Licensed to Grill gains heat in Kandy
Kandy is known to sleep early. Shops close up by 7 p.m. and the Kandy City Centre is dark just an hour later. But if you happen to drive down DaladaVeediya any night other than Monday, be it even midnight, you’re going to hear some hyped up beats coming from a boom box on the Torrington Square. Beneath a red canopy, three young entrepreneurs in aprons and tall white hats are chasing hard after a dream.
Enterprising trio: Ramli, Navoda and Dinesh
“I’m taking the credit for this one,” Navoda, 23, grins beneath his carefully curled moustache, “it was all my idea!” “It was actually all of us,” his partner, Ramli, 22, sets the record straight, pointing with his hot spatula. In front of the two, flatbreads piled with crunchy veggies wait patiently for the meat and cheese to get hot enough for a wrap. Dinesh, the third team member, takes orders and handles the cash. They’re just out of Hotel School, but they’re Licensed to Grill.
For nine whole months, the two chefs and their business partners Dinesh and Ashan courted Municipal authorities for permission to make fast food on the Torrington Square. They had almost given up and started looking for other jobs when the paperwork finally came through.
“We had been considering plenty of other names [for the business],” Navoda says, dismissively. But at the end of the ordeal, they knew it had to be Licensed to Grill, L2G for short. It’s only a “fraction” of what they planned, they say, but even that fraction is getting a lot of attention. “Some days, I’m watching the grill and cooking meat one minute, the next minute I look up, and there are so many people in front of me waiting to order that I can’t see beyond,” Ramli says, still sounding astonished.
Hot and spicy food. Pix by Ashwin Dominique Jayalath
Eating out late night in Kandy inevitably means a fancy hotel or restaurant if not greasy, unhealthy food from a night kade. L2G is now throwing the option of healthy, filling and – most importantly – affordable food into the equation. And Kandy is loving it. The L2G menu is short but attractive. Juicy chicken BBQ, beef and tuna in wraps and burgers with crunchy veggies plus hot waffles drenched in fudge sauce in the evening. Their specials include the scrumptious L2G meal and iced lemon tea on exceptionally hot afternoons. And everything is priced between Rs.100 and Rs.300.
If you think this is good, check out how it gets better. Most of the food at Licensed to Grill is made from scratch at home, including the wraps and buns. The chefs, Ramli and Navoda, are Hotel School graduates who’ve both worked in 5-star kitchens (Ramli in fact trained at Heritance, Ahungalla with Chef Dimuthu Kumarasinghe), and are bent on maintaining high standards.
“We want to make real food, and good food, always from scratch. Bring 5-stars to street food,” Navoda says. “We want to become the best fast-food makers in Sri Lanka!”