Kaema Sutra; Appams and more Appams

There are chefs. And then there are chefs with two restaurants in the Asia Top 50. The third one, which is not there (yet), is not far away. In partnership with actress Jaqueline Fernandes, Darshan Munidasa has set up a beautiful restaurant on the rooftop of the Shangri-La Hotel, Colombo. It appears, though that the chef and the actress are out to showcase a modern version of Sri Lankan food!

There was this gigantic 1 kg crab. Nice. OK, I know 'nice' is probably the blandest adjective in English, but bear with me. Lamprice, a Sri Lankan specialty with rice and loads of meat packed into a banana leaf and steamed! Nice. Yes, nice. And the really nice Kottu Parota with giant prawns on it. Yep, nice.

But was way beyond nice were the appams. Yes, there were nice appams too.  Like the egg appams with their gravies. And then there were fantabulous ones. The BLACK. Like total black. The appams, all of them, were huge. Like 9 inches diameter. The black one was served with cream and had some sea salt in it. This is the simplest of ways to flavour food, just salt and fat. With the sublime flavour of the appams, just simple flavouring was all it needed.

And dessert? Yep, appam again. No, not the nice one, but the fantabulous one. This time? It was served with chocolate chips and cream. Replace the salt with the choco-chips, and the same fat and sugar works. Simple add ons for a simple dish, but one that rocks the taste buds. The crab was priced at about 9800 LKR (about 4.5k INR), but the rest of the dishes were very reasonably priced and for 6 of us, including the crab, our tab was about Rs. 9500 INR.

Service was slow that day and we had to call multiple times to get the attention of the wait staff. THe setting was beautiful and we got the outdoor seating with a nice view, so the slow service didn't affect us much.

Jaqueline and Darshan have a winner here! Is it not far away from making it to Asia's Top 50? Only time can tell.