The Indonesian Cafe Serving Philly’s Most Comforting Breakfast

The Fluffy Sammy at Griddle & Rice / Photograph by Mike Prince

At Griddle & Rice in South Philly, personal real estate is limited. In the dining room there are only three tables and a handful of counter seats that are always taken. Business here is mostly done standing. It’s mostly takeout, mostly sweet Indonesian iced tea and unfiltered kopi tubruk, matcha lattes, fat breakfast sandwiches wrapped in crinkling paper, and bowls of lontong sayur curry soup, and after you order, stepping politely to the side is the only option.

It is busy. New, but already thoroughly discovered by the neighbors and the Indonesian and Malaysian families who come here for its dichotomous menu, split between Indonesian breakfast and American brunch.

The standard breakfast sandwich (appropriately called “Fluffy Sammy”) is a messy delight, stuffed with a thick base of scrambled eggs, too much cheese, too much arugula, too much garlic aioli — all of it spilling out the sides, but in a good way. In a way that means good times and excess and getting an edge on shameless morning hungers. The “Hot Chick,” though, isn’t. Still messy, it isn’t hot (at least not by hot chicken sandwich standards), and uses a ground chicken patty that gets spongy as it sits.

The further you wind your way through the menu, the better it gets, and the more you learn how to approach it. The chicken satay hot sauce is thin, offering nothing but an acetylene heat, but the thick sambal with the nasi uduk is better. And the nasi uduk, with its breakfast egg chopped into a pile of coconut rice and fried chicken (sometimes too dry, sometimes just right), comes with a whole vegetable fritter that goes nicely with the soft cubes of rice cake (from the satay), soaked in peanut sauce and mashed with the fritter into big, sweet-savory bites.

I go to Griddle & Rice for chicken congee, the most comforting breakfast ever invented: rice porridge, soaking in a rich chicken broth and served with a mad alchemist’s collection of ingredients for tinkering — like soy sauce as thick as hoisin, sambal (ordered extra), pickled vegetables, shredded chicken, thin-sliced cakwe like savory croutons, and more. It is great congee, available from the minute they open until they turn out the lights, and it’s worth going for that alone, but there’s so much more to like about the place. The energy of it is contagious, the heat and sound of the bodies packed in, waiting for their turn. A neighborhood spot made for all the neighbors.

Even if there’s just barely enough room for most of them to stand.

2 Stars — Come if you’re in the neighborhood

Rating Key

0 stars: stay away
★: come if you have no other options
★★: come if you’re in the neighborhood
★★★: come from anywhere in Philly
★★★★: come from anywhere in America

Published as “Dawn to Dusk” in the November 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.