In this guide
Sri Lankan food in London splits in two: the central restaurants in Soho, Covent Garden and Borough Market, and the neighbourhood kitchens of Tooting High Street, Ealing Road in Wembley and Rayners Lane.
Sri Lankan often gets filed under South Indian, and they are not the same cooking: Sri Lanka runs on grated coconut, tamarind, smoked goraka fruit and dried Maldive fish, and its core dishes have no equivalent across the water. Where a kitchen cooks both, this guide says so.
💡 The Short Version: Hoppers holds a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand and is named by nineteen sources. Rambutan in Borough Market is the one the Good Food Guide rates higher. Kolamba for a Soho dinner you can actually book. Jaffna House in Tooting has cooked the same northern repertoire since 1991, and nothing on its menu is expensive. Karapincha for kothu roti chopped to order inside Canary Wharf station.
📊 The evidence behind this guide. 28 independent sources carrying 135 citations across 33 named venues. 19 are named by two or more independent sources, and one holds a dated award. Built on: the MICHELIN Guide and the Good Food Guide; ten mastheads; six independent writers; ten London food channels. Evidence built 22 September 2026 · How we rank →
Where they are
| If you are near… | Where to eat |
|---|---|
| Soho & Carnaby | Kolamba, Hoppers Soho |
| Covent Garden | ADOH! |
| Borough Market | Rambutan |
| King’s Cross, Marylebone & Shoreditch | Hoppers, Kolamba East |
| Tooting | Jaffna House, Apollo Banana Leaf, Kothu |
| Canary Wharf | Karapincha |
| Victoria | Dammika’s |
| Farringdon | Machan Kitchen |
| Wembley & Ealing | Palm Beach, Papaya |
| Harrow & Rayners Lane | Trinco Bay, Gana, Kothu, Sambal Express |
| Putney & Worcester Park | Colombo Kitchen |
| Pinner & Eastcote | Virundhu |
| Walthamstow | Best Foods Supermarket |
Price guide: £ under £20 a head · ££ £20–£40 · £££ £40+.
How far ahead to book
- Weeks ahead: Rambutan. It is a small room beside Borough Market and the counter goes first.
- A few days: Kolamba Soho and Kolamba East, ADOH!, Colombo Kitchen, Virundhu, Dammika’s.
- Bookable, rarely needed: Apollo Banana Leaf, Kothu, Trinco Bay, Jaffna House, Palm Beach, Papaya.
- Walk-in only: every counter and stall — Karapincha’s three, Best Foods Supermarket, and Colombo Kitchen’s stall at St James’s Courtyard.
- Both at once: Hoppers Soho takes reservations for two to four people and runs a virtual queue for everyone else. You leave your name and phone number and go for a drink; they call when the table is ready.
The winners
Three restaurants are rated by the MICHELIN Guide or the Good Food Guide.
Hoppers, Soho
££ · Soho · 4 min from Tottenham Court Road · Cited by 19 sources · MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, 2026 guide · Time Out’s number one London chain, August 2026
Nineteen independent sources name it, against thirteen for the next one (Kolamba), and it is the only one here holding a dated award. The Soho original opened on Frith Street in 2015 and the room is styled on a toddy shop, the palm-wine shacks on Sri Lanka’s coconut plantations: terracotta tiles, a rattan ceiling, poster art, and tables close enough to hear each other.
Devilled meats and roti at Hoppers.
Order the egg hopper, a fermented rice-and-coconut batter swirled round a curved pan until it is lacy at the rim, with an egg set into the base. Then mutton rolls with chilli ketchup — shredded lamb in mashed potato, crumbed and deep-fried — and the black pork kari, a dry curry darkened with goraka, a smoked sour fruit that gives it a tang no other spice does. The lamb shoulder buriani feeds a table.
Four London sites: Soho, Marylebone, King’s Cross and Shoreditch. The Bib Gourmand is for Soho. Soho takes bookings for parties of two to four and runs a virtual queue for everyone else; the other three are easier to book.
Book: Hoppers Soho · King’s Cross · Shoreditch · Marylebone
Rambutan, Borough Market
££ · Borough · 3 min from London Bridge · book weeks ahead · Cited by 12 sources · Good Food Guide: Very Good · In the 2026 MICHELIN Guide
The Good Food Guide rates it above Hoppers, Very Good against Good, and calls its cooking inventive; Michelin gives Hoppers the Bib and lists Rambutan without one.
Rambutan’s sharing table.
