalism and openness to outside influences. This explains the surf and turf char siu skewers of tare-glazed pork jowl topped with sea urchin, and a “pearl curry” featuring bamboo clams and hamachi on a bed of egg tofu, ikura, and tapioca pearls. Muskita reinterprets the Jakartan street food dish rujak juhi as amberjack and seaweed jelly in a passion fruit and bell pepper sauce, while the lamb-rib course recalls the experience of having goat-meat satay amid the tea plantations of Puncak, a two-hour drive south from Jakarta.

Desserts are no less inventive. A clever take on angsle—a traditional Javanese drink—pairs glutinous rice gelato with thick strands of palmyra fruit, frozen coconut water powder, crushed peanuts, a swirl of mung bean noodles, and hot coconut ginger foam piped at the table. Chase it all down with a Riesling or one of Esa’s luscious homemade fruit meads. —James Louie

esarestaurant.com
+62 811 1001 6282 (WhatsApp)
SCBD Park, Lot 7 Unit 3A, Jl. Jenderal Sudirman Kav. 52–53, Jakarta, Indonesia

Esa Restaurant: New Jakarta

Jakarta Dining

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