Video
Sri Lanka’s Best Roti 🇱🇰
· 15 min · Watch on YouTube
Sri Lanka’s Best Roti 🇱🇰
An evening food crawl in Ella with Ali, built around one dish: roti, ordered in as many forms as three people can eat. Mac 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.