Kolamba

Stepping off Kingly Street into Kolamba feels like a warm embrace. This homely yet stylish Sri Lankan restaurant offers a little slice of peace in one of London's busiest neighbourhoods, favouring a cool, earthy feel with large, woven hanging lampshades, leafy greenery and exposed brick. All of this is deftly lit to ambient perfection, befitting date nights or dinners with close friends. Its sense of warmth is palpable, with an open kitchen at the back where chefs can be seen plating dish after vibrant dish, and staff who welcome you like a friend.

Kolamba was set up by a husband-and-wife team Eroshan and Aushi Meewella in 2019 to bring authentic Sri Lankan food to a London audience, and is now ranked amongst the likes of Hoppers and Rambutan – some of the capital’s best Sri Lankan restaurants – for its delicious home-style cooking.

The menu forms a nice entryway into the world of Sri Lankan cuisine, presenting diners with fragrant curries, tasty street food eats, sambols, hoppers and breads – enough to feel like a discovery of Sri Lanka’s nuanced recipes and spices, without overcomplicating things. We like that the menu is 50% vegetarian too, heroing vegetable-based curries, dhals and sides amongst a collection of meat and fish dishes.

Your best bet is to order something from every section if you can. We started with a couple of excellent breadcrumb-coated fish cutlets, filled with flaky mackerel and potato, then served with curry mayo. Everything else comes all at once: a rich Ceylon chicken curry featuring tender on-the-bone chicken, sweet roasted pumpkin cooked with coconut and lemongrass, fresh grated coconut with chilli and onion, and a nutty pan-fried roti for soaking up those fragrant sauces. It’s all incredibly good, and there’s something joyous about dining this way, trying a bit of this and that, choosing your own combinations, discussing your favourites with whoever you’re dining with.

As we dig into a gently flavoured rendition of Sri Lanka's Watalappam, a sweet, spiced custard garnished with candied cashew nuts and coconut, we can’t help but feel this is the most restorative meal we’ve had in a while, leaving us well fed, well looked after and, well, happy.

If you love Sri Lankan food, you need to plan a visit to Kolamba. In the heart of lively Soho, this hub of home cooking serves up exploding flavours, with dishes that are never short on spice or colour.

In fact, the dishes you'll find on the menu are derived from recipe books of the team's friends and family back in Colombo – which is known to locals as Kolamba. These multi-cultural delights feel like a ray of sunshine in a more often than not grey London. You will find Malay, Tamil, Moor, Sinhalese and Dutch tastes and textures on the menu, ensuring that you can sample a blend of the most iconic dishes, along with street food with a twist and large sharers for the table.

As for 'bites' on the menu, the Kolamba team recommends one to two per person, sort of serving as a little starter. The bites include Nalini's fish cutlets which are crispy, traditional short eats of mackerel fried in breadcrumbs, along with the green mango and papaya salad mixed with chilli, cashew, ginger, lime and kithul.

Onto the meat and fish section, you'll be able to choose from the Ceylon chicken curry that has been cooked on the bone with sharp tamarind and creamy coconut milk, and sticky marinated prawns tossed with chilli, tomato and onion. For vegetable dishes, sambols and rice and breads, choose the cabbage mallum sauteed with turmeric, mustard seeds and coconut, a seeni sambol with local caramelised onion relish and salty Maldive fish, and string hoppers with kiri hodhi and pol sambol.

When it's time for dessert, try the watalappam, the most famous, traditional Sri Lankan dessert of spiced coconut custard that is garnished with cashew nuts.