srilankacoffee.com), the first premium coffee to come out of the island for 150 years. Based in Nuwara Eliya, Hansa’s arabica and robusta blends are now served in increasing numbers of places around the island.Sri Lanka boasts a fascinatingly idiosyncratic culinary heritage, the result of a unique fusion of local traditions and produce with recipes and spices brought to the island over the centuries by Indians, Arabs, Malays, Portuguese, Dutch and British.
The staple dish is rice and curry, at its finest a miniature banquet whose contrasting flavours – coconut milk, chillies, curry leaves, cinnamon, garlic and “Maldive fish” (an intensely flavoured pinch of sun-dried tuna) – bear witness to Sri Lanka’s status as one of the original spice islands. There are plenty of other unique specialities to explore and enjoy – hoppers, string hoppers, kottu rotty, lamprais and pittu – as well as plentiful seafood.
Sri Lankan cuisine can be decidedly fiery – sometimes on a par with Thai, and far hotter than most Indian cooking. You’ll often be asked how hot you want your food; “medium” usually gets you something that’s neither bland nor requires the use of a fire extinguisher. If you do overheat during a meal, remember that water only adds to the pain of a burnt palate; a mouthful of plain rice, bread or beer is much more effective.
Sri Lankans say that you can’t properly enjoy the flavours and textures of food unless you eat with your fingers, although tourists are always provided with cutlery by default. As elsewhere in Asia, you’re meant to eat with your right hand, although this taboo isn’t strictly observed – if you’d really prefer to eat with your left hand, you’re unlikely to turn heads.
Costs are generally reasonable though no longer the bargain they once were. You can get a filling rice and curry meal for a couple of dollars at a local café, while main courses at most guesthouses or cheaper restaurants usually cost around $3–6, although prices in more upmarket places, in Colombo especially, are now approaching European or North American levels. Note that many places add a ten percent service charge to the bill, while more upmarket restaurants may add additional government taxes of varying amounts (10–15 percent) on top of that.
Be aware that the typical vagaries of Sri Lankan spelling mean that popular dishes can appear on menus in a bewildering number of forms: idlis can become ittlys, vadais turn into wadais, kottu rotty transforms into kotturoti and lamprais changes to lumprice. You’ll also be regaled with plenty of unintentionally humorous offerings such as “cattle fish”, “sweat and sour” or Adolf Hitler’s favourite dish, “nazi goreng”.
Where you’ll eat in Sri Lanka will depend very much on where you are. Some of the island’s larger cities, including Kandy, Trincomalee and Jaffna, remain a bit of a culinary desert, although Colombo, Galle, Negombo, Unawatuna, Mirissa and Ella have a burgeoning number of independent restaurants and plenty of choice. Away from the major tourist centres, however, good restaurants are few and far between, and you’ll probably end up eating at your guesthouse, which at most places means rice and curry, plus a limited selection of simple fried rice and noodle dishes.
Sri Lankans themselves either eat at home or patronize the island’s innumerable scruffy little local cafés, often confusingly signed as “hotels”, which serve up filling meals for a dollar or two: rough-and-ready portions of rice and curry, plus maybe hoppers or kottu rotty. Lunch packets are also popular and, at less than a couple of dollars, the cheapest way to fill up in Sri Lanka. Sold at local cafés and street stalls in larger towns between around 11am and 2pm, these contain a filling portion of simple rice and curry wrapped in a banana leaf or newspaper (or, increasingly, packed in a styrofoam box).
Served up in just about every café and restaurant across the land, rice and curry is the island’s ubiquitous signature dish – somewhere in style between the food of South India and Southeast Asia (although bearing virtually zero resemblance to the classic curries of North India). Rice and curry can take many forms. At its simplest it can be just a single plate, with a mound of rice topped with a few dollops of veg curry and/or dhal, a hunk of chicken or fish and a spoonful of sambol (see below). More sophisticated versions comprise a large bowl of rice accompanied by around five to eight (sometimes more) side dishes – a kind of miniature banquet said to have been inspired by Indonesian nasi padang, which was transformed by the Dutch into the classic rijsttafel, or “rice table”, and introduced to Sri Lanka sometime in the eighteenth century.
