EPICURIOUS: COLOMBO’S FINDS
With growing investments from Beijing in Sri Lanka, there are now a large number of Chinese businessmen, engineers and tourists in Colombo. Half of them seemed to have been in the Chinese restaurant ‘88’ when we took a Sri Lankan couple there recently. It’s always a good sign to see lots of Chinese diners in one of the restaurants, because it gives the establishment a stamp of authenticity. However, you can’t have too much of a good thing, as the Chinese tend to be loud and raucous when they are together in groups.
However, the food made up for the ambience. Despite the noise and the air of frantic activity, we had a great meal. The hot and sour soup was especially good, with tremendous depth of flavour; the spicing was well-balanced, and the soup contained lots of tofu. A quick confession: I was very tempted by the shark fin soup on offer, but the thought of the sharks being used only for their fins, and then to be thrown back into the sea to die, has put me off the dish, even though I used to love it.
While 88 is very much a Chinese restaurant, it offers a range of Far Eastern dishes, including Indonesian, Thai and Malay. We stuck to the Chinese cuisine, however, and had no reason to regret our choice.
Fine dining in Colombo, from Chinese to Vietnamese and Japanese, is a culinary adventure
We were staying in a small flat in central Colombo that we hired on Airbnb. To our dismay, when we walked in, we discovered that the flat had no kitchen and, as we never use a microwave oven to cook with, we are eating out a lot. Lunch at Noodles, a restaurant in the Cinnamon Grand Hotel, was excellent, even though the place was full of noisy children brought there for a Sunday treat by doting parents. Vietnamese paper rolls and Japanese dumplings were followed by a rich roast duck soup with rice noodles that had slices of duck simmered in chicken stock and leeks.