Jayakarta Restaurant - Cuisine by the legendary Mama Talen

Nestled at the foot of the Berkeley hills, only blocks away for the UC Berkeley campus, Jayakarta Restaurant has been serving the East Bay and the Indonesian community for seven years (2012).

We’ll admit it…. We are simply a “hole in the wall”.

Believe it or not, we are only a staff of 3 people, 4 at the most, with only one head chef. …But we are capable of running at the speed of a busy McDonalds or Chinese restaurant with many more employees than we have. So when we are busy (normally 6-8PM on weekends) and fully packed with customers and lines of To Go orders, please forgive us if our service becomes erratic. With only 3 people, it deserves an award for not buckling under the pressure… something that we have been doing for seven years straight.

Our job is simply to bring you the most authentic cuisine you could find on the streets of the capital city of JAKARTA (Betawi) and nothing more. That’s it.
If you’re looking for an ENTIRE menu in the style of another region of Indonesia (Bali, Medan, Menado etc..), you WON’T find it here. Remember from a region of 17000 islands… there is so much diversity in term of style of food that any restaurant can offer… so our FOCUS is on a style common in Jakarta ONLY.
We are not here to win awards for all-around best restaurant… win awards for best designed restaurant or awards for the best ambience… If you want something like that… trust us… there are many restaurants in the Bay Area who have and can qualify for that and then some.

What we DO do best here is bring you the best food most Jakartinians encounter on a daily basis. In that regard, we are the BEST restaurant in the WORLD with only Greater Jakarta being own par with us.

This is the reason almost every evening and on the weekdays... our restaurant is still packed with people. Generally, our regulars consist of ex-pat Indonesians and Chinese Indonesians, students from UC Berkeley, local Berkelities and Dutch people formerly from Indonesia or have tried this food in Amsterdam. We are de facto “restaurant of choice” for the Indonesian embassy in the United States and have held cabinet member and member of the presidential entourage (Yudhoyono) within our walls and have even had the occasional American movie star drop by (Julia Roberts). This for a “hole in the wall.”

So please… if you like to experience how it feels to eat on the streets of Jakarta… by all means try our food. If you don’t like it… it’s totally understandable, you may not like eating outside in Jakarta either… everyone is entitled to have their preference of course.

However if you do like it… it looks like you’d also be able to eat in Jakarta as well. And that’s the experience we hope to bring you here at Jayakarta.
And as they say in Jakarta…. Terima kasih.

Let the magic begin.