The menu comes from Jaffna in the north by way of chef Cynthia Shanmugalingam’s mother’s kitchen, cooked over an aduppu — an open wood fire — behind the counter. Order the gundu dosas, golden fritter-balls served with coriander sambol, and the Jaffna crab curry, a whole Dorset crab you take apart with your hands. Northern prawns come cooked in the shell in tamarind, with roti to mop up.
Counter seats are the ones to want, and it books weeks out. Stoney Street, in the middle of Borough Market.
Book: Reserve a table
Kolamba, Soho and Shoreditch
££ · Soho · 5 min from Oxford Circus · Cited by 13 sources · Good Food Guide: Local Gem
Thirteen sources, second only to Hoppers, and a Good Food Guide Local Gem. Eroshan and Aushi Meewella cook what they ate growing up in Colombo — kolamba is the city’s Sinhalese name. The Soho room is small, with a few pavement tables on Kingly Street and a basement underneath.
Kolamba’s dining room.
Vaira’s jaggery beef, marinated overnight in palm sugar and spice and cooked slowly the next day, is the dish everyone orders. Beside it, hot butter cuttlefish, a pineapple fry with curry leaves and shallots, and parippu — red lentils in coconut milk with turmeric, the daily dal of every Sri Lankan household. At weekends Soho serves a rice and curry feast at £26 a head, noon to 4pm.
Open noon to 10pm, to 9pm on Sunday. The bar counter is kept for walk-ins. Kolamba East on Blossom Street is the bigger room and takes groups up to 26; Soho takes up to 16.
Book: Kolamba Soho · Kolamba East
Also strongly backed
No award, but the widest agreement after the three above.
Jaffna House, Tooting
£ · Tooting · 2 min from Tooting Broadway · Cited by 12 sources
Trading on Tooting High Street since 1991 and named by twelve sources, level with Rambutan. The dining room is plain and full.
An egg hopper and rice plate at Jaffna House.
The Jaffna special chicken curry is the order — boneless chicken in a sharp, tomato-heavy northern sauce — with an egg hopper and katta sambol, a fierce dried-chilli and Maldive-fish relish that is not a chutney and is not sweet. Also: mutton biriyani, fried string hoppers, and pittu, rice flour and coconut steamed in a bamboo tube until it comes out as a crumbly log.
£, and the takeaway trade is as busy as the dining room. Walk in, or book on the site.
Book: Reserve a table
Apollo Banana Leaf, Tooting
£ · Tooting · 5 min from Tooting Broadway · Cited by 7 sources
A few hundred metres down the same high street, and the kitchen calls itself Sri Lankan and South Indian on its own front page — which is why it sits here with a label rather than being filed under Sri Lankan alone. The room is murals, disco lights and red velvet over what is essentially a function-room layout.
Order the mutton kothu roti: godamba roti chopped on a hot plate with two metal blades, tossed with mutton, egg, onion and spice until it is a clattering heap, served with curry sauce on the side. The Ceylon chicken curry and the chilli masala dosa are the other two. Prices are low and the menu is long.
£, and worth booking at the weekend. Seven sources name it and one calls it the best Sri Lankan restaurant in south London.
Book: apollobananaleaf.uk
Karapincha, Canary Wharf and two markets
£ · Canary Wharf · inside the station · walk-in only · Cited by 7 sources
Twin sisters Vasanthini and Dharshini Perumal, from Kandy, started as market traders and now run three counters: Unit 14 inside Canary Wharf station, Old Spitalfields Market and Mercato Metropolitano at Elephant & Castle. Karapincha is Sinhalese for curry leaf, which goes into nearly every spice blend they grind.
Karapincha’s counter.
Chicken kothu roti is the signature; the vegetable version comes with pineapple pirattal, a sweet-hot fried relish. String hoppers in prawn curry and egg hoppers in chicken curry are the sit-down orders. Because the curries are built on coconut milk rather than dairy, most of the vegetarian menu is vegan.
£, no bookings, and the Canary Wharf unit keeps office hours — it is a station kitchen, not an evening restaurant.
Dammika’s, Victoria
££ · Victoria · 6 min from Victoria · Cited by 7 sources
A small white-tablecloth room on Lower Grosvenor Place, five minutes from the station, on the site of Sekara.
The chicken lamprais is why people come: rice boiled in stock, then a meat curry, aubergine pickle, caramelised seeni sambol, a fish cutlet and a boiled egg all folded into a banana leaf and baked, a Dutch Burgher dish. Around it, kiri hodi — a mild coconut gravy loosened with green chilli and egg — cuttlefish fry and chicken rolls. Lion lager and EGB stout are imported rather than substituted.
