In the restaurant’s original location in Colombo’s historic Old Dutch Hospital complex, an open kitchen holds fort in a spacious hall, above which hangs a board decorated with a row of crabs arranged in ascending order according to their size, ranging from half-kilogram crabs to veritable monsters named “Colossal”, “OMG!!!” and finally, “Crabzilla” (the latter title reserved for specimens weighing two kilograms or more). The crustaceans are caught fresh daily, then wok-fried to order in flavours like black pepper and garlic chilli—the resulting crab is decadently moreish, the flesh flavourful and succulent to a fault, and is certainly the reason for the restaurant’s success and its expansion to outposts in Mumbai, Bangkok, the Maldives, Shanghai, Manila, and most recently, Chengdu.

Seeing these prized crustaceans exported to Singapore for dishes (and markers of the city-state’s national culinary identity) like chilli and pepper crab was the catalyst that sparked Munidasa to open Ministry of Crab—to bring Sri Lankan crabs back to Sri Lankans. For the half-Japanese, half-Sri Lankan restaurateur, the intersection of the country’s unique history, culture and geography are what has given rise to one of the most freewheeling traditional cuisines in the region.

“We are one of the few countries in South Asia that has no restrictions in terms of ingredients. We have beef, pork and alcohol, unlike Pakistan, India, Bangladesh or the Maldives where at least one of these things are missing—or sometimes two things, like pork and alcohol in the case of Muslim countries.”

That’s not to say that religion hasn’t had an influence on Sri Lankan cuisine, as in the case of the official religion of Theravada Buddhism, practised by the majority Sinhalese population. At breakfast on the verandah of Wallawwa, a country house retreat set in an overgrown thicket outside of Colombo, I had my first brush with this facet of Sri Lankan food in the form of kola kanda.

Coloured a bright green, this herbal congee is made with broken rice, coconut milk and the juice of a bevy of native herbs; it has been consumed by Buddhist monks from the 5th century AD onwards to bolster one’s constitution in accordance with the tenets of the indigenous Sinhala system of traditional medicine—which is believed to have developed independently of Ayurvedic medicine. Mildly savoury and intensely vegetal, each spoonful of the kola kanda is followed by a bite from a cube of jaggery (unrefined cane sugar made from palm sap) to temper the bitterness; by the end of it, I’m feeling slightly more ready to face the oppressive humidity of the day.

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There’s less of a need to ward off the elements as one heads inland into the higher elevations of the tea country. There, despite my visit coinciding with the beginning of the traditional monsoon season, the weather is spectacular—with the shape of Ella Rock, a geologic formation that overlooks the entrance to the quaint backpackers’ town of Ella, thrown in sharp relief against the clear blue sky. 

After a lunch of moreish chicken and cheese kottu—an okonomiyaki-like mix of chopped roti bread, chicken curry, vegetables and spices, pounded together with eggs and cheese on a metal griddle using steel chopping blades in a gunfire-like rhythm—I arrive at my destination: Nine Skies, sister hotel to Wallawwa under the Teardrop Hotels umbrella. 

A restored colonial bungalow, the five-bedroom hotel is a picture of respite—a romanticised parcel of colonial life set in the midst of the tea estate of Demodera that could very well pass for an English cottage in the Cotswolds, were it not for the Sinhalese pop music wafting over to the infinity pool from the radios of nearby tea pickers.

The cool highland climate is no doubt a boon to the proliferation of camellia sinensis, the tea plant, as well as the pickers who labour in the plantations, backs bent double under the sun for hours on end. Baskets strapped to foreheads, they diligently separate the bud and top four leaves of each plant; the youngest, freshest leaves at the top reserved for finer, more nuanced teas like Orange Pekoe, while the older bottom leaves are used for strong brews, best served with milk.

The day’s harvest is brought to a sorting hut, where it is packed into brightly coloured netted bags and sent to a tea factory like Uva Halpewatte—an antiquated hillside building resembling in some ways a Sri Lankan version of Howl’s Moving Castle—to be dried; further graded into white, green and black teas by hand as well as by state-of-the-art colour-sorting machines; then shipped for export or sold to the domestic market, depending on their quality.

