Where To Get The Most Delicious Street Food Around H. Agus Salim Street aka Sabang
Whether you are new to Jakarta or love to do culinary traveling, you probably have heard about Sabang street and its crowded street food stalls at night. Fun facts: not everyone know where Sabang street is exactly located and the street name is actually called H. Agus Salim, named after an Indonesian intellectual figure. You can find food as early as 6 am until as late as 3 am.
Let’s start with breakfast. My favorite one is Bubur Ayam Nano, the blue cart always stays next to Koramil post after Sabang Perfume store. It cost IDR12k for a full portion and the satay cost IDR5k. The yellow curry is really tasty and the satay has giant size compare to the rest of Bubur Ayam sellers around Sabang. The chilli sauce has creamy texture compare to others that only consist of chilli and water. The seller is quite generous in giving shredded chicken and fresh celery leaves. They sell almost everyday except Saturday and the earliest you can eat this Bubur Ayam is around 6am, and during week days it may open until 10:30am but on Sunday everything is out of stock by 8:30am.
If you like to eat rice then you can try Nasi Uduk that’s located next to Smartfren’s gate. The taste used to be 1.5 stars out of 5 but to my surprise recently I think they have improved it to 3.5 out of 5. The price can be varied, depends on what you eat with that rice but spending IDR20k should give you a full stomach.
For noodle lovers, I cannot suggest any street food stall that serves good noodle for morning time, and I have not yet tried the one nearby Maxone hotel, so I’ll keep this as a part of dinner option. However for brunch or lunch you can try Bakmi Ayam Semarang that’s located on the intersection of Sabang and Wahid Hasyim, or to be exact is next to Garuda.
During lunch time there are lots of options for sure, but among all the food there are only two street food that I highly recommend people to try and both of them are located on the pathway nearby the Mosque. The first one is Satay either lamb or chicken, but imho the lamb satay is the winner. When it comes to satay, I think how fresh the meat, the soy sauce brand, and charcoal are the main factor of bring out the best taste. During lunch you can spend IDR25k to get the lamb satay plus rice, while at night same price will only give you a 1.5 out of 5 taste of chicken satay plus rice. The next one is Gado-gado, it is very healthy and very cheap, with only IDR15k you can get a full portion of Gado-gado plus rice cake or rice. The sauce is very tasty compare to the other Gado-gado sellers, and what I appreciate the most from its seller is that every morning he washes his cart with dishwashing liquid. If you need some sweetness in your life then you should try the Cendol that’s located just on the entrance of that narrow pathway in between the Bakso Malang and Sabang Perfume store.
What about dinner? Well, during this time you can find lots of food stalls and with lots of variety of foods. There are three specific kind of food that I like for my dinner: fried rice, lamb soup, and yamin noodles. My favorite fried rice in this particular area is the famous Nasi Goreng Kambing Kebon Sirih, and I’m so thankful that there’s one in Sabang street. Sometimes I get so lucky with so many chunks of lambs but other times I have just a few chunks with lots of rice. For the lamb soup, I’d recommend the one close to Orins Martabak shop, if you face the Garuda restaurant it should be on the left side of Orins and you should notice that the long table touches the electricity pole. It has good size of the lamb chunk and very tasty broth with only IDR25k. Lastly, the noodle that I’d recommend is Bakmi Roxy, the stall used to be located across Dunkin Donut but now it is located after the Century pharmacy. I was really sad when I found out it was not on its original place and I thought they left forever, because good noodle acted like my happy pill that I needed when I celebrated an achievement or when I felt so stress out and angry about work. With IDR18k you can get a bowl of noodle with two meat balls and two wontons.
There are still more tasty food at night such as Kue Putu and fried bird. You can try so many things but you need to make sure you have a good immune system otherwise your body will embrace the typhoid fever.
