Work through the list in order. Hide the notes when you know what to do.
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Eat rice and curry
Rice in the middle surrounded by several curries and sambols in small bowls. You mix them into the rice a little at a time rather than eating each dish separately.
In lunch places refills of rice and dal come free. Start with the dal and vegetables; the fish and meat curries are usually the hottest things on the plate.
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Eat hoppers for breakfast
A thin bowl-shaped pancake of rice flour and coconut milk, crisp at the edges and soft in the centre. With an egg cracked into it, it becomes an egg hopper.
They are cooked in a small round pan with a handle and served hot; a cold hopper loses its crunch. Eaten with pol sambol and sweet onion seeni sambol.
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Try string hoppers
Nests of fine rice noodles steamed and served in a stack with dal, coconut sambol and a thin curry gravy. Breakfast or a light dinner.
They are counted individually and a normal portion is ten to fifteen. The kiri hodi coconut gravy is poured over and mixed in by hand.
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Eat kottu roti
Godamba roti chopped on a metal griddle together with vegetables, egg and meat using two blades. The clatter carries a block away and functions as the shop sign.
It is evening food; kottu stalls start after dark. Cheese kottu is a modern version; the classics are chicken or vegetable.
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Try pol sambol
Freshly grated coconut pounded with dried chilli, onion, lime and Maldive fish. It goes with everything and is added to the plate a little at a time, because it is very hot.
Maldive fish is dried tuna and provides the salty umami note. A vegetarian version leaves it out, and it is worth asking.
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Try lamprais
Rice cooked in stock with curry, a meatball, sambol and egg, wrapped in banana leaf and baked. A Dutch Burgher legacy that became a Colombo classic.
Everything bakes together inside the leaf so the flavours merge, which is what separates it from rice and curry. The leaf adds aroma and keeps the rice from drying.
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Try ambul thiyal
Chunks of tuna cooked almost dry with goraka, pepper and spices until nearly black. The sourness of goraka worked as a preservative before refrigeration.
The dish is dry by design: almost no sauce, but a concentrated flavour. Goraka sours differently from lime — tart with a bitter edge.
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Try dhal curry
Red lentils cooked down in coconut milk with turmeric, curry leaf and onion fried with chilli. The mildest thing on the plate and the best buffer against heat.
It is part of any rice and curry and is almost always vegetarian. Refills of dal in lunch places are free.
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Grab a pol roti
A dense flatbread of flour with grated coconut, green chilli and onion, cooked on a dry griddle. Breakfast or a snack, eaten with sambol or lunu miris.
Lunu miris, a paste of onion, chilli and Maldive fish, is fiercer than pol sambol. The roti is torn and eaten by hand.
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Get short eats from a bakery
A case of fried snacks: fish cutlets, malu paan fish buns, rolls, samosas, vadai. You take what you want on a tray and pay for what you ate.
The classic Sri Lankan snack with tea at three in the afternoon. Lentil vadai are also sold on trains, carried through the carriages.
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Try wattalappam Desserts and pastries
A pudding of coconut milk, eggs and kithul palm treacle with cardamom and nutmeg. A Malay community legacy, dark and caramel-flavoured.
Kithul treacle gives a smoky caramel note that ordinary sugar cannot. Served chilled, often with a cashew on top.
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Eat buffalo curd with treacle Desserts and pastries
Thick, tart buffalo milk curd in a clay pot, drizzled with kithul palm treacle. The simplest dessert and the best antidote to a hot lunch.
The clay pot is not decoration: it holds the temperature and absorbs excess whey. You pour the treacle yourself, to taste.
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Try kavum and kokis Desserts and pastries
Kavum is a fried oil cake of rice flour and treacle; kokis is a crisp snowflake-shaped rice batter biscuit. New Year sweets, sold outside the season too.
The peak is the Sinhala and Tamil New Year in April, when every household makes them. Kokis is brittle and barely sweet; kavum is dense and honeyed.
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Drink Ceylon tea Non-alcoholic drinks
Tea from the central highland estates, graded by altitude: high-grown is light and brisk, low-grown dense and dark. It is drunk strong, often with milk and sugar.
Ask for it unsweetened if you want to taste the leaf; the default is very sugary. Nuwara Eliya, Uva and Dimbula taste noticeably different.
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Drink a king coconut Non-alcoholic drinks
The orange thambili coconut, opened in front of you with a blade: the water is sweeter and softer than in a green one. Sold from carts across the city.
Once you have drunk it, the seller will split the nut so you can eat the flesh; just ask. It is the safest cold drink on the street.
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Try coconut arrack Local alcohol
A spirit distilled from fermented coconut palm sap and aged in barrels: soft, nutty and closer to rum than to vodka. The national spirit.
It is drunk with soda and lime or with ginger beer. On full-moon poya days alcohol is not sold in the country, which is worth planning around.
