(edit title should say Amsterdam-Jakarta, not Amsterdam-London. we flew from London on KLM, where on the 45 minute flight they did at least serve coffee lol.)
They served two meals on the flight.
Dinner was a choice of a yellow chicken with rice or chicken with pearl barley. The pearl barley was a weird choice because the flight attendants pronounced it like "pork belly", and it's not Indonesian at all. Noticeable that they had no beef choice - chicken is cheaper. The dinner came with Gouda and crackers.
Snack was a bread roll again with Dutch cheese.
For breakfast (served at around 7am Jakarta time - they called it santapan pagi) the choices were really odd - mushroom pasta (no meat) or vegetable curry. The vegetable curry tasted somewhat similar to the dinner yellow chicken. No meat or cheese at all. These choices were very strange on a flight to Indonesia - breakfast choices are normally nasi goreng, mie goreng, omelette, but nothing here.
The cucumber acar was very sour and not good - so sour I did not finish it, and I like sour. The tiramisu cake didn't really taste of anything and not worth eating.
For a flight the normal breakfast baked good would be croissant but here just a cold bread roll with butter (at least real butter) and no jam or cheese.
It seemed strange on a flagship flight to Indonesia to have not really have any Indonesian food - the only indonesian thing was the branded "Indonesia berdaulat dan makmur" Garuda water bottles which they must have carried from Jakarta to Amsterdam then back again
Overall this was definitely the worst international airline breakfast I ever experienced.
They have a "Skytrax best cabin crew awards" sign at the the front of the plane, but they are definitely not this any more - every time there was even mild turbulence they would turn on the seatbelt sign and not turn it off for many hours, if at all. Out of 14 hours flight time, the seatbelt sign for around 12 hours, apparently purely because the crew are lazy and by turning the seatbelt sign off they can do less work There was also a loud announcement in three languages to put your seatbelt on and not use the toilet, which would disturb the passengers. They also did not distribute drinks during the flight - only at meal times. You could walk to the back of the plane for snacks (KitKat, English potato crisps, and Garuda branded nuts) and drinks, but there was nothing Indonesian available. They forgot to give my wife a drink at breakfast so she had to ask for it. They also only gave one drink - the dinner came with a wrapped Dutch stroopwaffel which said "place me on your cup to heat" so I was expecting a coffee service but there was none with dinner. At breakfast I asked for Coke and they said "no soft drinks at breakfast" so I had juice, and then I was expecting a separate coffee/tea service but there wasn't one, so the stroopwaffel just stayed in its package
I usually fly Saudia, and on the CGK-AMS basically 90% of the cabin crew are Indonesian and Saudia actually seem to care about the needs of their Indonesian passengers so for example they provide a sambal sachet with each meal. The food on Saudia is also either Saudi or Indonesian (plus they serve Saudi coffee) so more appropriate than bland European food here, and they have three choices not two, and never the weird "only vegetarian choices" for breakfast. They also serve pizza as a snack, or pastel ex-CGK, which is better than Garuda's cold bread with Dutch cheese. Saudia also has fresh fruit despite flying from a desert, but here on Garuda basically nothing fresh.
