Dropped in here for a late lunch on a Monday afternoon after finishing up some life admin in central London. This is an upmarket Sri Lankan restaurant in Borough Market. The place was pretty busy and we didn’t have a reservation. They offered us high stools at the counter. We spied a small table at the back - they apologetically said it was to seat 3 persons, not 2, so they couldn’t place us there. So we sat at the counter which has leather-topped high stools and useful hooks underneath for jackets, bags, etc. It’s actually the counter encircling the open kitchen, so we got to watch a lot of cooking.
Menus:
They served free still or sparkling tap water - a nice touch. I forgot to look at the drinks menu properly or I would have ordered a pandan cream soda because I love pandan.
We were given some ‘guidelines’ as to what to order. This gets on my nerves slightly. Sometimes I feel like telling the server - I’m nearly 50 years old, I think I can order without a detailed briefing from you and if I order not enough, I’ll just order some more and if I order too much, I’ll ask for a doggy bag. Anyway, my husband was initially keen on the feasting menu but I thought it would be overkill. So we ordered gundu dosas and beef rolls to start and the black pork curry with rice and the mutton kottu roti with spring greens as the mains. Even though they warned us things would be served in whatever order they were ready, they did come out as starters and mains.
Starters:
Gundu dosas with coriander sambol
I didn’t know what a gundu dosa was - now I know it’s the cutest love child of an idli and dosa.
Hotel Nippon beef and bone marrow rolls
This is the ultra-luxe version of our family favourite mutton rolls, which we buy in bulk from time to time from our favourite Sri Lankan Tamil hole in the wall. Here, the posh version was cloaked in panko instead of bog-standard breadcrumbs, no potato filler to be detected in the filling, which was meltingly tender studded with unctuous bone marrow. Very rich and filling.
The tattooed lady in this photo did most of the cooking for our dishes:
I was pretty impressed, because she was cooking on coal fired grills and clay pot cookers (I don’t really know what to call these in English, in Bengali we call these ‘unon’ and in Hindi I think it’s called ‘sigdi’) and really captured the Sri Lankan flavours really well. From her accent and looks, I would guess she’s British Japanese. She got our mains served at the perfect interval.
Middlewhite black pork belly curry
White samba rice
So good! My only criticism would be a few of the pork belly pieces didn’t have the fat rendered as nicely as the rest. The rice was a varietal I haven’t had before - lovely and fragrant.
Swaledale mutton kottu roti with spring greens and wild garlic:
I’ve not had kottu roti before - it’s sort of a stir fry of chopped up paratha with meat and veg. I liked this prep. The mutton pieces were very tender, so were the spring greens. I’m not sure if they replaced the wild garlic with carrots 
.
After this, we ordered the ice cream, we said a double scoop with one scoop of lemongrass and lime and one scoop of toasted rice and brown butter flavour. What came out (after a very long wait - they seemed to have completely forgotten our dessert order) was 2 separately served scoops:
I used the long delay to move to a proper table as the restaurant had emptied out quite a lot by now. When they served the ice cream they took great care to explain the green scoop was the lime and lemongrass and the beige one was the toasted rice and brown butter - I never would have guessed! The ice creams were tasty enough but I’m not sure they were worth £6 a scoop (which they charged us on the bill despite it saying a double scoop was £10 but I didn’t want to make a fuss over £2). The toasted rice and brown butter was was very coconutty - tasted exactly like a Bengali sweetmeat called Narkoler Naru (which is made of grated coconut fried with jaggery and formed into small caramelly balls).
The bill:
12.5% service charge included. Service was very attentive at the beginning but sort of became non-existent towards the end. I suppose the restaurant was very quiet by that point so they weren’t gagging to turn the table we had occupied. Overall a very enjoyable experience. I would return to try other things on the menu.
