The Sri Lanka Food Guide: What to Eat and Where to Find It

Sri Lankan food does not try to impress you. It just does. The cuisine here is built on coconut, spice, and a kind of generous heat that sits differently from Indian food or Thai food — it has its own personality entirely, and once you understand it, you realise you have been missing something your whole life.

Start with a rice and curry. Not the single curry you might be imagining — a Sri Lankan rice and curry is an entire spread. A mound of red or white rice surrounded by six, seven, sometimes ten small dishes: dhal, a green leaf mallung, a fish or chicken curry, pol sambol made with fresh coconut and chilli, and a papadum cracked at the table. This is the national meal and it is eaten at lunch, every day, by almost everyone. Order it at a local restaurant where it is served on a banana leaf and the cost is about 400 rupees. Eat with your right hand if you want to do it properly.

Then there is kottu. This is street food at its most theatrical. Day-old roti is shredded and thrown on a hot griddle with egg, vegetables, and your choice of protein, then chopped rapidly with two metal blades in a rhythm you can hear from a block away. The sound of kottu is the sound of evening in Sri Lanka. Eat it outside, standing up, with a bottle of Elephant ginger beer.

Hoppers are the breakfast you will become obsessed with. A thin, lacy bowl of fermented rice batter, crispy at the edges and soft in the centre, served with a fried egg dropped into the well or just plain with seeni sambol — a dark, slow-cooked caramelised onion relish that has no business being as good as it is. String hoppers are the noodle version, steamed in gentle coils and served with coconut milk gravy. Both are perfect.

For seafood, the south coast is where you want to be. Jaffna crab, jumbo prawns, seer fish, red snapper — the options are extraordinary and the freshness is non-negotiable. The best seafood meals in Sri Lanka happen in small open-air restaurants where the catch is displayed on ice at the entrance and you choose your fish before it goes to the kitchen.

And finally: kiribath, a thick, firm rice cake made with coconut milk and cut into diamond shapes. It is eaten on special occasions, on New Year's morning, at celebrations. If someone offers you kiribath, it means something. Eat it gratefully.