Find Your Local Sri Lankan Restaurants
Sri Lankan cuisine is professed to be of the most complex in South Asia. Sri Lanka has a number of its own agricultural products, but because of its utility as a major trade hub, it has come to incorporate a number of non-native products and accumulate a wild mix of culinary influences. The island's national cuisine is steamed or boiled rice served with curries. As a main dish, these curries are based on fish, beef, pork, chicken, or mutton. Vegetable- or lentil-based curries exist as an alternative in Sri Lankan restaurants in Australia, and they are widely enjoyed in Sri Lanka as well. The diverse set of fruit available in Sri Lankan cuisine also produces fruit-augmented or fruit-based curries. Native coconut contributes its flesh or milk in just about every curry. The number of spices flowing through Sri Lanka is incredible. Historically, the trade routes passing through Sri Lanka brought many foreign spices such as chilli, cardamom, cumin, coriander from India; vanilla, cinnamon, lemon grass, and pepper pass through here too. Spices are used liberally and measured by the eye, so one restaurant's basmati-snapper curry could taste drastically different from another's. Other Sri Lankan dishes include flat bread hoppers (and their many different types), Dutch-influenced lamprais, the palmyra palm-utilizing kool, pittu, and a roti similar to that consumed in India. Sri Lankan restaurants here are likely to use Australian-fished seafood and mix in a little locally grown produce (e.g. beetroot-yoghurt curry). Sri Lankan cuisine is considered some of the spiciest on Earth - spicier than the hottest from India or Southeast Asia - but restaurants are likely to cater to more inexperienced tongues; food from Sri Lankan takeaway restaurants will be much more mild than food cooked in a Sri Lankan home.
