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 incredibly fiery – sometimes on a par with Thai, and far hotter than most Indian cooking. Many of the island’s less gifted chefs compensate for a lack of culinary subtlety with liberal use of chilli powder; at the same time, as a tourist you’ll often be seen as a weak-kneed individual who is liable to faint at the merest suspicion of spiciness. 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.
Etiquette and costs
Sri Lankans say that you can’t properly enjoy the flavours and textures of food unless you eat with your fingers, although tourists are almost always provided with cutlery by default. As elsewhere in Asia, you’re meant to eat with your right hand, although this taboo isn’t really 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 were some years ago). You can get a filling rice and curry meal for a few dollars at a local café, while main courses at most guesthouse restaurants usually cost around $10, and even at the island’s poshest restaurants it’s usually possible to find main courses from $15. 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 (usually 13–15%) 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 to eat
Although Sri Lankan cooking can be very good, few restaurants really do justice to the island’s cuisine. There’s no particular tradition of eating out and, except in Colombo, few independent restaurants of note. Locals either eat at home or patronize the island’s innumerable scruffy little 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. However as the food is usually pretty ordinary, eating in local cafés is more of a social than a culinary experience.
Given the lack of independent tourist restaurants, most visitors end up taking the majority of their meals in their hotel or guesthouse. The sort of food and setting you’ll encounter varies wildly, from the big bland restaurants at the coastal resorts to the cosy guesthouses of Ella and Galle, where you can experience the sort of home cooking that rarely makes its way onto menus at larger hotels. In general, however, choice is limited, with most places offering a standard assortment of fried noodles or rice, a small range of seafood and meat dishes (usually including a couple of devilled options) and maybe a few kinds of curry.
Most of the island’s independent restaurants can be found in Colombo and, to a lesser extent, Kandy, Galle and Negombo, where tourism has inspired the growth of a modest local eating scene. The most common independent restaurants are aimed at tourists, with a mix of Sri Lankan, seafood and Western dishes; you’ll also find a few South Indian-style places, especially in Colombo.
If you want to eat like the locals, you’ll find lunch packets on sale at local cafés and street stalls all over the country between around 11am and 2pm. These usually include a big portion of steamed rice along with a piece of curried chicken, fish or beef (vegetarians can get an egg), some vegetables and sambol. They’re the cheapest way to fill up in Sri Lanka, although probably best avoided until your stomach and tastebuds are properly acclimatized to the local cooking.
Rice and curry
The island’s signature dish is the ubiquitous rice and curry, the staple food of almost every Sri Lankan man, woman and child, served up in just about every café and restaurant across the land. A really good Sri Lankan rice and curry can be a memorable experience, although it’s worth noting that the dish bears zero resemblance to the classic curries of North India. Typical Sri Lankan curry sauces (known as kiri hodhi, or “milk gravy”) are made from coconut milk infused with chillies and various other spices – much more like a Thai green or red curry than anything you’ll find in India.
Basic rice and curry (not “curry and rice” – the rice is considered the principal ingredient), as served up in local cafés islandwide, consists of a plate of rice topped with a few dollops of veg curry, a hunk of chicken or fish and a spoonful of sambol. More sophisticated versions comprise the inevitable mound of rice accompanied by as many as fifteen 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). These generally include a serving of meat or fish curry plus accompaniments such as curried pineapple, potato, aubergine (brinjal), sweet potatoes, okra (lady’s fingers) and dhal. You’ll probably also encounter some more unusual local vegetables. Curried jackfruit is fairly common, as are so-called “drumsticks” (murunga – a bit like okra). Other ingredients you might encounter include 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 combination of chilli powder, chopped onions, salt, grated coconut and “Maldive fish” (salty, intensely flavoured shreds of sun-dried tuna). 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 biryanis 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.
Other Sri Lankan specialities
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 sinks to the bottom, making them soft and doughy at the base, and thin and crisp 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 (indiappa), 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. 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, and can be delicious. 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 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 biryani, being nothing more than 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.