Sri Lankan restaurants in London
10 places
ADOH!
££Kolamba's siblings doing Colombo street food instead of home cooking — plastic chairs, murals, painted lorry art and a canteen volume.
Apollo Banana Leaf
£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 honest, and the reason it sits here with a label rather than being quietly filed.
Colombo Kitchen
££Sylvia Perera grew up in Negombo on the west coast, cooked her way through a catering business and a street stall, and now runs two rooms with a live hopper and kottu bar — the pans and the blades are
Dammika's
££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, wh
Hoppers
£££Hoppers, kothu and sambols from the JKS group - Sri Lankan and Tamil cooking that London had been filing under Indian for years.
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.
Karapincha
£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.
Kolamba
££---
Kothu, Tooting
£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.
Rambutan
££Cynthia Shanmugalingam was born in Coventry to Sri Lankan Tamil parents and the menu comes from Jaffna in the north by way of her mother's kitchen, cooked over an aduppu — an open wood fire — behind the counter.