Sri Lankan food is one of the great underrated cuisines of Asia. It shares a vocabulary with South Indian cooking but it is its own language: more coconut, more sourness from goraka and tamarind, more heat, and a set of dishes that exist nowhere else.
The twelve
1. Rice and curry
Not a dish but a system: a mound of rice surrounded by five to ten small curries — dhal, jackfruit, beetroot, green beans, aubergine moju, a fish or chicken curry, papadum and sambol. Every one is seasoned differently. The best versions are at small local places at lunchtime for a couple of dollars.
2. Egg hoppers (biththara appa)
A bowl-shaped fermented rice-flour pancake, crisp at the edge and soft in the middle, with an egg cracked into it. Breakfast or evening street food. Eat with lunu miris.
3. String hoppers (idiyappam)
Steamed nests of rice noodle, served in stacks with dhal, coconut sambol and a thin curry. The standard Sri Lankan breakfast.
4. Kottu roti
Godamba roti chopped on a hot griddle with vegetables, egg and meat, to a rhythm you can hear from three streets away. Late-night food, best from a busy stall.
5. Lamprais
A Dutch Burgher inheritance: rice cooked in stock with a meat mixed curry, frikkadels, blachan and aubergine, all wrapped in a banana leaf and baked. Colombo does it best.
6. Pol sambol
Grated coconut pounded with chilli, lime, red onion and Maldive fish. Appears at every meal and is hotter than it looks.
7. Ambul thiyal
Southern sour fish curry, tuna cooked dry with goraka until almost black. Sharp, salty and completely unlike anything else.
8. Polos curry
Young green jackfruit slow-cooked in spices until it has the texture of meat. Vegan by accident and better than most deliberate imitations.
9. Kiribath
Rice cooked in coconut milk, cut into diamonds, eaten at new year, on the first of the month and at every celebration, with lunu miris.
10. Short eats
The bakery counter: fish cutlets, mutton rolls, vegetable patties, seeni sambol buns. A meal for a dollar in any town.
11. Crab
Sri Lankan lagoon crab is world class. Ministry of Crab in Colombo made it famous; harbourside places in Negombo and Jaffna do it for a fraction of the price.
12. Curd and treacle
Thick buffalo curd in a clay pot with kithul palm treacle. The best dessert on the island and the only one worth ordering twice.
Drinks
Ceylon tea, obviously — take it plain and strong to taste the difference from what you buy at home. King coconut (thambili) from a roadside stall. Lion lager, which is decent. Arrack, distilled from coconut flower sap, mixed with soda and lime. And on poya days, nothing alcoholic at all, anywhere.
Eating well as a visitor
Hotel buffets are the least interesting food in Sri Lanka. Ask your driver where he eats — the answer will be a plain room with a plastic tablecloth and better food than anywhere on the guidebook list. If you tell us food matters to you, we will build the route around it, including a home cooking class and a market walk.