££, and small enough that a Friday walk-in is a gamble.
Colombo Kitchen, Putney and Worcester Park
££ · Putney and Worcester Park · Cited by 6 sources
Sylvia Perera, from Negombo on the west coast, runs two rooms with a live hopper and kottu bar, with the pans and the blades in front of you.
Colombo Kitchen, Putney.
The lamprais is served at weekends only, Saturday and Sunday, at both sites. Otherwise: hot butter prawns in a beer batter, a Ceylon chicken curry with real heat, aubergine moju — fried aubergine pickled sweet-sour with mustard and vinegar — and a cashew curry.
££, two sites: 240 Upper Richmond Road in Putney and 25–27 Central Road in Worcester Park. There is a third Colombo Kitchen: a street food stall in St James’s Courtyard off Piccadilly.
Book: colombokitchen.co.uk
ADOH!, Covent Garden
££ · Covent Garden · 4 min from Covent Garden · Cited by 4 sources
Kolamba’s siblings doing Colombo street food instead of home cooking — plastic chairs, murals, painted lorry art and a canteen volume.
ADOH!‘s sharing table.
Crab kothu and mutton rolls are the orders, plus isso vadai, a lentil fritter with whole prawns pressed into the top that is sold off carts on Galle Face Green and, by ADOH!‘s account, nowhere else in London. Devilled sausages, chilli prawn toast and a salted jaggery soft serve to finish. The fried chicken with a curry-leaf waffle is the one dish the sources argue about.
££, Maiden Lane, and walk-ins get counter seats. Book for a table.
Book: Reserve a table
Kothu, Tooting, Harrow and Croydon
£ · Tooting · 3 min from Tooting Broadway · Cited by 4 sources
Started at food markets in the Midlands and now three London rooms — 114 Tooting High Street, plus Harrow and Croydon — with booths at the back and a bar.
Kothu, Tooting.
The mutton kothu roti is the signature, and you pick the heat. The string hopper set is the quieter order, and the cheesy mutton rolls — deep-fried, slow-cooked lamb, molten cheese — are the thing regulars add at the end. King prawn poriyal and devilled kingfish are the two dishes to order if you want to see what the kitchen can do.
£ and walk-in. There is a full bar as well as a kitchen.
Book: kothurestaurant.co.uk
By tradition, because Sri Lanka is not one cuisine
The cooking differs between the ends of the island.
Jaffna and the Tamil north
Seafood, tamarind sourness and fenugreek rather than coconut richness — the food closest to Tamil Nadu across the strait.
- Rambutan, Borough Market — Jaffna crab curry over an open fire. Cited by 12 sources
- Jaffna House, Tooting — the name is the region. Cited by 12 sources
- Gana, Rayners Lane — a Harrow room cooking Jaffna-style: kool, a thick shellfish soup from the northern coast, and vendhaya kuzhambu, a fenugreek curry whose bitterness is mellowed with coconut milk. Hoppers come in red or white rice. Cited by 3 sources
- Trinco Bay, Rayners Lane — on the same Village Way parade as Gana, named for Trincomalee on the north-east coast. A whole menu section of devils: chicken, prawn, kingfish, mutton, squid and seafood, stir-fried fierce and sour with chilli and onion. All meat is halal. Cited by 3 sources · trincobay.co.uk
⚠️ Trinco Bay is closed Monday and Tuesday.
Colombo and the south
Coconut milk, pol sambol — grated coconut pounded with chilli, lime and Maldive fish — and black curries darkened with goraka.
- Kolamba, Soho and Shoreditch — named for the city. Cited by 13 sources
- Colombo Kitchen, Putney and Worcester Park — west-coast cooking from Negombo. Cited by 6 sources
- Machan Kitchen, Farringdon — exposed brick, bamboo and masks on Farringdon Road, doing jackfruit cutlets, cashew nut curry and parippu dhal in portions built for sharing. Cited by 1 source · machankitchen.co.uk
Sri Lankan Muslim
Buriani built on whole spice rather than tomato, godamba roti slapped thin on the griddle, and deep-fried short eats.