As in Southeast Asia, coconut and chilli provide the foundations for Sri Lankan cooking. Typical curry sauces (known as kiri hodhi, or “milk gravy”) are made from coconut milk infused with chillies and various other spices usually including curry leaves, cinnamon, ginger, garlic and turmeric. A choice of either chicken or fish curry plus a serving of dhal comes as standard, with a varied range of vegetable dishes which might include curried pineapple, potato, aubergine (brinjal), sweet potato and okra (lady’s fingers). Other commonly encountered local vegetables include curried jackfruit, so-called “drumsticks” (murunga – a bit like okra), “long beans” and kankun (also spelt kangkung), or “water spinach”, usually stir-fried with other ingredients or on its own. You might also be served ash plantain (alu kesel), snake gourd (patolah), bitter gourd (karawila) and breadfruit (del), along with many more outlandish and unpronounceable types of regional produce. Another common accompaniment is mallung: shredded green vegetables, lightly stir-fried with spices and grated coconut.
Rice and curry is usually served with a helping of sambol, designed to be mixed into your food to give it a bit of extra kick. Sambols come in various forms, the most common being pol sambol (coconut sambol), an often eye-watering lethal combination of chilli powder, chopped onions, salt, grated coconut and Maldive fish. Treat it with caution. You might also come across the slightly less overpowering lunu miris, consisting of chilli powder, onions, Maldive fish and salt; and the more gentle, sweet-and-sour seeni sambol (“sugar sambol”).
Funnily enough, the rice itself is often fairly uninspiring – don’t expect to find the delicately spiced pilaus and birianis of North India. Sri Lanka produces many types of rice, but the stuff served in restaurants is usually fairly low-grade, although you may occasionally come across the nutritious and distinctively flavoured red and yellow rice (a bit like brown rice in taste and texture) that are grown in certain parts of the island.
Vegetarian food in Sri Lanka
Surprisingly for such a Buddhist country, vegetarian food as a concept hasn’t really caught on in Sri Lanka. That said, a large proportion of the nation’s cooking is meat-free: vegetable curries, vegetable rottys, hoppers and string hoppers – not to mention the bewildering variety of fruit on offer. Colombo’s numerous pure veg South Indian restaurants are a delight, while if you eat fish and seafood, you’ll have no problems finding a meal, especially around the coast.
Sri Lanka’s tastiest snack, the engagingly named hopper (appa) is a small, bowl-shaped pancake traditionally made from a batter containing coconut milk and palm toddy, and is usually eaten either at breakfast or, most commonly, dinner. Hoppers are cooked in a small wok-like dish, meaning that most of the mix collects in the bottom, making them soft and doughy at the base, and thin and crispy around the edges. Various ingredients can be poured into the hopper. An egg fried in the middle produces an egg hopper, while sweet ingredients like yoghurt or honey are also sometimes added. Alternatively, plain hoppers can be eaten as an accompaniment to curry. Not to be confused with the hopper are string hoppers (idi appa), tangled little nests of steamed rice vermicelli noodles, often eaten with a dash of dhal or curry for breakfast.
Another rice substitute is pittu, a mixture of flour and grated coconut, steamed in a cylindrical bamboo mould – it looks a bit like coarse couscous. Derived from the Dutch lomprijst, lamprais is another local speciality: a serving of rice baked in a plantain leaf along with accompaniments such as a chunk of chicken or a boiled egg, plus some veg and pickle.
Muslim restaurants are the place to go for rotty (or roti), a fine, doughy pancake – watching these being made is half the fun, as the chef teases small balls of dough into huge sheets of almost transparent thinness. A dollop of curried meat, veg or potato is then plonked in the middle and the rotty is folded up around it; the final shape depends on the whim of the chef – some prefer crepe-like squares, others opt for samosa-style triangles, some a spring roll. Pol (coconut) rotty, served with lunu miris, is a popular breakfast snack. Rottys can also be chopped up and stir-fried with meat and vegetables, a dish known as kottu rotty. You’ll know when kottu rotty is being made because of the noise – the ingredients are usually simultaneously fried and chopped on a hotplate using a large pair of meat cleavers, producing a noisy drumming sound – part musical performance, part advertisement.
