Sri Lankan cooking is a lot like the island itself: a unique fusion of Indian, Asian and European influences which have been mixed together over the centuries to produce a highly flavoured and hugely enjoyable cuisine quite unlike any other. Rice and curry remains the national staple, though this plain name completely fails to describe the culinary magnificence of the best Sri Lankan cooking. Fish features heavily thanks to the abundant local supplies and there are lots of intriguingly named local specialities to sample too – hoppers, string hoppers, lamprais, pittu, kottu rotty and watalappan, to name just a few.
Dried chillies
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Central to the island’s unique cuisine is its vast array of spices – Sri Lankan cooking is typically hot (and often downright fiery), with crisp chilli and coconut flavours which are often more reminiscent of Thai cooking than Indian. Adding to the heat are the distinctive local sambols, a kind of Sri Lankan salt and pepper, which are served as condiments – and you will probably come across the ubiquitous pol sambol, a bland-looking but palate-scorching combination of finely grated coconut and chilli. Approach with extreme caution.
Where to eat
The main problem with Sri Lankan food is finding really good places to sample it: too many places, from the big west-coast resorts to smaller hotels and guesthouses around the island, offer up lame international tourist standards or tired buffets which give no hint of the island’s wonderful cuisine – and, except in Colombo, decent independent restaurants are disappointingly thin on the ground. Having said that, there are a reasonable number of good places if you know where to look. A lot of the island’s best restaurants are located in top-end hotels, some of which offer excellent cooking in luxurious surroundings. At the other end of the spectrum you will sometimes find excellent home cooking at relatively modest little guesthouses – a great opportunity for tourists to enjoy proper Sri Lankan home cooking at bargain prices.
Kottu is the national dish
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Anywhere with even the slightest tourist pretensions will have an English-language menu – although wild variations in spelling can sometimes make it tricky to work out what is being offered. In the unlikely event that you end up eating in a local café you will just have to point at whatever food is on the counter or at what other diners are eating – though there will probably only be one or two choices available in any case.
Breakfast and snacks
Rotis are rather dry pancakes made from onion batter, eaten for breakfast with sambol, butter or marmalade, or as a snack. The traditional Sri Lankan breakfast consists of a kind of pancake called hoppers (crispy on the outside, soft inside). If there is an egg in the middle, it will be an egg hopper. String hoppers are tangled circles of steamed noodles, which when eaten with a meat curry taste delicious, even in the morning. Kiribeth is a type of milk rice, usually served with jaggery, a sweetener made from palm syrup. For a snack, call in at a roadside stall and try a vegetarian spring roll or cutlis, pockets of dough filled with cold chicken or fish. Be warned: the meatballs and round, often fish-filled rolls (malu pan) are fiendishly hot. One dessert is wattalappam, a coconut crème caramel. Curd is a yoghurt made from buffalo milk – try it with jaggery.
What to eat
Rice and curry
Sri Lanka’s national dish is rice and curry, a term which covers everything from the basic meals served up in local cafés to the sumptuous banquets dished up in the island’s top hotels and restaurants. The classic Sri Lankan rice and curry features a dozen or more dishes of contrasting ingredients and flavours served with an enormous mound of rice – more akin to a South Indian thali (or even Middle Eastern meze or Indonesian rijstafel) than a traditional North Indian curry.
The range of dishes varies from place to place but will usually feature a meat or fish curry, dhal and poppadums along with local favourites such as curried pineapple, caramelised aubergine, potato or sweet potato curry, curried green beans, mallung (shredded green vegetable fried with spices and coconut) and a range of sambols, as well as dishes using unusual local specialities such as drumsticks (similar to okra), curried jakfruit or ash plantain. The range is pretty much endless, and part of the fun of travelling around the island is in sampling different local variations on the island’s national dish.
Rice and curry is undoubtedly king in the Sri Lankan cookbook, but there are plenty of other local specialities worth sampling (see ‘Breakfasts and snacks’, click here). Lamprais is a mound of rice plus toppings (typically a lump of chicken, a boiled egg and some pickle) baked and served in a banana leaf – a kind of simplified local take on the North Indian biriani.
Cooking Sri Lankan hoppers
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The most popular Muslim contribution to Sri Lankan cooking is the rotty, a doughy pancake (similar to a Malaysian murtabak) wrapped up in various shapes around spicy dollops of vegetable or potato. Alternatively, rotty is chopped up and stir-fried with meat and vegetable to produce kottu rotty, a popular evening snack usually cooked on the spot outside local cafés by machete-wielding chefs – listen for the noise of furious chopping and banging. You might also come across pittu, a mix of grated coconut and flour steamed in a cylindrical bamboo mould, and you will definitely find ‘devilled’ dishes (devilled pork, chicken and beef are all common) – bite-size hunks of meat served in a delicious, moderately-spicy barbecue sauce with big chunks of tomato, onion and chilli.
