After only a short while in Peter Kuruvita’s company you lose count of the anecdotes you’ve heard about his erratic and atypically Sri Lankan side of the family. A hardbound copy of his book Serendip sits in front of us while he relates the story behind this book. “I rounded up all my female Sri Lankan relatives and put them together in a kitchen. I did attempt to record but it was impossible,” he throws his hands up in mock exasperation. “They were all too busy cackling away in there.”

Peter is back once more in Sri Lanka and we meet him for high tea at the t-Lounge by Dilmah on Chatham Street. We’re told that experimenting with tea is his new found hobby. “Green tea is amazing for smoking things over,” he says. “Take it away from your tea cupboard and start using it in your food. Experiment!” (You can find some of these wild recipes on www.teagastronomy.com)

He was also back for his latest World Expeditions tour with a group of people he persuaded to visit and travel the country with him. “I’m trying to keep them away from the touristy attractions,” he says. “This is proper back to basics stuff.” During the tour they travelled the coastal belt while hitting some of these very much touristy attractions-albeit with Peter’s own brand of tour guiding.

Peter has lived Down Under for most of his life but Sri Lanka is a land with which he’s probably more familiar than most of the locals themselves. The chef is of Austrian-Sri Lankan descent, and speaks frequently about his Sri Lankan father whom he credits with pretty much everything. As anyone who’s watched ‘My Sri Lanka’ and ‘Island Feast with Peter Kuruvita’ or even simply had a chat with him will know Wickremapala Kuruvita was, and always will be, Peter’s number one man.

He’s a walking memoir of his father’s life and regales the crowd gathered at the t-Lounge with entertaining, slightly surreal stories of his exploits. For instance there’s a story about how his parents met. His dad had travelled to England with three friends (on motorbike!) for the Queen’s coronation in 1953 only to miss it by three days. His mum had come to England from Austria to study to be a teacher and had been explicitly warned to ‘stay away from the blackies’. And then the duo met each other, married and had children.

Peter lived in England for four years before his father decided to move them back to Sri Lanka. “They were some of the best times of my life,” he tells us. “I remember running wild in Karagampitiya, the family’s hometown.” Sri Lanka was also where he learnt to love cooking while watching his grandmother at the stove in a hot kitchen. She had what he calls a ‘Gordon Ramsay’ persona. “Her daughters used to get a real whacking if they got the seasoning wrong,” he laughs easily. “She was very exacting.”

His mum, however, was having a hard time in this strange, humid country. Add to that the troubles of the 70’s, with his father’s business being nationalised, and they made the decision to move to Australia. “We left in the middle of the night,” he remembers. Even more clearly he remembers his grandmother stuffing their pockets with food. “I remember taking back some wild boar wrapped in a banana leaf with us. That didn’t last long, as you can imagine.”

Since then he has lived and made a name for himself in Australia but his heart was never too far away from his island home. This is why he convinced the Australian TV and radio network SBS executives to pilot a show ‘My Sri Lanka’, even though Sri Lanka at the time was thought of in terms of ‘boat people’. It’s why he’s written a number of books touching on Sri Lankan cuisine, the most recent being Serendip. It’s full of recipes from his family kitchen. “I literally just drove to the homes of my female relations in a van and told them that I needed them for a week or so. We hit some tough spots-mainly because some of them weren’t talking to each other,” he laughs. “You know Sri Lankan families.” Fighting one day and the best of friends next-oh yes, we do. He had an inkling the kitchen might sort that out.

And that it did. Once closeted in the kitchen his ‘punchis’ and ‘akkis’ and aunties all formed a coven of ‘cackling ladies’ that he had no hope of breaking into. “They were all tasting things and adjusting the seasoning and sharing recipes and generally having a blast.” For Peter, that is what Sri Lankan kitchens are about-bringing people together. He laments that people don’t do this anymore, this Sri Lankan tradition of cooking together. He hopes to change things with his books, his TV shows and his many, many rambling stories about family. “People will go back into the kitchen, hopefully.”