Devilled dishes are also popular. These are usually prepared with a thick, spicy sauce plus big chunks of onion and chilli, though the end product often isn’t as hot as you might fear (unless you eat all the chillies). Devilled chicken, pork, fish and beef are all common – the last is generally considered the classic devilled dish and is traditionally eaten during drinking binges. Another local staple is the buriani. This has little in common with the traditional, saffron-scented North Indian biriani, being simply a mound of rice with a hunk of chicken, a bowl of curry sauce and a boiled egg, but it makes a good lunchtime filler and is usually less fiery than a basic plate of rice and curry.
Not surprisingly, seafood plays a major part in the Sri Lankan diet, with fish often taking the place of meat. Common fish include tuna, seer (a firm-bodied white fish), mullet and the delicious melt-in-the-mouth butterfish, as well as pomfret, bonito and shark. You’ll also find lobster, plentiful crab, prawns and cuttlefish (calamari). The Negombo lagoon, just north of Colombo, is a particularly prized source of seafood, including gargantuan jumbo prawns the size of a well-fed crab.
Seafood is usually a good bet if you’re trying to avoid highly spiced food. Fish is generally prepared in a fairly simple manner, usually fried (sometimes in breadcrumbs) or grilled and served with a twist of lemon or in a mild garlic sauce. You will, however, find some fiery fish curries, while chillied seafood dishes are also fairly common – chilli crab is particularly popular.
Sri Lanka boasts a good selection of “pure vegetarian” South Indian restaurants (vegetarian here meaning no meat, fish, eggs or alcohol); they’re most common in Colombo, although they can be found islandwide wherever there’s a significant Tamil population. These cheerfully no-nonsense places cater to a local clientele and serve up a delicious range of South Indian-style dishes at giveaway prices. The standard dish is the dosa, a crispy rice pancake served in various forms: either plain, with ghee (clarified butter), onion or, most commonly, as a masala dosa, folded up around a filling of curried potato. You’ll also find uttapam, another (thicker) type of rice pancake that’s usually eaten with some kind of curry, and idlis, steamed rice cakes served with curry sauces or chutneys.
Another classic Tamil savoury which has entered the Sri Lanka mainstream is the vadai (or wadai), a spicy doughnut made of deep-fried lentils – no train or bus journey is complete without the sound of hawkers marching up and down the carriage or vehicle shouting “Vadai-vadai-vadai!”. Platefuls of vadais, rottys and bread rolls are often served up in cafés under the name of short eats – you help yourself and are charged for what you eat, though be aware that these plates are passed around and their contents indiscriminately prodded by all and sundry, so they’re not particularly hygienic.
There are plenty of Chinese restaurants around the island, although the predominantly Cantonese-style dishes are usually spiced up for Sri Lankan tastes. As usual, Colombo has easily the best range of such places. Indonesian dishes introduced by the Dutch are also sometimes served in tourist restaurants – most commonly nasi goreng (fried rice with meat or seafood, topped with a fried egg) and gado gado (salad and cold boiled eggs in a peanut sauce), although these rarely taste much like the Indonesian originals.
Other cuisines are restricted to Colombo. Thai food has made some limited inroads, while Japanese cuisine is also modestly popular. Colombo is also where you’ll find almost all of Sri Lanka’s surprisingly small number of decent North Indian restaurants, along with lots of excellent European places. Smarter hotels all over the island make some attempt to produce European cuisine, though with wildly varying results.