Salty addition
So-called ‘Maldive fish’ (sun-dried tuna) is a popular ingredient in local cooking, adding a sharp, salty twist to curries and sambols.
Seafood
Around the coast, seafood also plays a big role in the Sri Lankan diet, with a wide range of freshly caught fish – tuna, seer, mullet and shark among them – plus cuttlefish (calamari), crab and prawns (those from the Negombo lagoon are particularly prized). Fiery fish curries are common, as is chilli crab, though otherwise preparation is fairly simple and usually not too spicy, with the fish grilled, bread crumbed or served in a simple garlic sauce.
International cuisines
Other cuisines have also established themselves in the island’s culinary mainstream. Colombo boasts dozens of excellent little South Indian restaurants, unpretentious places dishing up subcontinental classics like dosas (crispy rice pancakes), iddlis (steamed rice cakes) and vadais (spicy doughnuts made from deep-fried lentil-flour) at giveaway prices. Chinese food is also ubiquitous. Though generally spiced up for local tastes with distinctly un-Chinese hunks of chilli, it is often tasty and cheap. And in Colombo a lot of restaurants serve up the full range of international cuisine, from Japanese and Thai to Italian and French, with varying degrees of authenticity.
Desserts
Sri Lanka also has a good range of desserts. The classic pudding is curd, a deliciously thick and creamy yoghurt made from buffalo milk, usually served with treacle – syrup made of kitul palm. You might also encounter wattalappam, an egg-based dessert from Malaysia which tastes a bit like crème caramel. Kiribath, rice cooked in milk, is traditionally served at weddings and other festivals. More mainstream puddings and snacks include a decent range of ice-cream (the Elephant House brand is ubiquitous) and colourful cakes, often made in lurid colours and with a faintly curried flavour, are also popular, especially in Kandy. South Indian restaurants in Colombo usually have a selection of classic Indian sweets such as laddu and burfi. Banana fritters are also popular.
Galle Fish Market
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Fruits
Sri Lanka also boasts a wonderful array of tropical fruits. Bananas come in all shapes and sizes, from fat little yellow miniatures to huge red monsters. Pineapple, mango and papaya are all found everywhere, as are coconuts. The enormous jakfruit, the world’s biggest fruit, is often served curried as part of a rice and curry, while durian, another massive fruit, is a reputed aphrodisiac – though its peculiarly smelly aroma makes it something of an acquired taste. Mangosteens look like purple tomatoes and hold a delicious fruit which tastes like a slightly citrus-flavoured grape. The outlandish-looking rambutan is covered in bright red tentacles, inside which is a delicately flavoured, lychee-like fruit. Wood apples – round, apple-sized fruits covered in a tough wooden shell – are also common; crack them open to discover a red, rather bitter seed-filled flesh, usually served softened with a dash of honey.
What to drink
Tea in Sri Lanka is a bit of a disappointment – most of the island’s best beverages get exported, meaning that you are unlikely to get more than a milky cup of tea-bag tea. There is also lots of locally grown coffee, which is usually quite palatable. International brands of fizzy drinks are available everywhere. Ginger beer is a particular favourite and there is also an interesting range of bizarre-tasting local fizzy pops to explore like Portello or Necta. Coconut water is also available pretty much everywhere – look for men hanging around with a bunch of coconuts and a machete – and is claimed to be good for upset stomachs and hangovers thanks to its rich mix of glucose and potassium, as well as being a great teeth whitener.
Fresh tropical fruit at the market
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Sri Lankans love to drink, and the island isn’t short of tipples both hard and soft. The nation’s lager of choice is Lion Lager, Carlsberg, brewed locally under licence and imported Tiger. Imported wines are widely available at top-end hotels, though at a price, while a few bottles of rather strange-tasting Sri Lankan wines also occasionally make their way onto drinks lists. The island’s top drink, however, is arrack, a feisty (33 percent proof) spirit made from refined toddy, tapped from coconut. Tasting a little like rum, arrack is available in various grades (double-distilled is easier on the palate and makes for softer hangovers). It can be drunk neat, mixed with coke or lemonade, or used as a base for all sorts of cocktails.