Sri Lankan Food: What to Order and Where

Sri Lankan food is distinct from Indian food, and saying so is not pedantry. It leans harder on coconut, uses Maldive fish (a dried, smoked tuna) as a savoury base, roasts its spices darker, and treats rice and curry as a communal spread rather than a single plate. It is also, reliably, some of the best value eating anywhere.

Rice and curry

The national meal, and it is not one dish. You get a mound of rice and then anywhere from three to a dozen small curries around it — dhal, a vegetable or two, a green, maybe fish or chicken, plus sambols and a papadam.

Things worth knowing:

• Parippu (dhal) is on every table and is the benchmark. Good dhal is creamy with coconut milk and tempered with curry leaves and mustard seed.
• Pol sambol — grated coconut, chilli, lime, onion and Maldive fish, pounded together. Fiery, fresh, essential.
• Seeni sambol is the sweet counterpart: onions caramelised slowly with tamarind and spice.
• Ask for a "rice and curry" at a local place at lunchtime — it is when it is freshest, and it is often served as an all-you-can-eat spread.
• Eating with your right hand is normal and, done properly, genuinely improves the meal. Nobody minds if you use cutlery.

Hoppers and string hoppers

Hoppers (appa) are bowl-shaped pancakes of fermented rice flour and coconut milk, cooked in a small round pan so they come out crisp at the edges and soft in the middle. An egg hopper has an egg cracked into the centre as it cooks. They are a breakfast and dinner food, not lunch, and are best eaten within seconds of leaving the pan.

String hoppers (idiyappam) are different: nests of steamed rice-flour noodles, served in stacks with dhal and a coconut sambol. Breakfast food.

Kottu

The sound of the Sri Lankan evening. Kottu roti is flatbread chopped on a hot griddle with two blunt metal blades, mixed with egg, vegetables, and meat or cheese. You hear it being made from down the street — a rhythmic metallic clatter that cooks compete to make musical.

It is street food, it is cheap, and it is what everyone eats late.

Regional and community food

• Jaffna cooking, in the Tamil north, is hotter and uses its own roasted curry powder. Jaffna crab curry is worth the trip on its own.
• Lamprais comes from the Dutch Burgher community: rice cooked in stock, with curries, a frikkadel meatball and sambol, wrapped in a banana leaf and baked so the flavours bind. Ordered ahead at good places.
• Short eats are the bakery snacks in every town — fish cutlets, mutton rolls, samosas, patties. A cabinet of them plus a tea is the standard mid-morning stop.
• Coastal cooking naturally leans to fish: seer, tuna, prawns, and ambul thiyal, a sour dry curry preserved with goraka fruit.

Fruit

Take this seriously. King coconut (thambili) is sold from carts everywhere — orange, drunk straight from the shell, and the best rehydration on the island. Then rambutan, mangosteen, wood apple, and jackfruit, which is eaten both as a fruit and, unripe, as a substantial curry.

Durian is available in season. You will know when you are near it.

Practical notes

• "Spicy" here means spicy. Asking for less chilli is completely normal and nobody will judge you.
• Vegetarians eat extremely well. A standard rice and curry is mostly vegetable anyway, and Buddhist and Hindu vegetarianism means it is well understood. Vegans should ask about Maldive fish, which turns up in sambols and dhal.
• Drink the tea. Plain tea comes very sweet by default; ask for less sugar if you want to taste it.
• Eat where it is busy. The usual rule, and it holds. A crowded rice-and-curry place at 1pm is turning over fresh food.