Taman Fatahillah
main dining room
Sate
down to the lobby. September 2014
Cafe Batavia was a total sensation in Jakarta in the mid to late 1990s. Brian and I lived in South Jakarta with all the expats and diplomats near the famous area called "Kemang", filled with restaurants and shops catering to Jakarta's then huge expat community (before the Asian market crash of 1998). We didn't frequent Kemang because the restaurants were overpriced and basically not all that good. Add to that, we would see other foreigners we knew who would all complain about the traffic, their servants, and how awful the food was. It was predictable and tedious. We ended up eating at home mostly because our maid/cook, Mbak Endang, was a fantastic chef. Why eat out when our home cooked food (Indonesian AND Western) was the envy of all our friends?
The northern part of Jakarta, the original Dutch colonial part of town known as "Kota", had become a run-down collection of Dutch-style warehouses and forgotten government buildings in those days. Then a renaissance of sorts took place, and around the train station and the old city hall park (Taman Fatahillah) people realized that all those old buildings were actually kind of "cool" and could be renovated.
The building of Cafe Batavia was constructed ca. the 1830s. It has been variously used as a residence, an office of the Dutch governors, and a warehouse. For several years from around 1884, the ground floor of the building was occupied by the wholesale business of the trading firm, E. Dunlop & Co. The building also housed the offices of "Kongsi Tiga - Kantor Kapal Hadji", which arranged the Muslim pilgrimages from Batavia to the Middle East by steamship.
(Wikipedia)
In the early 90s the building was first renovated into an art gallery and soon after into a restaurant/club with a roaring 20's theme. It became the place to see and be seen in Jakarta's expat community, BUT with the city's legendary traffic, Taman Fatahillah was nearly a 2 hour drive from our place in the south. It just was not worth the effort to take six or seven hours out of an evening to drive across town, spend time at Cafe Batavia, and return home. We heard all kinds of stories of expat excess there and it did develop quite the reputation in its heyday.
On trips to Kota with friends or sometimes in our own explorations of Jakarta, we visited Cafe Batavia in the saner daylight hours. It was a lovely, restored Dutch colonial building with overpriced food and drink. We enjoyed the atmosphere much as we did the Tiffin Room in the Raffles Hotel, Singapore. The place was trying to recapture an age and did a fairly good job of it. The difference, of course, was that the Tiffin Room had ALWAYS been a restaurant and Cafe Batavia had actually never been one until its final incarnation. No matter how well laid out that place was, it did not reflect any of its former incarnations whatsoever. Nonetheless it still was a lovely place to grab a bite and kick back with a "Bintang" beer before braving the traffic and heading back down south to our home.
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