What to eat in Colombo
Sri Lankan food is hotter than Indian: rice and curry with a dozen small plates, hoppers for breakfast, kottu roti to a drumbeat of blades, sambol and estate tea.

[ ] 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.
[ ] 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.
[ ] 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.
[ ] 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.
[ ] 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.
[ ] 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.
[ ] 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.
[ ] 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.
[ ] 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.
[ ] 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.
[ ] Try wattalappam
    A pudding of coconut milk, eggs and kithul palm treacle with cardamom and nutmeg. A Malay community legacy, dark and caramel-flavoured.
[ ] Eat buffalo curd with treacle
    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.
[ ] Try kavum and kokis
    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.
[ ] Drink Ceylon tea
    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.
[ ] Drink a king coconut
    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.
[ ] Try coconut arrack
    A spirit distilled from fermented coconut palm sap and aged in barrels: soft, nutty and closer to rum than to vodka. The national spirit.

Checklist from Unload: https://unloads.me/c/food-colombo