Surakarta

I am Indonesian and am very familiar with the taste of Javanese food (Surakarta is the name of a city in Central Java) and to me the taste of food in this restaurant has obviously been adapted to Dutch taste. Yet the restaurant is popular, has very nice ambience and unique. Service isnt always fast but it is a given since it isnt a fastfood joint.

Two of us were visiting Leiden and we wanted a rijstaffel before we departed; this was the perfect choice. We had the 12 dish version and could not finish all the food, so I recommend coming very hungry or with a larger group. A couple of the meat dishes were a bit overdone but overall everything was excellent (shrimp had a very fishy sauce but I suspect it was suppose to taste like that?).
Suggestion: for those of us not familiar with Indonesian food a guide to what we were eating in the rijstaffel would have been welcome.
Service was very good and we were seated quickly even though they were busy and we had not made reservations.

I loved the food here! It was my first introduction to Indonesian food, but I went twice during my trip to Leiden. The first night I had the lontong surakarta — cubes of sticky rice, chicken in a sweet-​spicy sauce, vegetables, with toasted coconut and peanuts to sprinkle over it. There was far more food than I could eat, and 14 euro wasn’t unreasonable.
The second night, I went with a group, and we got the rijsttafel (not sure if it was the 12 or 18-​dish version). There was a lot of food — we didn’t come close to eating it all — and a good variety of dishes (even the vegetarians got plenty to eat), but I actually liked the lontong surakarta much better. The spekkoek was pretty good, though.
The atmosphere isn’t great. Tables are packed very close together (such that you often get bumped by a server or someone at another table), and it gets very noisy at dinnertime, since it seems to be a popular restaurant. I ate there the first night around 6pm, and it wasn’t a problem finding a table that early. It did seem unusual that I was sitting by myself, though.