Padang is the home of Padang food — nasi padang — and this is reason enough to spend time eating your way through the city. The traditional system works like this: you sit down and the waiter brings a stack of small dishes to your table — curried beef, rendang, jackfruit curry, fried fish, egg in chilli sauce, cassava leaves — and you pay only for what you eat. The quality and the range vary from place to place, but even a mediocre nasi padang restaurant in Padang is better than most outside it.
Beyond the regional cuisine, the waterfront and Chinatown areas have good seafood, and there is a strong tradition of Minangkabau coffee culture — strong, dark coffee drunk at wooden tables, often accompanied by sticky rice cakes.