The classic Sri Lankan dessert is curd (yoghurt made from buffalo milk) served with honey or kitul (a sweet syrup from the kitul palm). When boiled and left to set hard, kitul becomes jaggery, an all-purpose Sri Lanka sweet or sweetener. Another characteristic dessert is wattalappam, an egg pudding of Malay origins which tastes faintly like crème caramel but with a sweeter and less slippery texture. Kiribath is a dessert of rice cakes cooked in milk and served with jaggery – it’s also traditionally made for weddings, and is often the first solid food fed to babies. A South Indian dessert you might come across is faluda, a colourful cocktail of milk, syrup, jelly, ice cream and ice served in a tall glass like an Indian knickerbocker glory. Ice cream is usually factory made, and safe to eat; the most widely available brand is Elephant House.
Sri Lanka has a bewildering variety of fruits, from the familiar to the less so, including several classic Southeast Asian fruits introduced from Indonesia by the Dutch. The months given in brackets below refer to the periods when each is in season (where no months are specified, the fruit is available year-round). Familiar fruits include pineapple, mangoes (April–June & Nov–Dec), avocados (April–June) and coconuts, as well as a wide variety of bananas, from small sweet yellow specimens to enormous red giants. Papaya (pawpaw), a distinctively sweet and pulpy fruit, crops up regularly in fruit salads, but the king of Sri Lankan fruits is undoubtedly the jackfruit (April–June & Sept–Oct), the world’s largest – a huge, elongated dark-green monster, rather like an enormous marrow in shape, whose fibrous flesh can either be eaten raw or cooked in curries. Durian (July–Sept) is another outsized specimen, a large green beast with a spiky outer shell. It’s very much an acquired taste: though the flesh smells rather like blocked drains, it’s widely considered a great delicacy and has a bit of a reputation as an aphrodisiac. The strangest-looking fruit, however, is the rambutan (July–Sept), a delicious, lychee-like fruit enclosed in a bright-red skin covered in tentacles. Another prized Sri Lankan delicacy is the mangosteen (July–Sept), which looks a little like a purple tomato, with a rather hard shell-like skin that softens as the fruit ripens. The delicate and delicious flesh tastes a bit like a grape with a slight citrus tang. Equally distinctive is the wood apple, a round, apple-sized fruit covered in an indestructible greyish bark, inside which is a red pulpy flesh, rather bitter-tasting and full of seeds. It’s sometimes served with honey poured over it. You might also come across custard apples, greenish, apple-sized fruits with knobbly exteriors (they look a bit like artichokes) and smooth, sweet white flesh; and guavas, smooth, round yellow-green fruits, usually smaller than an apple and with slightly sour-tasting flesh around a central core of seeds. Other exotic fruits you might encounter include soursop, lovi-lovi, sapodilla, rose apple, and beli fruit (not to be confused with nelli fruit, a kind of Sri Lankan gooseberry). Finally, look out for the tiny gulsambilla (Aug–Oct), Sri Lanka’s strangest fruit – like a large, furry green seed` enclosing a tiny, tartly flavoured kernel.
It’s best to avoid tap water in Sri Lanka. Bottled water is available everywhere, sourced from various places in the hill country and retailed under a baffling range of names. Check that the seal hasn’t been broken.
International brands of soft drinks – Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Sprite – are widely available and cheap, but it’s much more fun (and better for the Sri Lankan economy) to explore the glorious range of outlandish soft drinks produced locally by Olé, Lion and Elephant. These include old-fashioned favourites like cream soda and ginger beer, and unique local brands like Portello (which tastes a bit like Vimto) and the ultra-sweet, lollipop-flavoured Necta. Ginger beer is particularly common, and very refreshing – the Elephant brand uses natural ginger, which is meant to be good for the stomach and digestion.
Coconut water (thambili) is widely available, with streetside vendors standing ready with a machete to lop the head off a fresh coconut at your command. The slightly sour-tasting liquid isn’t to everyone’s taste, although it’s guaranteed safe, having been locked up in the heart of the coconut and is also claimed to be an excellent hangover cure thanks to its mix of glucose and potassium – which also makes it good to drink if you’re suffering from diarrhoea.
