Chef Yohini Nandakumar's foodie guide to Sri Lanka's largest city, Colombo

Yohini Nandakumar is the co-founder of Lewisham’s Sparrow restaurant. Born in the UK, she grew up visiting Sri Lanka’s largest city with her parents who, though from Jaffna, had lived in Colombo during the Civil War and had an apartment there.

Two years ago, after marrying her husband, New Zealander porn jav Terry Blake, she realised that “the place I had begun thinking was becoming boring to visit suddenly became really interesting and there were things I wanted to show him.”

As a Londoner, she likes the city because she believes capital cities “show a little bit of everything of a country. I like being in one like Colombo that is so diverse, as there are Tamils and Sinhalese and people from different religions, as well as tourists. It’s just an interesting and vibrant place to be.”

While she describes it as a “thriving capital,” she thinks it will change a lot in the next 10-20 years: “Already in the last few years you can see new buildings and jav censored free structures going up, and there’s been loads of tourism too.”

Here she describes her favourite places to eat...

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Yohini Nandakumar (Supplied)
Where do you always return to eat?

Galle Face Hotel (2 Galle Rd, Colombo 0300; gallefacehotel.com/) is a really quintessential spot to stay in - one of those old-style colonial buildings and one of the nicest beachfront hotels. There’s a lovely bar that opens onto the beach, which gets busy as you can sit there with a cocktail and watch the sun go down over the sea. We always do that on our first evening.

Not far from there is another hotel, with a restaurant called Nuga Gama (77 Galle Rd, Colombo 0030; cinnamonhotels.com/). Visiting Sri Lanka, I think it could be hard knowingjapanese porn  whether or not you’re experiencing authentic Sri Lankan food - unless of course you know people and go to somebody’s house to try theirs. But here you get great, tasty, high quality, authentic Sri Lankan dishes. We’ve had good crab curry there – the quality varies across the city – and lots of sambals including a traditional coconut red onion and lime one. I’m ethnically Tamil and eat a lot of Tamil food, and here you can get black pepper pork curry, which I hadn’t had before but was very interesting.