- Hoppers — the lamb shoulder buriani is the Moor dish on a mainstream menu, and the chicken and lamb on the menu are halal. Cited by 19 sources
- Trinco Bay, Rayners Lane — fully halal. Cited by 3 sources
- Sambal Express, Harrow — a Sri Lankan grocer and takeaway group trading since 2008, with delis alongside the restaurant and click-and-collect through its own app. Pittu, vadai and varuval, and the mutton rolls are what readers wrote in to Time Out about. Cited by 2 sources
Dutch Burgher lamprais
One dish: rice cooked in stock with a meat curry, aubergine pickle, seeni sambol, a fish cutlet and an egg, wrapped in a banana leaf and baked so the leaf perfumes everything inside it.
- Dammika’s, Victoria — chicken lamprais, on the menu daily. Cited by 7 sources
- Colombo Kitchen, Putney and Worcester Park — weekends only, Saturday and Sunday, at both sites. Cited by 6 sources
- Virundhu, Eastcote — a family dining room on Field End Road cooking the chef’s own family recipes, with the lamprais built out on a banana leaf: green jackfruit curry, aubergine pickle, seeni sambol, egg and fish cutlet. Finish with watalappan, a set custard of coconut milk, egg and palm jaggery, scented with cardamom and nutmeg. Open to 10.30pm midweek and 11.30pm Friday and Saturday. Cited by 4 sources · virundhurestaurant.com
Cheapest
Everything here comes in under £20 a head.
- Best Foods Supermarket, Walthamstow — a corner shop on Forest Road with a hot Sri Lankan counter behind the grocery racks: trays of smoky aubergine and mutton curry, spiced chicken samosas, crisp mutton rolls, string hoppers. Grab-and-go, no seats. Cited by 2 sources
- Jaffna House, Tooting — on Tooting High Street since 1991. Cited by 12 sources
- Apollo Banana Leaf, Tooting — a long menu and nothing on it expensive. Cited by 7 sources
- Karapincha — kothu roti at market-stall prices in three places. Cited by 7 sources
- Palm Beach, Wembley — on Ealing Road, doing a long list of devilled dishes and a kottu you build yourself: choose godamba roti, string hoppers or pittu as the base. The menu is long and half of it is Indian; order from the Sri Lankan half. Cited by 3 sources
- Papaya, Ealing — Northfield Avenue, and openly Sri Lankan and South Indian rather than one pretending to be the other. Thali and paratha, regional specialities, British meat. Cited by 2 sources
Quickest
Counters and single-dish kitchens, for when you have twenty minutes.
- Karapincha, Canary Wharf station — inside the ticket hall. Kothu is cooked to order and takes about five minutes.
- ADOH!, Covent Garden — short eats at the counter without a booking.
- Hoppers, Soho — a hopper and a mutton roll at the bar, though the virtual queue decides how quick it is.
- Best Foods Supermarket, Walthamstow — everything is already made; you point at it.
Counters, station kitchens and market stalls
Named traders only: the hall is the address, not the restaurant.
| Trader | Where | What to order, and why it works there |
|---|---|---|
| Karapincha | Old Spitalfields Market, E1 | Kothu roti chopped to order on the hot plate. The sisters traded markets for years before they had restaurants, and this is still the original format |
| Karapincha | Mercato Metropolitano, Elephant & Castle, SE1 | A curry plate you build yourself — slow-cooked beef, aubergine moju — which suits a hall where everyone shares a table |
| Karapincha | Unit 14, Canary Wharf station, E14 | The chicken kothu. A hot Sri Lankan lunch inside a Tube station |
| Colombo Kitchen | St James’s Courtyard, off Piccadilly | Hoppers and kottu off a live pan. Sylvia Perera ran this stall before she had either restaurant and still runs it |
| Best Foods Supermarket | 156–158 Forest Road, Walthamstow, E17 | Mutton rolls and curry by the tray from a counter behind the grocery racks. The cheapest Sri Lankan food in this guide |
None of these takes a booking, and none of them is a dinner. Check hours before travelling; a stall keeps the market’s hours.
What has changed
Kolamba East opened on Blossom Street, by Spitalfields, in the summer of 2024, with a longer menu and a private dining room. ADOH! followed in Covent Garden, the same owners doing street food rather than home cooking.
Paradise Soho has closed. It was Dom Fernando’s restaurant on Rupert Street.
