If you love Sri Lankan food, you need to plan a visit to Kolamba. In the heart of lively Soho, this hub of home cooking serves up exploding flavours, with dishes that are never short on spice or colour.
In fact, the dishes you'll find on the menu are derived from recipe books of the team's friends and family back in Colombo – which is known to locals as Kolamba. These multi-cultural delights feel like a ray of sunshine in a more often than not grey London. You will find Malay, Tamil, Moor, Sinhalese and Dutch tastes and textures on the menu, ensuring that you can sample a blend of the most iconic dishes, along with street food with a twist and large sharers for the table.
As for 'bites' on the menu, the Kolamba team recommends one to two per person, sort of serving as a little starter. The bites include Nalini's fish cutlets which are crispy, traditional short eats of mackerel fried in breadcrumbs, along with the green mango and papaya salad mixed with chilli, cashew, ginger, lime and kithul.
Onto the meat and fish section, you'll be able to choose from the Ceylon chicken curry that has been cooked on the bone with sharp tamarind and creamy coconut milk, and sticky marinated prawns tossed with chilli, tomato and onion. For vegetable dishes, sambols and rice and breads, choose the cabbage mallum sauteed with turmeric, mustard seeds and coconut, a seeni sambol with local caramelised onion relish and salty Maldive fish, and string hoppers with kiri hodhi and pol sambol.
When it's time for dessert, try the watalappam, the most famous, traditional Sri Lankan dessert of spiced coconut custard that is garnished with cashew nuts.