window display
inside the store
Gourmet cupcakes! Soft, fluffy, light-as-air sponge with creamy icings. But what I like most about them is they’re not too sweet. I love staring at the window display cos they’re so pretty! They have about 10 different types of cupcakes with various sponges and icing selections for $3.50 each.
From top left (clockwise) …
- Chocolate cupcakes with caramel icing
- Vanilla cupcakes
- Chocolate oreo cupcakes
- Lemon meringue cupcakes (my fave)
I think the vanilla ones are better 
They have strawberry ones as well.
Jimbaran is one of the “nicer” Indonesian restaurants in Sydney, apart from Ubud and Ratu Sari. All the other Indonesian restaurants around Kingsford, Randwick, Maroubra have very authentic good food, but no ambience as they’re targeted for students, not a place to have a date or dinner where you can have a nice long talk. Ever since it received good reviews from SMH, I found it very difficult to make a booking at this place. So I was surprised to find that it wasn’t packed with customer when we came. Perhaps because it was a lunchtime.
Jimbaran has a nice courtyard, but we sat inside. Ordered only two dishes because we were very full from breakfast. Bandeng duri lunak (bandeng is a type of fish, cooked for a long time so that the bones are soft and edible) was fried and served with chilli sweet soy sauce. I loved this because you can’t find this dish easily in other restaurants. Fish was tender, flavoursome and fried to perfection. You gotta eat the fish with the sauce.
Ayam kalasan was sweet deboned chicken, cooked in a pressure cooker so the flesh was very tender. Very tasty.
And of course we made room for dessert! They were so cheap, $3.90 each. We had cendol and bubur ketan hitam. Cendol is the little droplets of green “jellies” made from pandan, served cold with palm sugar syrup and coconut milk. Bubur Ketan Hitam (black sticky rice) was served warm with coconut milk. Cendol was very yummy, very well done. Bubur ketan hitam was a bit too sweet.
Overall… I was very happy with this restaurant. Haven’t been since a few years back before they became popular. Food was still very good and didn’t disappoint. Quite affordable too, our dishes were around $14-15 each (maybe a little bit expensive compared to the other cheaper Indonesian restaurants, but still good value for what you get).
Just came back from lunch here. Completely stuffed for $15 pp. A bit of history about this place - SinMa is short for “Singapore Malaysia”, so this is a good place to try Singaporean/Malaysian dishes, the “Mamak” dishes (Malaysian-Muslim) and Nyonya dishes (Chinese-Malaysian). SinMa has been around Kingsford for a few years, which is a good sign considering the high turnover of restaurants in this area. You have to be very good and competitive to survive here.
Decor is not great - very basic with tables covered in plastic. Menu is long and extensive, providing a good variety of hawker-style dishes as well as other dishes like Singaporean Chilli Crab. Service could be a lot friendlier, but what they lack in service and ambience was made up by the food. You order and pay at the counter and sit down to wait for your food. They also have a glass counter where you can order 3 dishes+rice for $8.20. We ordered …
- Curry puffs ($1.50 each) which were very good - fresh, crisp, very yummy spicy curry fillings.
- Rice with 3 choices of dish (pork stew in sweet soy sauce and star anise, curry and sambal chicken) - recommend the pork stew
- Mamak nasi goreng (approx $9) - very tasty, not too oily and the best dish out of all
- Singaporean fried bee hoon (approx $9) - fried rice noodle, not as good as the nasi goreng but quite good
- Ikan bakar - grilled stingray with sambal, a bit too salty and fish was a bit tough
- Sambal baby octopus ($15) - on the specials board. This dish is different to the other sambal dishes I’ve tried. I was expecting sweet sambal sauce, but this was very salty and oily. Octopus was chewy, disappointing.
- Fried turnip cake - Turnip cake with beansprouts, egg and prawns. Very tasty.
- Ice kacang ($4.80) - My friend said it was a tad too sweet. Otherwise pretty good, better than the one at QVB she said.
The point is .. go for the single dishes like nasi goreng, mee goreng, char kway tiao etc. Overall all the dishes were nice except for the sambal baby octopus. A Malaysian friend of mine frequents this place every time she comes to Sydney. She recommends the nasi lemak, curry laksa, Loh Mee, prawn mee, hokkien mee, fried turnip cake and chilli crab. Definitely worth trying