60 restaurants to join Jakarta Food Festival

JAKARTA (JP): Sixty large-scale restaurants will take part in the second Jakarta Food Festival 1995 from Oct. 15 to Nov. 30, said Wuryastuti Sunario, an executive of the Indonesian Tourism Promotion Board.

The festival will be sponsored jointly by the tourism promotion board, the Jakarta Tourism Office, American Express Travel Related Services and the Bali office of the Ministry of Tourism, Post and Telecommunications.

Wuryastuti said that during the festival the 60 restaurants will feature foods from various countries.

"Ten of the 60 restaurants will offer a wide variety of Indonesian food. This shows that restaurants specializing in Indonesian food are also ready to present food of good quality," she said yesterday.

The other 50 restaurants will present international food from such countries as America, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

She said that the number of participants in this year's festival increased substantially from the 39 in the first food festival last year and that many more restaurants outside of hotels will participate.

She said that the festival hopes to promote Jakarta as a culinary destination in order to support its role as a city for meetings, conventions and exhibitions.

The festival will be opened by Governor Surjadi Soedirdja on Oct. 15 at Jl. Lapangan Banteng, Central Jakarta.

During the festival, the 60 restaurants will offer visitors discounts of 15 percent. A special discount of 25 percent will be given to members of American Express Travel Related Services.

Restaurant patrons will later be asked to fill out restaurant opinion forms, which will be used by the festival's committee to select the best restaurant in the city.

"There will be no jury for the competition. The decision depends entirely on the visitors' opinions," she said.

Wuryastuti said that the organizing committee will also invite food writers from Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan as well as Australia to observe the city's potential as a culinary destination.

Haswadi A. Taufik, the head of the City Tourism Marketing Office, said that Jakarta has the potential to become a service city due to the wide variety of facilities.

He said the city has 71 star-rated hotels with over 12,600 rooms, international-standard golf courses, a large-scale convention center, an international trade center, shopping centers and 1,596 restaurants.

A similar festival will also be conducted in Bali at the same time. "We want to show that there are also many restaurants with good quality, good sanitation and good services," Wuryastuti added. (32)