Plus

Plus

Serving a platter of Jaffna delights
By Smriti Daniel
The fragrance surrounds you as you take a deep breath and then another. Instantly your body reacts – you begin to salivate, your stomach rumbles, your fingers itch to reach out towards the food. You give in; you tear off a piece of the hopper and dab it in the accompanying curry. As you begin to chew, the flavour of authentic Jaffna cooking fills your mouth, and in that moment of culinary ecstasy you wholeheartedly concur with Gerard Nathaniel when he says that “this food is out of this world”.

Mr. Nathaniel, the man behind the trendy restaurant on Nawala Road called ‘The Peninsula’, will be the first to admit to having a lifelong affair with Jaffna cooking. He talks of how when he was a young and somewhat difficult adolescent, his parents decided to send him to a boarding school in Jaffna. There he not only found himself “thrashed into shape”, he also discovered the Jaffna curry. “I made friends with the cook,” narrates Mr. Nathaniel, “and offered him a little added incentive to hide an extra jar of mutton curry in the bushes behind the kitchen”. Later that night, the young connoisseur would scamper out and gleefully lay claim to his extra rations. Decades later, Mr. Nathaniel still maintains that “they in Jaffna have created a cuisine that is as distinctive as it is delicious”.

This appreciation of a uniquely Sri Lankan flavour was something he took with him when he went to England to study engineering. Many young men in the same predicament would have chosen to simply wait until they got back home to their mother’s cooking, but Mr. Nathaniel was unwilling to do without his favourite food for years on end. Instead he began to teach himself how to cook, experimenting and practising until he could recreate with accuracy the flavours and fragrances that he had come to love so much. As a student with a small budget, meat was out of the question, it was simply too expensive. Instead he used potatoes to imitate the mutton curries. “Cooking became my hobby,” he says, looking back .

Nothing changed in the next few years, even though Mr. Nathaniel married and settled in Germany. “We had two kitchens,” he reminisces, “my ex-wife had one upstairs for her German cooking and I had my kitchen in the basement, where I would cook Sri Lankan food”. Often his ex wife would abandon her cooking and come downstairs when she got a whiff of his curries. The same was true of their friends. “I would find myself cooking for 20 people on the spur of the moment,” explains Mr. Nathaniel. How did he manage to find the ingredients he needed? Often he would buy them wholesale in Sri Lanka and then keep them frozen so that they stayed fresh.

After he retired, he decided to come back to Sri Lanka. He soon discovered – much to his dismay – that none of the Jaffna restaurants in town met his exacting standards. “This tongue of mine,” he says ruefully, “needs to be excited about what it’s eating”. So he got together with some friends and opened The Peninsula. Today, the restaurant has been in business for over a year, with both residents of the area and visiting tourists singing its praises.
Guests say that they come to The Peninsula for more than just the food and the atmosphere – the extensive beverage menu, which includes nearly a hundred cocktails is a big attraction. Mr. Nathaniel, who boasts that the margueritas served at the restaurant are the best in the island, gives all the credit to his two bartenders. Having whisked them away from a five star hotel in Dubai, he now offers their expert services to the guests who frequent his beautifully decorated restaurant.

Mr. Nathaniel, who even now remains deeply involved in the everyday running of The Peninsula, is often to be found in the kitchen - tasting and analysing the efforts of his chef. He pays particular attention to the curries, claiming that “the secret of a good curry lies in the curry powder”. When he dons the chef’s hat, he tackles each dish individually, and simply refuses to abandon it until it has reached the desired level of perfection. It soon becomes obvious that Mr. Nathaniel treats the enterprise not as a business but as a way to share the sheer joy of Jaffna food with his guests. To him, cooking is obviously something of an art.

Interestingly, this engineer turned restaurant owner never makes the mistake of underestimating the importance of good cooking. Straight faced, he explains how helping people here in the Western Province enjoy Jaffna cooking is one way to contribute to the unification of the island’s people. “Intermarriage is one way, and the other is food,” he says convincingly, and as you swallow another mouthful of his delicious food, you can very well imagine why.

Back to Plus