Why Jiak Simi exists

Today eat what?

Jiak simi is Singlish for “what to eat?”. We ask it three times a day and still end up at the same few places — not for lack of options, but because choosing is tiring, and reviews are written by strangers whose taste has nothing to do with yours.

That is the question Jiak Simi answers. Not what is popular, not what is nearest, but what you will actually enjoy.

Why I built it

I am Kimberley — a designer in Singapore, and the whole team.

Ask anyone how they take their bak chor mee and you get an exact answer. Xiao la, extra black vinegar, no liver, dry not soup. We are all that specific about food — and yet every app that tries to recommend a meal talks to us like we’re the same person.

I already had my own answer, kind of. A mental list of places I would run through whenever anyone asked where to eat. Then one evening I spent more than twenty minutes on that same question anyway — scrolling Google Maps, asking an AI, opening the same few tabs twice — and still could not land on anything I actually wanted. Not too sinful, not too expensive, but still genuinely worth eating. That was the evening the list stopped being good enough in my head, and started being something I wanted to build.

I have always wanted to be a designer. The system I grew up in did not really reward that, and at some point I had accepted that art might just stay a hobby. When I finally had the time to find out otherwise, a six-hour web prototype turned into a months-long app project. AI handled the technical heavy lifting, which left me the part that actually matters: the craft. Three months and close to a hundred Figma frames later, this is it.

Being one person is deliberate. Nothing here needs layers of approval before getting shipped — and if something feels wrong, there is one person to tell.

Your Palate Compass

Most food apps rank places by what everyone else thought. Jiak Simi starts from you.

You get a Palate Compass — six taste axes (heat, sweet, sour, umami, rich and fresh) that describe how you actually eat. Every stall and restaurant is scored on the same six. Match the two, and a pick means something personal: this place, for this palate.

The hard part is not the matching. It is the taste data underneath — a Singapore-specific reading of what a dish is really like, built stall by stall. That is the part nobody can copy quickly, and the part I care most about getting right.

Something I did not expect when I started: it cuts both ways. Matching on taste instead of ranking on reviews means a good new place nobody has written about yet can still reach the people it suits — and so can the stall that has quietly fed the same crowd for twenty years without ever collecting the reviews to prove it. Helping smaller places get found by the palates they actually fit matters to me as much as the picks do.

Say hello

I would genuinely like to hear from you — a place we are missing, a pick that was wide of the mark, or just what you ate today. Write to hello@jiaksimi.ai.

Run a restaurant or stall, writing about Jiak Simi, or want to build something together? Same address — more on the support page.