gourmandonline

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).