If you like curry, hie thee to Sri Lanka. We have been so impressed by how delicious the food is that we are dedicating a blog post just to this aspect of our trip. "Western" food (as it is styled by proprietors) is readily available, especially the meaty variety, but much of the time we have been sticking to Sri Lankan style food.
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| We have been regularly greeted with fresh juices when arriving at our hotels and guesthouses |
Breakfasts tend to be hit or miss in general for our family for
aforementioned food preference reasons but generally speaking we are served fresh mango, papaya or pineapple juice, tea and coffee, bread and butter or jam and fresh fruit platters. We are usually offered eggs. We are sometimes offered rolled crepes with a sweet filling. And I often request what is known as Sri Lankan breakfast which is some combination of hoppers (minus egg), those delicious noodle nests called string hoppers, sometimes replaced by roti, dal and sambal. Places tapped into the more Westernized sensibilities will sometimes offer waffles.
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| Chris contemplates how much of our fruit he can eat |
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| My favorite breakfast: dal and roti. For others, bread and jam/butter. |
The abundance of fresh produce means that salads here are generally great. I often have one for lunch to offset the heaviness of the curries.
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| Giant delicious salad |
But....the curries! We order vegetable curry and have been served the following in various orders, either wet (stew) or dry (seasoned and cooked with much less liquid): carrot, eggplant, pepper, cauliflower, okra, potato, mango, lady's finger, cucumber (a relation to our cucumber but not exactly the same), pumpkin, potato, bitter gourd, onion, cassava, spinach, green bean, "garlic*," "Sri Lankan squash*" and "Sri Lankan greens*." We are always served dal as an accompaniament. Toppings include coconut/onion sambal, spicy cashews, chutney and in one instance, fried banana flowers.
*We have no idea what these were.
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| Spinach, cashews, eggplant, potato, dal |
Curries take a while to prepare and so one finds that one's guesthouse/hotel proprietor is checking in with you about your meal selection fairly regularly. I mentioned earlier that our hotel in Weligama had particularly good curries and the chef there offered cooking lessons -- I regret we did not take advantage of this opportunity. Another favorite was
The Other Corner, home of the giant curry pictured a bit below.
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| Garlic, greens, dal, cassava with a string hopper |
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| Green beans, Sri Lankan squash, okra and potato topped with fried banana flowers and spicy pepper |
You do not select what vegetables are cooked, the chef does. You simply say you'd like vegetable curry and at a mutually agreed upon time, bowls upon bowls of hot, delicious food come to you.
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| This curry was so bonkers... |
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| ...an order for one! ONE! Otis and I split it, and ordered it multiple nights -- different each night. This one was squash, dal, potato and pepper, green beans, mango and aubergine |
When not eating curry, we have been trying out Sri Lankan iterations of pizza and pasta, and, in one case, burritos. Our favorite non-Sri Lankan place was
Cafe Chill in Ella, a popular, fun and funny place. Fun because it had a good atmosphere, friendly service and a wide ranging menu of tasty food and drink. Funny because it seems to be a magnet for white travelers and when you look around, everyone is from somewhere else. This can, and did, lead to some fun conversations with people on similar but different trips.
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| Otis watches the cooks in action at Cafe Chill |
We went off piste a little with some of our choices. We went to a well regarded pizza stand in Nuwara Eliya called
Salmiya which was fun, and in Kandy we ended up at Pizza Hut when Chris couldn't do another curry.
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