“It's part of the culture [in Sri Lanka]. When somebody comes to your place, you first give them a cup of tea with a biscuit or cake, so in a day you might drink about five or six cups of tea,” says factory manager Sellaiah Sivanathan.

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This culture, along with the tea plantations that blanket these highlands, might seem today as native to the island as the Sri Lankan leopard, but were brought here by the British when they wrested control of the island from the Dutch in 1796—who in turn had taken the mantle of colonising force from the Portuguese in 1658. Indeed, the natural landscape, seemingly wild and brazen on the surface, is a patchwork of foreign species plucked from far-flung corners of the world and introduced to Sri Lanka over centuries by successive colonisers to achieve very specific means, as our naturalist points out on an afternoon ramble through the tea estate.

Just within the plantation alone, shade trees like gliricidia sepium, native to Central and South America, provide a cool and moist environment for the tea bushes to grow, while towering flame trees are used to demarcate the boundaries of different plantations, their abundant and brilliant red blooms visible for miles around. Even the ornamental birds-of-paradise and the unmissable lobster-claw plants on the Nine Skies lawn—so named for the hanging rows of yellow-tipped vermilion flowers that resemble crustacean appendages—were transplanted from the jungles of faraway Brazil.

In the southern coastal city of Galle, this same legacy of successive colonisation is written in the architecture of the historic Galle Fort, a perfectly preserved peninsula of Portuguese and Dutch fortifications, ramparts, handsome townhouses with white-washed verandahs and curlicued facades, a lighthouse and so many churches—from the elegant Dutch Reformed Church to the imposing All Saint’s Church. 

It’s here, at breakfast in my high-ceilinged suite in Fort Bazaar—a 17th-century merchant’s residence transformed by Teardrop Hotels into luxury accommodations—that I encounter my favourite Sri Lankan dish yet: string hoppers served with a side of chicken curry and pol sambal. Essentially a stack of steamed rice noodles compressed into pancake form, they’re perfect for sandwiching fall-off-the-bone chunks of chicken drumstick. I eat with gleeful abandon as streaks of curry run down my hands, fork-and-knife etiquette duly thrown to the wayside.

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For all the cornucopia of sights, sounds and flavours that Sri Lanka offers, it’s still relatively off the beaten track—the country recorded two million tourists in 2019 compared to Bali’s 6.3 million, despite the latter being 11 times smaller. Much of it comes down to the outsized share of tragedy that has beset “the Pearl of the Indian Ocean” in recent history: foremost is the 25-year civil war between the Sinhala majority government and Tamil Tiger rebels which only ended in 2009; while the past four years alone have seen Sri Lankans endure the Covid-19 pandemic, bookended by the shocking 2019 Easter terrorist bombings as well as the collapse of the country’s economy, leading to widespread shortages of fuel and electricity last year. 

A response from the country’s food community has been an even more pronounced turn inwards. To bypass the astronomical import duties and devalued rupee, restaurants and hotels like the Teardrop group that can afford to grow their own produce—and thus secure a dependable, local supply—have done so, with vegetable gardens on at least four of the group’s seven properties providing everything from okra to jackfruit, and papayas to pepper and pineapples.

“Gradually over time, we’ll develop a much more Sri Lankan or island identity focusing on seafood and Sri Lankan curries, which I think was instigated by [the economic crisis] but it's probably something we should have been doing anyway,” admits the hotel group’s CEO, Henry Fitch.

Then again, perhaps it’s a return to a truth that has remained eternal on this bountiful emerald isle, where the majority of its fruits are still plucked from wild-grown trees and migrating schools of tuna flow from the bracing waters of the southern Indian Ocean to arrive directly on its doorstep. 

“One thing about Sri Lankan cuisine is that we are still tied to our land. We do everything with what's available here,” says Ministry of Crab’s Munidasa. Within those multitudes that Sri Lanka offers to the hungry traveller, a “small universe” in the Clarkesian sense awaits—a tapestry of flavours both novel and familiar, laden with spice and history, a pure expression of the bounty that the island provides to all who land on its shores.

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