Sri Lankan Food and Drink

Sri Lankan food is one of Asia’s great undiscovered cuisines: bold, layered and built almost entirely on the island’s own harvest. It leans on rice, coconut in every form, and a deep spice cupboard, cinnamon (native to the island), cardamom, cloves, black pepper, curry leaves and roasted chilli. Indian, Malay, Arab, Portuguese and Dutch hands have all shaped it, yet it tastes like nowhere else: hotter, more sour and more coconut-rich than the food of its giant neighbour to the north. At its centre sits the plate of rice and curry, a small edible map of the whole island.

Rice and curry, the daily feast

Ask what Sri Lankans eat and the answer is rice and curry, not one dish but a spread. A mound of rice sits at the centre, ringed by several small curries: a soupy dhal, one or two vegetables (perhaps beans, pumpkin, okra or kankun water spinach), sometimes a fish or chicken curry, and always a sambol or two, a pickle and a stack of crisp papadums. You eat with your right hand, mixing a little of each into the rice so that every mouthful is different, mild, then fiery, then sour, then cool. The best versions are found not in smart restaurants but in humble roadside canteens and “rice and curry” shops, where a heaped plate runs around 300 to 800 rupees. It is one of the great-value meals in Asia.

Hoppers and string hoppers

Two of the island’s most distinctive foods share a name in translation only. The hopper, appa in Sinhala, is a small bowl-shaped pancake of fermented rice flour and coconut milk, cooked in a curved pan so the middle stays soft and spongy while the rim goes thin and lace-crisp. The egg hopper, with an egg cracked into the centre, is the breakfast to seek out, eaten with a smear of lunu miris, a fierce onion-and-chilli paste. There are sweet milk hoppers too, pooled with coconut milk and jaggery.

String hoppers (indiappa) are something else entirely: steamed nests of pressed rice-flour noodles, pale and delicate, served in little stacks at breakfast or dinner with dhal, a coconut sambol and a mild curry. Alongside them you may meet pittu, steamed cylinders of rice flour and coconut, and roti of every kind, from the thin, flaky godamba roti to the coarse, wholesome pol roti studded with grated coconut.

Kottu roti and the street

No sound is more Sri Lankan than the evening clang-clang of kottu roti being made. Cooks take godamba roti, shred it on a hot flat griddle with two blunt metal blades, and fold in egg, vegetables, spices and meat, chicken, beef, or a molten cheese kottu, chopping the whole lot into a savoury, satisfying hash. It began as a way to use up leftover roti and became the island’s favourite street food and late-night meal. Watch it made at a busy stall and order it as hot or mild as you dare.

The street offers plenty more: isso vadai (deep-fried lentil cakes topped with a whole prawn) hawked on the beaches and trains, grilled corn, roast gram, and the ubiquitous short eats, fish rolls, cutlets, patties and samosas, sold by the piece from every bakery counter.

Sambols, dhal and the supporting cast

The condiments make the meal. Pol sambol, the essential one, is fresh coconut pounded with red chilli, onion, lime and a little dried Maldive fish for a savoury depth, bright, hot and on every plate. Lunu miris is its fiercer cousin, a paste of chilli, onion and lime that partners hoppers. Seeni sambol is the opposite: a dark, sweet-and-spicy caramelised onion relish. Gotu kola sambol, a finely shredded pennywort salad with coconut and lime, is fresh and faintly medicinal.

Behind them stands dhal (parippu), red lentils cooked soft in coconut milk with turmeric and curry leaves and finished with a sizzling temper of onion, garlic and mustard seed. Mild, creamy and comforting, it is the dish that balances all the fire around it, and the one you will come to look for on every plate.

Jackfruit, greens and the vegetable table

Sri Lanka is a paradise for vegetable curries, and the star is polos, young, unripe jackfruit slow-cooked in dark roasted spices until it turns dense and meaty, long a favourite of vegetarians and now of curious visitors too. Ripe jackfruit and the starchy breadfruit get their own treatments, while ash plantain, snake gourd, pumpkin, beetroot, aubergine (as the sweet-sour fried wambatu moju), okra and cassava all become curries or mallung, greens finely chopped and tossed with grated coconut. Because so much is cooked in coconut milk rather than dairy, a great deal of Sri Lankan food is naturally vegan, making the island one of the easiest places in Asia to eat meat-free.

