Amsterdam is known for its Indonesian food, so it’s quite often that I end up in a conversation with someone about the best Indonesian restaurants in town. I generally vote for Blauw, with Tempo Doeloe in second place (the food is great but the service can be awful), but there was one place I couldn’t with any certainty tell people was good or bad, because I’d never been: Sama Sebo. It’s apparently one of the oldest Indonesian restaurants in the Netherlands, having been serving customers from its kitsch brown-café location for over 35 years. So you’d think, after all that time, that they’d know when they’re doing.
You’d be wrong.
I set out on my Sama Sebo mission with a fellow food writer – we were both ashamed never to have been there, so we figured we’d put that right together. Barely even bothering to look at the menu, we ordered the
rijsttafel. There was only one of them (which I took to be a good sign and, in any case, made the ordering process much easier) and it felt like the right yardstick by which to judge the place. After all, I’d eaten
rijsttafel at Blauw, Tempo Doeloe, Jun, and pretty much every other Indonesian joint in town – if it ain’t broke, why fix it?
We’d no sooner got our wine than the dishes started arriving – suspiciously quickly. It felt like we were part of a production line of tourists being fed our requisite dozen or so dishes before the next busload arrived. Because that’s the thing: Sama Sebo is in every guidebook, which implies one of two things: either it’s so good that everyone goes there, or it’s so bad that only the tourists go there. We heard very few Dutch voices at other tables – ‘nuff said.
