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Serendip's charm
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Discover the food and culture of emerald isle
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SIMPLY ASIA A culinary and cultural fare from Sril Lanka Photo: Mohd Yousuf
Serendipity: (noun) the lucky tendency to find interesting or valuable things by chance. At Encounters in Taj Krishna, they are folding their hands like namaste and saying ayboha (Sinhalese: may you have a long life) for a welcome and a discovery of food from the island that was part of the fabled spice island.
If you go today for the food, you will get it with a dash of old Indian songs sung in contralto by a calypso band. But on Saturday and Sunday, there was a Kandyan dance ballet by seven girls, which looked like a contortionist version of Manipuri dance. The charm offensive included a masked dance called Sabaragamuwa. But the main course was the food: spicy, ricey, evoking the smells of sea, sand and coconut grooves.
Cooked up by Chef L. Shantha Peiris of Taj Exotica, the dishes are almost south Indian except for the spice factor. "I got cinnamon here, it doesn't smell good. Sri Lankan cinnamon is very, very strong, very, very fragrant," says Shantha Peiris who got his load of spice supply and who believes that chefs are like doctors: "If they go wrong, you can die." With such noble thoughts you can happily dig into a range of food items like brinjal moju, alabeduma, mutton karpincha fry, fish white curry or chicken pepper fry and round it up with wattalapam. Doesn't make sense? There is a hint.
The dishes sound exotic but they aren't to an Indian palette. Read the ingredients and you can decipher the dish as easily as 1 + 2 = 3. Like chicken pepper curry is chicken cubes, onion, green chillies fried with crushed pepper.
Or Alabeduma is boiled potato fried with onion and chilli pieces. Getit?
SERISH NANISETTI
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