Seafood and the Jaffna kitchen

With the Indian Ocean on every side, seafood is superb and everywhere. Tuna (balaya), seer fish (thora), mullet and sardines turn up in fiery red fish curries and in the milder white ambul thiyal, a distinctive sour fish curry cooked dry with goraka, a smoky tamarind-like fruit, that keeps for days. On the coasts you will find grilled lobster, cuttlefish and heaps of prawns, best eaten simply at a beachside table.

The north and east cook differently. The Jaffna kitchen of the island’s Tamil communities is famous for its dark, intensely spiced Jaffna crab curry, made with lagoon crab and a roasted curry powder sharpened with tamarind, messy, magnificent and worth every finger. Look out too for kool, a thick Jaffna seafood broth, and for the region’s love of odiyal palmyra flour.

The dishes to try first

Sweets, fruit and the roadside

Sri Lankan sweets are heavy on coconut and jaggery (kithul palm sugar). The classic pudding is curd and treacle, thick buffalo-milk curd, sold in earthenware pots, drizzled with amber kithul syrup. Around the New Year table appear kavum (fried oil cakes), kokis (crisp Dutch-influenced pastries), the diamond-shaped semolina aluwa and the sweet coconut roti pol pani. Wattalappam, a rich Malay-Muslim steamed custard of jaggery, coconut milk, egg and cardamom, is the great festive dessert.

Then there is the fruit. Beyond bananas and papaya, seek out the fragrant, spiky-shelled rambutan, the custardy wood apple (divul), sweet mangoes and pineapple, and the small, tart mangosteen. Roadside vendors sell them sliced with a dusting of salt and chilli.

Ceylon tea and what to drink

Sri Lanka’s most famous product is Ceylon tea, still sold under the island’s old name and grown across the misty central highlands. It is graded by altitude, delicate high-grown teas from around Nuwara Eliya, fuller-bodied leaves from lower slopes, and you can tour working estates and colonial-era factories around Ella, Nuwara Eliya and Kandy, where the whole process from plucked leaf to packed tea plays out. Locally, tea (kahata for plain, or with milk) is drunk strong and very sweet, poured from height at wayside stalls.

The other essential drink is the king coconut (thambili), a bright-orange coconut grown for its light, sweet water. A vendor lops off the top and hands it over with a straw for around 100 to 150 rupees, the perfect antidote to heat and chilli alike. For something stronger, Sri Lanka distils arrack, a spirit made from the fermented sap of the coconut palm, drunk neat, with ginger beer, or in a sour; Lion Lager is the workaday beer, and the sweet, cloudy palm toddy (ra) is the country drink. Fresh lime juice and yoghurt lassis cool things down without alcohol.

Where and how to eat

Knowing where to eat is half the pleasure. The humblest “rice and curry” canteens and bus-station eateries serve the freshest, best-value food, often as a buffet at lunch where you point at what you want. Bakeries and tea shops run all day on short eats and sweet milk tea. Beach towns and the tourist trail have relaxed cafés and guesthouse kitchens, and the truth is that some of the best meals of a trip come from a guesthouse cook, so it is always worth asking your host for a home-cooked rice and curry, usually arranged for the evening a few hours ahead.

A few customs are worth knowing. Sri Lankans traditionally eat with the right hand, mixing the rice and curry on the plate; cutlery is always offered to visitors, but eating by hand is easy to try and genuinely changes the meal. Hotel in local usage often means a simple eatery, not a place to sleep. And the pace is unhurried, lunch is the main meal, dinner comes later, and no one will rush you.

To plan what a whole trip might cost, read our guide to money and budgeting in Sri Lanka, and to time your visit around the harvest and festival tables, see the best time to visit.