---
type: Video
title: "Sri Lanka’s Best Roti 🇱🇰"
description: A roti crawl through two Ella kitchens — a prawn roti in the Indian style, a coconut roti in the Sri Lankan one, and a banana-chocolate dessert roti, for $2 to $4 a plate.
tags: [sri-lanka, ella, roti, food, beer, restaurants]
timestamp: 2026-08-06T15:40:00Z
resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlE2VSHAcAw
video_id: OlE2VSHAcAw
upload_date: 2022-03-01
duration: 912
---

# Sri Lanka’s Best Roti 🇱🇰

An evening food crawl in [Ella](/places/ella.md) with [Ali](/people/ali.md),
built around one dish: roti, ordered in as many forms as three people can eat.
[Mac](/people/mac.md) has gone off on his own and joins later.

The premise is a comparison between two neighbouring kitchens. His verdict at the
end is that he can't separate them.

*Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles, which don't render either
restaurant's name reliably, so neither is named here. Nothing in the video or
description links or plugs them.*

## What roti means here

Two quite different things go by the name, and eating both back to back is the
useful part of the video.

- **The Indian style**: a wrap. A very thin paratha-like bread folded around a
  filling — his is prawn with potato and vegetables — served with a green sauce he
  keeps saying tastes like Thai green curry and can't identify.
- **The Sri Lankan style**: **coconut roti.** A thinner, softer flatbread eaten
  by dipping, somewhere between a paratha and garlic bread by his description,
  with a hot sauce alongside that he finds overpowers everything else. He prefers
  it plain.
- **The dessert version**: the same bread wrapped around banana, coconut and
  chocolate and fried in butter. He expects the chocolate to dominate and finds
  the banana does.
- **The wider menu** at these places also runs to cheese, chicken, beef and
  sausage roti, mango and pineapple sweet ones, shawarma and dosa.

His summary of the savoury two: the Indian one is a meal because it has the prawn
in it, the Sri Lankan one is a snack, and neither is better.

## Prices

- **500 to 700 rupees a roti — $2 to $4.**
- **4,000 rupees for three people at the first place**, beers included, which he
  says is much less than the setting led him to expect.
- **1,500 rupees, about $7**, for the dessert roti at the second.

**Lion beer** is the local one and he rates it among his favourites anywhere.

## The rooms

The first place is a first-floor room with an open fire, bean bags, live music
and cricket on — the Pakistan Super League, Islamabad against Lahore, which
amuses him a fortnight after leaving there. He calls the atmosphere closer to
Ibiza than to anywhere else in the country so far, and expects the bill to match,
and it doesn't.

**Both kitchens are behind glass** so customers can watch the cooking, which he
remarks on twice — his note is that this would not happen in the UK. He asks
permission to film in both and gets it in both.

A first attempt at a third place fails: they had run out of roti, with an hour
needed to make more.

## Key moments

- `[01:04]` The first place is out of roti — an hour to make more.
- `[01:35]` Bean bags, a fire, and the Pakistan Super League on the television.
- `[02:36]` Lion beer, and where he puts it.
- `[03:39]` Filming the kitchen through the glass.
- `[04:40]` The prawn roti, and the sauce he can't name.
- `[06:44]` 500–700 rupees a plate.
- `[07:14]` The Sri Lankan coconut roti, and the sauce that buries it.
- `[08:47]` 4,000 rupees for three, with beer.
- `[10:20]` The second kitchen, also behind glass.
- `[11:52]` Banana, coconut and chocolate roti.
- `[13:55]` 1,500 rupees for the dessert.

## Extracted pages

- [Sri Lanka](/countries/sri-lanka.md)
- [Ella](/places/ella.md)
- [Ali](/people/ali.md)
- [Mac](/people/mac.md)