Also named, briefly
Named by one or two sources, or further out from the centre.
| Venue | Area | Price | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adchaya | South Wimbledon | £ | Merton High Street, fast and very cheap; seafood kothu and keerai puttu with fried fish |
| Everest Curry King | Lewisham | £ | A Loampit Hill canteen with a long vegetarian menu, and bring your own bottle |
| Watch Me | Wimbledon | £ | Family-run on Morden Road, across Sri Lankan and South Indian; string hoppers with sambol |
| Serendip Flavours | Bow | £ | A railway arch doing collection and delivery only, built around chicken lamprais |
| Tharshini’s | Tooting | £ | A halal Sri Lankan takeaway |
| Sambal Kitchen & Diner | South Harrow | £ | A café beside the Sambal Express grocer, doing Sri Lankan dosas, poriyal and Moor biryani |
| Malar Spice | Wembley | £ | High Road, cooking for the Tamil community rather than for visitors |
| Spicyelon | Carshalton | £ | Wrythe Lane |
| Veechu | London | ££ | Sri Lankan fusion: cheese kothu, and hoppers served as a dessert |
Eating this food well
- Eat with your hands if you like. A hopper is designed for it.
- Sambol is not chutney. Pol sambol is grated coconut pounded with chilli, lime and dried Maldive fish; katta sambol drops the coconut and doubles the chilli. Both are seasoning, not a side.
- Heat is real. Coconut milk does not make it milder. Kothu and Apollo Banana Leaf both let you pick a level; most kitchens do not ask.
- Vegetarians and vegans. The curries are built on coconut milk rather than dairy, so a vegetarian menu is usually vegan already. Check the Maldive fish, which turns up in sambols and in dhal.
- Hoppers runs several London restaurants, and the chain restaurants guide has what to order and how to get a table at each.
- Arrack is the island’s spirit, distilled from coconut flower sap. Hoppers and Kolamba both pour it.
- Halal: Trinco Bay and Tharshini’s are fully halal, and Hoppers serves halal chicken and lamb. Elsewhere, ask — it varies by dish as well as by kitchen.
Continue planning your London trip
- 🍛 The Best Indian Restaurants in London — the neighbouring cuisine, kept deliberately separate from this one
- 🍽️ Eat in London: Restaurants, Food Markets & Quick Food Hub
- 🥘 The Best Street Food in London — every market and food hall, by trader and by day
- 💷 Cheap Eats in London — the same under-£20 territory across every other cuisine
- 🕌 The Best Halal Restaurants in London
- 🌱 The Best Vegetarian and Vegan Restaurants in London
- 🛍️ The Best Markets in London
- 🎭 Soho Area Guide · Covent Garden Area Guide · Canary Wharf Area Guide
Counters and market stalls change hours more often than restaurants do; check before travelling.
Common questions
What is the best Sri Lankan restaurant in London?
Hoppers, on the evidence. It holds a Bib Gourmand in the 2026 MICHELIN Guide, Time Out ranked it the best chain restaurant in the capital in August 2026, and nineteen independent sources name it, more than anything else here. Rambutan in Borough Market is the one the Good Food Guide rates higher: Very Good, against Good for Hoppers.
What is the difference between Sri Lankan and South Indian food?
Coconut, tamarind and heat, mostly. Sri Lankan cooking leans on grated coconut, smoked goraka fruit and Maldive fish, and its signature dishes — the hopper, the kottu, lamprais, pol sambol — have no South Indian equivalent. The overlap is real in the Tamil north, which is why several kitchens here cook both and say so.
What is a hopper?
A bowl. Fermented rice-flour and coconut-milk batter is swirled round a small curved pan so it cooks thin and lacy at the rim and spongy at the base. Crack an egg into the middle before it sets and you have an egg hopper. String hoppers — idiyappam — are a different thing entirely: rice-flour noodles pressed into little nests and steamed.
Where do I eat Sri Lankan food in London cheaply?
Tooting High Street, where Jaffna House, Apollo Banana Leaf and Kothu sit within a few hundred metres of each other, and all three come in under £20 a head. Karapincha's counters at Canary Wharf station, Old Spitalfields Market and Mercato Metropolitano are cheaper still, and the curry counter at the back of Best Foods Supermarket in Walthamstow is the cheapest thing on this page.
Do I need to book?
For Rambutan, yes, weeks out. Hoppers Soho takes bookings for two to four people and runs a virtual queue for everyone else — you leave your details and walk away. Kolamba keeps its bar counter for walk-ins. Every counter and market stall here is walk-in only.
Where is the Sri Lankan food in London, geographically?
Four clusters. Tooting in the south, Wembley and the Rayners Lane end of Harrow in the north-west, Croydon, and a Sri Lankan and South Indian overlap in East Ham.