Despite the fame of Sri Lanka’s tea, most of the stuff served up is usually fairly bland – and you won’t find the marvellous masala teas of India. British-style tea with milk is often called “milk tea” (ask for milk and sugar separately if you want to add your own or you might end up with a cupful of super-sweet bilge). “Bed tea” is just ordinary tea brought to your room first thing in the morning. For more on the island’s tea, see Contexts.
Coffee has always taken a backseat to tea in Sri Lanka – at least since the island’s original coffee plantations were wiped out during the 1870s. Nescafé is sometimes available, although most is made from locally raised and roasted beans grown in people’s back gardens or allotments – which accounts for the distinctive taste of most island coffee, with its thin, rather bitter taste and faint aroma of pond water (not to mention the big layer of silt found at the bottom of every cup). Things are slowly changing. Proper barista-style espresso, latte and cappuccino is increasingly available, while international-quality roasts and blends are now being produced by the trailblazing Hansa Coffee company (srilankacoffee.com), the first premium coffee to come out of the island for 150 years. Based in Nuwara Eliya, Hansa’s arabica and robusta blends are now served in increasing numbers of places around the island.
Sri Lanka has a strong drinking culture – beer was introduced by foreign captives during the Kandyan period, and the islanders have never looked back. The island’s two staple forms of alcohol are lager and arrack. Lager is usually sold in large (625ml) bottles, or sometimes in smaller cans; draught beer is still relatively uncommon. The staple national tipple is the ubiquitous Lion Lager, an uninspiring if perfectly drinkable brew which now has a virtual islandwide monopoly. Carlsberg (brewed under licence in Sri Lanka by the Lion Brewery) can also be found in some places, while in the hill country (particularly Kandy) you might come across the locally brewed beer Anchor – soft, creamy and a bit bland. Lion also brews a very dense stout, Lion Stout, which is virtually a meal in itself, as well as Lion Strong (eight percent ABV), beloved by local alcoholics. As you’d expect, lager is relatively expensive in Sri Lankan terms, ranging from around Rs.180 in a liquor shop to Rs.400–500 or more in most bars and restaurants. Imported beers, on the rare occasions you can find them, come with a hefty mark-up.
Two more distinctively local types of booze come from the versatile coconut. Toddy, tapped from the flower of the coconut, is non-alcoholic when fresh but ferments into a beverage faintly reminiscent of cider – it’s sold informally in villages around the country, though unless you’re travelling with a Sinhala-speaker it’s difficult to track down. When fermented and refined, toddy produces arrack (33 percent proof), Sri Lanka’s national beverage for the strong-livered. Arrack is either drunk neat, mixed with Coke or lemonade or used in tourist-oriented bars and restaurants as a base for cocktails. It’s available in various grades and is usually a darkish brown, though there are also clear brands like White Diamond and White Label; the smoother, double-distilled arrack tastes faintly like rum. Imported spirits are widely available, but are predictably expensive. There are also locally produced versions of most spirits, including rather rough whisky, brandy, rum and vodka, as well as various brands of quite palatable lemon gin.
Most restaurants and some guesthouses serve alcohol (if only beer), although there are numerous places that don’t, and in some towns (such as Jaffna and Trinco) finding a drink can be hard work. You won’t find any alcohol in local cafes, either. There are a few decent bars (and the occasional English-style pub) in Colombo, Negombo, Unawatuna and a few tourist resorts, but most local bars are gloomy and rather seedy places, and very much a male preserve. Alcohol is available only from the rather disreputable-looking liquor shops which can be found in just about every town in the island – usually a small kiosk, piled high with bottles of beer and arrack and protected by stout security bars. Archaic Sri Lankan laws officially prohibit women from buying alcohol – foreign women don’t usually encounter any problems, although it’s worth being aware of, particularly if you’re of South Asian descent and might be mistaken for a local. In addition, you’re technically not allowed to buy alcohol on full-moon (poya) days and some other public holidays, including National Day, while the sale of alcohol is also often banned during major election periods – although tourist hotels often discreetly serve foreign visitors.