Best Places to Eat in Surabaya
Surabaya eats like the halal-majority port city it is: bold, petis-heavy, and built around a few genuinely famous local dishes rather than imported cuisine. Here’s what to actually order.
Rawon: the signature, rated the world’s best soup
Rawon is a beef soup blackened by ground keluak (kluwek) nut, built with garlic, shallots, candlenut, turmeric, and galangal, and served over rice with bean sprouts, salted egg, and fried shallots. The dish traces back to a 901 CE Javanese inscription, and the Surabaya style is its most widely known regional version; TasteAtlas rated it the world’s best soup in 2024.
Rujak cingur: the bold local salad
This Surabaya specialty mixes vegetables and fruit with slices of cooked cow snout (cingur), bound in a petis (fermented shrimp paste) sauce. It’s an acquired texture for some visitors, but it’s the dish locals point to first when asked what makes Surabaya’s food distinct.
Lontong balap and tahu tek: the street-food staples
Lontong balap (“racing rice cake”) pairs pressed rice cake with bean sprouts, fried tofu, a black-eyed pea fritter called lentho, and a petis-heavy sweet soy sauce; it originated in Surabaya. Tahu tek is similar in spirit, cut fried tofu with bean sprouts and potato in a petis-spiked peanut sauce, sold from carts across the city.
Sate klopo and the wider grill
Sate klopo coats satay in grated coconut before grilling, a distinctly Surabaya twist on standard Indonesian satay. Around it sits pecel (vegetables in peanut sauce, East Java’s version running thinner and spicier than Central Java’s) and soto ayam Lamongan, the chicken soup style from a nearby regency that shows up in warungs all over the city.
Semanggi and es krim Zangrandi
Semanggi Suroboyo, a clover-leaf salad in peanut and cassava sauce traditionally sold by itinerant vendors, is a distinctly local dish worth seeking out. Es krim Zangrandi, a long-running historic ice cream parlour, is a well-known Surabaya institution, though its founding date and current operating details are worth confirming before a special trip.
Where and how
Warungs (small local eateries) and street-food carts are where most of this actually gets eaten, not sit-down restaurants; cash is the norm at both, and there’s no tipping expected. Petis, the fermented shrimp paste, is the throughline across nearly every dish above, so it’s worth trying even in small doses if you’re new to it.
Read more: our things-to-do guide covers the Old Town where much of this street food is sold, and the main Surabaya guide has the full essentials table.