Ceylon Tavern

Lovely food. Quite different to your usual curry houses. We had an excellent meal there. They do an excellent Massala Dosa which are rare in this country.
Because this is Sri Lankan food it might get passed over by people but I recommend you try it.

I stumbled across Ceylon Tavern on my search for pre-​salsa food yesterday. They have only been open for 3 weeks but in fact, this is a bit of a homecoming for them.
The restaurant used to be on this site before a large fire shut the premises 4 years ago. The business moved to Clapham but now, they’ve moved back to their original premises
Most ‘Indian’ restaurants in this country serve Punjabi style food when in fact, the food from India has a much greater variety than that. Coming from Malaysia, I’m more used to South Indian/​Sri Lankan food as most Malaysian Indians come from there originally. There is greater use of ingredients like coconut milk and the curries tend to be lighter as they don’t use as much cream in their recipes
I liked the open plan kitchen though I curbed my curiosity this time to get up and watch the chefs at work. The staff were already a little shy and I didn’t want to spook them
I got complimentary popodams which was a nice touch. For starters, I tried the lamb rolls — deep fried rolls of crispy lamb and potato, served with ketchup and a spicier sauce. It was a good dish to wake the tastebuds up though I would maybe have served a cool sauce iike a raita with it as the filling was already quite hot
I then had the Jaffna chicken curry and the dish arrived with the familiar smell of frersh curry leaves, something that I smell a lot from curries back in Malaysia. In fact, it’s so nice to see all the fresh spices in the curry — you know that this curry wasn’t born from some amorphous generic curry paste made in a large factory in Southall. This went well with my egg roti, another dish which is hard to find in conventional Indian rerstaurants. The egg roti was good but perhaps not exactly like the version I love in Malaysia.
So nice to find an authentic Sri Lanakan restaurant and I will be back for the strong hoppers, the dosas, the vadai, etc etc etc