Rijsttafel

Rijsttafel, Dutch for "rice table", is a colonial-era banquet format rather than a single dish: plain rice at the centre and a dozen to forty small plates of Indonesian food around it, served all at once so that each diner builds their own plate from sweet, sour, hot and savoury components. It was assembled by Dutch planters and officials in the East Indies in the nineteenth century, who took the Sumatran habit of serving many side dishes with rice, as in nasi padang, and inflated it into a display of wealth with a servant carrying each dish. After Indonesian independence the format faded there, and it survives mainly in the Netherlands, where Indonesian and Indo-Dutch restaurants in The Hague, Amsterdam and Leiden serve it as their set menu, and in a reduced home version, the nasi rames, which puts a selection on one plate. In Indonesia today the word is rarely used, and the dishes are eaten separately.