Sederhana

The rendang is a twenty-spice paste reduced over nine hours, until it stops being a wet curry and turns dry and dark.

Why go

Restoran Sederhana started in Jakarta fifty-four years ago and now runs about two hundred shops across Indonesia and Malaysia, and this Queen Street room is its first in Australia (Broadsheet). A 2018 Roy Morgan survey put it ahead of both KFC and McDonald's in Indonesia by at least 4.4 million patrons. Co-owner Hana Tania brought Ria Ayam Penyet to Melbourne as a student in 2013 and has grown that to eleven stores; for this one she flew to Jakarta with her chef whites and trained for a week with the chain's head chef of thirty-five years, then brought her Melbourne team back for a second round. The spice mixes are still ground in Jakarta and shipped, and her reason is blunt: "Even if I mix the exact same ingredients here, the flavour is just different." Six curry bases sit in the bain-maries at once, from the dark rendang through orange chicken gulai to a red asam pedas catfish curry that leans sour and hot.

Order this / avoid

Order: rendang first. Ayam pop, which is skinless chicken poached and then fried in coconut oil, with the sriracha they make. The crispy beef lungs, dried in the kitchen, which is what Tania orders herself. Asam pedas if you want heat. A balado egg. Take the cassava leaf curry as the counterweight, since it and the jackfruit one are built thinner on purpose to sit under the meat.
Avoid: waiting to be served. The traditional Minang service, where a stack of small cloth-wrapped plates lands on your table and you open only what you want to eat, was ruled out by Australian food-safety regulation, so this is a cafeteria line. Check before turning up for a weekday dinner, because opening crowds were heavy enough to pause that service.

What locals & experts say

Haymun Win, Broadsheet (July 2026), reporting the opening: "It's the first Australian outpost for the popular Indonesian chain. Find 25 Padang-style dishes, including glossy ayam pop fried in coconut oil, and beef rendang made with a signature 20-spice paste." That is an openings report rather than a verdict. ref
Hana Tania, co-owner, on the Minang service the regulations cost them: "You only open the ones you want to eat. Once it's open and you touch it, you gotta pay for it." ref
On who turned up: Tania reckons 95 per cent of the opening-weekend customers were Indonesians "willing to queue" for Padang cuisine. ref
The caveat, stated plainly. No critic has assessed this kitchen and no Melbourne chef names it. It is also a two-hundred-outlet chain rolling into a new market, with Perth planned by December and Sydney after that, so the case for it rests on the cooking rather than on anyone's judgment of this room.

Good to know

Where: 207 Queen Street, in the CBD, roughly 1.2km from MCEC at South Wharf.
Timing: daily 11am to 3pm and 4.30pm to 9pm. The weekday evening service was paused shortly after opening under crowd pressure, so confirm.
Booking: walk-in. You point at what you want and pay at the counter.
Takeaway: dishes can be wrapped in banana leaf to go.
Context: Melbourne is in the middle of an Indonesian warung boom, and this is the franchise arriving rather than a local kitchen emerging.
Hygiene: Victoria publishes no consumer-facing food-hygiene rating, so there is no Australian equivalent of an FSA score to record.

Jeff's take (his words)

Nothing. Melbourne has no _src saved-places export in this repo, so no Jeff note stands behind this row and none has been written for him.

Verdict (Chef Jeff ladder)

could-visit — The rendang starts as a twenty-spice paste, pandan and lime and turmeric among the leaves, and gets reduced for nine hours until it stops being a wet curry and turns dry and dark. That is the dish done properly, and the spice mixes behind it are ground at the chain's central kitchen in Jakarta and shipped here, because Hana Tania says the same ingredients mixed in Melbourne taste different. She trained for a week with Sederhana's head chef of thirty-five years before opening. Six curry bases sit in the bain-maries at once and there are at least twenty-five dishes going, including ayam pop poached and then fried in coconut oil, and crispy beef lungs she dries in-house and names as her own must-order. The catch is what this is: the first Australian site of a fifty-four-year-old chain with around two hundred outlets, Perth planned by December and Sydney after. Group operators carry the burden of proof here, and nobody independent has assessed this kitchen yet. Cheap, fast, genuinely interesting, and not yet a room anyone has vouched for.