Order a rice and curry and you will not get a curry. You will get rice, in the middle of the plate or in its own dish, and around it a set of smaller preparations — usually one with meat or fish, two or three vegetables, something fried, something sour and something fiery. The idea is that you build each mouthful yourself.
What tends to be on the plate
- A fish, chicken or lentil curry as the substantial dish.
- Two or three vegetable preparations — often a green cooked with grated coconut, a root vegetable, and a dhal.
- Something crisp: papadum, or fried aubergine or okra.
- A sambol, which is coconut pounded with chilli, lime and onion, and is where most of the heat lives.
Coconut does more work than chilli
Sri Lankan cooking leans on coconut at nearly every stage — grated into vegetable dishes, pressed for the milk that forms the base of the wetter curries, and the oil much of it is cooked in. It is the reason a Sri Lankan curry tastes different from an Indian one made with similar spices, and the reason a plate that looks alarming is often gentler than it appears.
Heat is adjustable. Ours is cooked to be enjoyable rather than punishing, and the kitchen is happy to take it down or up — it helps to say so when you order rather than afterwards.
How to eat it
Take a little rice, add from one or two of the surrounding dishes, and mix only that mouthful. Working through the dishes in combinations rather than emptying them one at a time is the whole point: the sour thing cuts the rich one, the coconut cools the chilli.
Breakfast is a different proposition entirely, and worth staying awake for: hoppers, string hoppers or coconut roti, with a thin fish curry and a chilli sambol.
Palm Paradise, Cabanas & Villas, Tangalle1 min read