The long ride from the international airport to the city of Yogyakarta on the Indonesian island of Java at least has the virtue of easing a jet-lagged traveler through a liminal zone of rice-paddy plains and jungle hills. Then the buzzy metropolis closes round, and everything is all business and hot tropical urban disarray. Streets thrum with a zillion scooters in what was once nicknamed “kota sepeda,” bicycle city.
Only a tiny percentage of the millions who flock to overtouristed Bali make a side trip to Yogyakarta. It’s a place of cultural and intellectual ferment, dense with universities, run by a revered royal family. It’s not easily parsed, which makes it, over several days, a great city to explore.
The first thing you notice, after the scooter swarms, are the food stalls, the warungs, which range from tiny stands to de facto outdoor restaurants. These line almost every street and alley, often obliterating sidewalks, with banners boasting that this jackfruit stew (gudeg) has impeccable recipe provenance, or that here one eats “legendary” satays of young goat.
I spent more than two weeks exploring Yogya, but began with the food, moving from warung to warung and then to restaurants, over several days. I was steered to them by Tiko Sukarso, 39, a Jakarta transplant who ran a Yogya restaurant until Covid ended it, and now operates a sort of pop-up cooking club. I ate fried noodles (bakmi goreng) at this warung, fried free-range chicken (ayam goreng kampong) with sweet-hot sambals at the next. For one 7 a.m. breakfast I found the warung of Bu Sukardi, who makes wobbly-soft tofu in a fiery infusion of ginger and palm sugar (wedang tahu).
On one evening, to show the more formal side of Yogya eating, Mr. Sukarso met me at the ornate Javanese restaurant Griya Dhahar RB, set in elaborate open pavilions with carved teak chairs, where we had classic dishes like brongkos telur, a coconut-milk stew of cowpeas, tofu, boiled eggs and a lemony-bitter herb called melinjo.
“We love peanuts,” Mr. Sukarso said. “We love something fatty in a sauce, like peanut sauce on gado gado or lotek.” (Those are salads that often include chewy tempeh.) “That’s in our root palate. Something nutty, creamy, fatty, sweet, something fermented.”
Between meals, I went to museums, many art galleries, a huge annual contemporary art show, a morning market, countless barista-style coffee shops for iced revivers, a classical dance performance and a drag cabaret in a steamy…
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