The 13 best Indonesian restaurants in Sydney

One of Sydney’s original Indonesian restaurants and still one of the best. Fried chicken might be the namesake, but however juicy and perfectly golden those thigh pieces are, a cursory glance around the room will tell you that’s the second most popular thing here. The speciality is ayam bakar, or grilled chicken – marinated for up to six hours, roasted over charcoal and basted with kecap manis, garlic and spice. Order it with the house sambal (maybe the best in Sydney), tempeh, grilled offal bits and a dome of coconut rice.

This tiny Mascot restaurant started as a noodle diner to feed the local church community. Now, almost every Indonesian in Sydney knows about it. What hasn’t changed is the home-cooking style. Sauces and sambals are all made by the co-owner, Linda (she won’t even tell the staff the secret recipe); the meatballs are done by hand (a rarity in Sydney); and the sauce for their gado gado is ground in a traditional wooden mortar. If there's iga babi on the specials menu, order it – these are some of the best pork ribs you’ll find in Sydney.

Restaurant awards Rosebery Martabak could win include: Sydney’s Most Austere Interior, Cheapest Nasi Goreng in Town That Isn’t Rubbish and, most importantly, Sydney’s Best Martabak. Here, it comes in two forms. One is a savoury, crunchy fried package of roti that’s stuffed with spiced mince. Then there’s martabak manis, a round, perforated pancake that’s covered in salty and sweet items of your choice (peanuts, cheese, chocolate and durian among them) then folded onto itself like a buttery doona. As far as softness goes, think the fluffiest crumpet on earth and you've got it.

A scroll through the menu might read like a list of dishes you've seen at many Indonesian or Malaysian restaurants. What the menu won’t tell you is most of those things come with an inflection of Betawi culture, a Creole-like mix of Indonesia’s many influences – Chinese, Indian, Malay, Dutch and Arabic. For two classic examples, try the nasi uduk with coconut rice and a side of fried chicken, or soto Betawi, a thick beef and tripe soup made with coconut milk. If you want to stick to Indonesia-wide standards, they do a solid gado gado and sate, too.

In Padang, Sumatra, the traditional style of restaurant service is to pre-make all the food, serve it on plates to your table and have you pick what you want. It’s generally coconut-heavy, spicy and revolves around rice and a wide variety of curries. Pondok Buyung is the Sydney version of that. There’s not much in terms of a menu, just prices based on how many things you want with rice, so let loose, pay around $15 and pick away from the 20-odd dishes in the bains-marie. Don't be afraid to try the brains.

Indonesians will tell you Mie Kocok Bandung is a noodle restaurant – a particularly small one. That’s a bit of a disservice. Not the size critique, that’s fair. More the fact they do much more than noodles. The noodles are a speciality, particularly the Bandung-style light beef-based noodle soup with tripe, meatballs and fried wontons. But don’t ignore fried chicken tender enough to be wiggled off the bone, or the incredible range of crackers – taro, cassava, peanut, anchovy, purple yam, tapioca and more.

Lestari might be the best thing to happen to UTS students that hardly any UTS students even know about. It’s literally across the road, it's affordable, and pretty much everything on the menu has that perfect mix of exactly what a student meal aspires to be: huge, salty and the kind of delicious that makes you disregard any health-related hesitancy. That last bit is important because pretty much everything at this diner is fried (flat rice noodles, rice and chicken) or seasoned with pork (egg noodles).

Think of it like an Indonesian tapas restaurant, with Bintang instead of tempranillo. Besides a hefty fried rice and fried noodle dish, almost all the others are tiny. Order a lot of them and what would usually be an enormous banquet can be yours for just two people. The seven housemade sambal varieties range from soupy and volcanic to a sweeter version with peanuts and anchovies. Slather them on grilled chicken or a hunk of beef ribs, or mix them into your miniature rendang or coconutty rice-cake soup.

Willis Canteen was once one of the most revered Indonesian restaurants in Sydney, but then the owner made a controversial statement about Ahok, a governor jailed for blasphemy. While the wait times for their famous gado gado have radically reduced, the product hasn’t. The peanuts are still hand-ground for every order, it’s still challengingly colossal in size, and it’s still better than any other gado gado in Sydney. If you’ve got room or a companion, get a side of sambal-smothered beef ribs and a bowl of oxtail soup, too.

Might this be the only restuarant in Sydney where the star menu item, penyet, is a verb? Typically, it means to pinch something, but in this context it means smashing something with a pestle. You can have a number of deep-fried and smashed items – prawns, eggplant, egg, tofu, beef ribs and most famously, chicken. All of the above come with a particularly zingy sambal and a dusting of kremes, which are tiny bits of spiced fried crumbs.

Many Padang-born Indonesians will tell you this is the best dry-style rendang in Sydney. That’s never something you can fact-check, but it’s definitely a reason to try Sedap Rasa. Need some other reasons? There are twenty-odd bain-marie options to choose from. They serve Padang-style sate skewers (turmeric sauce rather than peanut, ox tongue on the skewer) and, if you drop in at the right time of year, you can score a mean, velvety young jackfruit curry.

The word 'homey' can be something of a cliché, but this place genuinely feels like somebody's house. The staff treat you like you’re family, there are no decorations other than the people inside, and sometimes you can see casual food prep going on at the other tables. Like Pondok Buyung above, it’s Padang style, so don’t look for a menu – just point to what curries, sambal splattered goodies or fried meats you want from the bain-marie selection and add any sweets that might be hanging around near the register.

When it opened on a suburban backstreet in 1993, Ria Sari was one of the only Indonesian restaurants in Sydney. The others, and many of the restaurants that followed, specialised in Anglo-accessible dishes like grilled chicken and fried rice. Nothing, not even the lace curtains or the guy serving you, has changed in the time since. And thank goodness for that. You'll still find a bain-marie wonderland of curries, fried fish, eggs drowned in chilli and rendang that’s been cooked for so long it glistens like a knob of butter melting on the pavement.