Wake-up call
Bubbly Brunch on 80: It’s the love boat, because those who know it love it! Cruising two-hours along the Beira Lake over sparkling wine brunches is touristy? Many have found a splurge on the barge irresistible: amidst the enfilade of tourists one espies locals on a family junket aboard this reconverted boat with wood-panelled interiors sporting stylish artwork. To top it all, a sun deck!
However, the most dedicated sun-bather too seems to laze little under the sun, exerting instead energies on navigating a stretch of salads as extensive as the seafood spread. Pause over prunes in richly spiced marinade. For mains, lasagne trumps. Desserts are deliberately select, lest your expanding line sink the liner.
Spices at Hilton: Forget the calories, hit the bakery counter
Today’s taut efficiency and attention to detail laced with touching hospitality somewhat stagger those of us who’d once railed about waiterly misdemeanours. Felicitate Cinnamon Lakeside’s charming new French GM and he winks that’s why he hand-picked his spruce new team, especially the F&B heads, all with international exposure.
Request fresh lime soda onboard 80 and if they’ve exhausted their lime supply (they don’t anticipate anyone boring of the bubbly) then they dispatch someone back to base to procure more with remarkable expedition. And staff clutching a phial of your freshly-squeezed lime returns on a speedboat- Bond style!
Night Owl at the Dining Room: Missed the boat? You’ll find yourself anchored to the Dining Room breakfasts. Yes, in the plural, for options are multiple.
Best not anchor yourself if breakfasting over a morning meeting, and the Dining Room does boast the business breakfast buzz (although one also sees the resident Prada-parading Indian tourist and Louis Vuitton-scarved Arab ladies). We suspect businessmen cleverly contrive morning meetings here to avail of the city’s finest Danish pastries and stunner stringhoppers like delicate little silken nests. Ah, how they string you along from temptation to temptation- until the boss rings. A wake-up call?
For uninterrupted gluttony we prescribe the inspired weekend Night Owl breakfasts, supposedly for party animals. Rumbustious revelry at unearthly hours mightn’t be deemed sagacious: therefore Cinnamon Lakeside politely confers wisdom on their midnight feast by christening it after the wise owl.
Whilst greed isn’t prudent it would be stupid to abstain before an enticement of what must be Colombo’s most subtly savoured kottu, whatever reputation certain “legends” might have. We doubt not the gorgeously moist milk rice can be rivalled: if Cleopatra wallowed in a milk bath, Colombo can plunge into kiribath! Poor Cleopatra missed out on the Dining Room’s crisp-crusted, just rightly buttered ros paan so rollickingly good and accompanied by lushly thickened dhal and mustard-dashed cadju curry. Taste tradition in Colombo’s hippest, most happening coffee shop!
Whilst seasonal festivity lends itself to nocturnal feastivity, those off on Christmas travels ought swing by for a pre-flight bite. But the Lankan fare’s so delicious and manager Mr Rufus’s service even more so you might linger too long to make that flight….
Sri Suryas: If the reader is weary of my Suryas predilection then here’s something about Suryas you didn’t know, that indeed I didn’t know: they’ve an incredible new chef. And they serve Colombo’s best breakfasts! Of course, you need to be a South Indian food-fiend to relish it, and who isn’t?
Tennis icon Sharapova last week addressing the press in India couldn’t contain herself about the glories of the dosa served her at breakfast. And Suryas is amongst Colombo’s few places that serves up a dosa in all its dignity, together with idlis seemingly afloat cloud-like on your plate. But these breakfast items you know about.
The grand discovery is Suryas’s exotic breakfast portfolio: Rashmi, Suryas’s lively and very lovely young owner, explains I cannot have for supper several interesting items as these are breakfast specialities and suggests I return next morning. So imbued I am in the better-than-at-any-5-Star samosas, vadais, rotis, parathas, paneer makhani, inexpressibly marvellous podi idli etc etc etc that there’s no question of returning for breakfast: it seems I won’t leave. Alas, the dote-worthy and commendably diligent staff must go home…
Rashmi, whose parents own a South Indian restaurant in Kerala, effuses such infectious enthusiasm for their breakfasts that return I must. Sweeps of the menu were removed, Rashmi discloses, because locals are unfamiliar with South Indian breakfast specialities: they cannot fathom how vadai soaking luxuriously in sambhar is a morning meal. Extant now is the wonder of a ven pongal studded with globes of pepper in drapes of ghee. What to do, but Rashmi insists ghee’s indispensability for flavour and texture. Equally delectable is the sumptuous semolina khichdi. Healthy options include raagi or wheat dosas. By the time you’ve got through all this, it’s probably time for lunch, if you can manage any. Otherwise, return to ravage the most magnificent thalis and plethoric sweetmeats including exceptional dry fruit Hajmer that Korean tourists take away tons of as a substitute for Christmas cake.
Don’t forget the traditional South Indian filter coffee. Few places in Chennai serve anything as good, or even food to match Suryas. But then, the chef is from a small town in Tamil Nadu renowned for its food from where Rashmi’s husband Mr. Ravishankar hails.
Spices: It isn’t unfair to say this is perhaps the city’s only continental breakfast of international standing. Every 5-Star offers cereals, viennoiseries etc. However, the quality distinguishes. Coffee is nicely brewed (surprising for a 5-Star…); outstanding homemade muesli betters muesli at celebrated Raffles and Orient Express hotels I recently stayed at in Cambodia, so too the healthy ginger & carrot shooters and blueberry smoothies and not-so-healthy but sparingly sweet homemade passion jam and orange marmalade. There are salads and cheeses, live Lankan and Indian speciality counters, but you wouldn’t find yourself straying from the bakery counter. Forget calories, try Colombo’s flakiest croissants and pain au chocolats whilst healthy wholegrain breads are veritable beauties. Newfangled bakeries might have sprouted around town, but one must confess wryly the rye bread at Spices is insuperable.
Shyamalee Wikramasinghe: If you can’t have bread have cake said Marie-Antoinette and lost her head. Haply, not being in France Colombo’s cake-fanatics can perhaps get away with such dangerous decadence. The Christmas/Wedding season lends itself to breakfast demolitions of Shyamalee’s supple love cake. This vivacious lady’s artistry displays in stunning wedding cakes and hand-painted cakes. Cake-painting “celebrity” chefs seem to have borrowed from Shyamalee who initiated it. But shhh….
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