Start from 60 curated places around Jakarta, ID, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
August
A 50-seat dining room hidden in the base of Sequis Tower where Indonesian ingredients - torch ginger, andaliman pepper, palm sugar - get run through French technique. It is the city's most serious tasting-menu restaurant, yet the room feels like a friend's library, all bookshelves and warm wood.
Kaum Jakarta
Indonesian heritage cooking in a Menteng house, built from recipes the team collected in villages across the archipelago - Toraja, Bali, West Sumatra. The long communal tables and ikat textiles set the tone: this is the place to taste regional dishes you otherwise need a domestic flight for.
Trails & outdoors
Tebet Eco Park
South Jakarta's showpiece park: seven hectares of restored river, wetland boardwalks, and lawns stitched together by a sweeping orange footbridge. The loop paths make an easy 2-kilometre walk or run with more birdlife than any park this central deserves.
Hutan Kota GBK
A planted urban forest inside the Gelora Bung Karno sports complex where a broad lawn opens to the full Sudirman skyline - the classic Jakarta skyline-picnic view. Paths thread the trees and connect to the stadium ring road for longer runs.
Things to do
Museum MACAN
Indonesia's first museum of modern and contemporary art, pairing the national canon with international heavyweights - it is where Jakarta queues for Kusama and Shiota installations. Exhibitions rotate every few months, so the museum rewards repeat visits.
National Museum of Indonesia
The archipelago's great treasure house on Merdeka Square - bronze-age drums, Hindu-Buddhist statuary, royal gold, and ethnographic halls covering hundreds of cultures - in a colonnaded building locals still call the Elephant Museum for the bronze elephant out front.
Landmarks & sights
National Monument
The 132-metre marble obelisk with a gilded flame at the centre of Merdeka Square - Indonesia's independence memorial and the city's compass point. A lift runs to an observation deck; below, the square fills with kite flyers, joggers, and deer paddocks.
Fatahillah Square
The cobbled heart of Kota Tua, ringed by the old Batavia city hall and a cluster of museums in Dutch colonial buildings. By day it is street performers and pastel rental bicycles; early morning it is empty cobbles and the best light in old Jakarta.