Sri Lankan food with a fine dining flourish

The Little Sri Lankan is putting on some of the best supper clubs in the city

One of my favourite ways to eat an indie chef’s food is to go to a supper club. Thy’re intimate, a good way to meet new people, and a great way to get to know who’s cooking your food and what their story is. Some of my favourites have been those from Claire Market Chef, Nila’s Burmese and Our Place. Check them all out. Another, The Little Sri Lankan had been on my to-eat list for a long time before I finally managed to get to one of their events and, damn, I’d been missing out. 

The Little Sri Lankan (TLSL) is a pop-up supper club from married couple Michael and Malanie Hooper Tillekeratne. Malanie was born in Sri Lanka but her dad was a British citizen so the family moved back and forth between Sri Lanka and the UK until finally settling here. Mala and Mike have worked as chefs at Michelin and Rosette restaurants everywhere from London to Australia. On their collective CV are Jason Atherton’s one-star City Social, The Mansion House (now Hotel Du Vin) in Poole, and the two-rosette seafood restaurant Scott’s in Mayfair among many others.

Mike and Mala of The Little Sri Lankan (Credit: The Little Sri Lankan)

One day while working in a kitchen, Michael slipped on an ice cream tub lid and fractured his elbow leaving him unable to work for a while. As he recovered, the pandemic was just taking hold making it difficult to find work so he had to claim benefits. He and Malanie started making Sri Lankan ready meals at home to sell in the local area using local Facebook groups to advertise them. That led to pop-ups at Levenshulme Market (RIP) where they won over the locals with their Sri Lankan toasties, chicken curry and spicy potato sambal.

Then came the supper clubs, designed to facilitate good food, good drinks and a convivial, friendly atmosphere and really show what they could do. They describe their style of cooking as traditional Sri Lankan food in a fine dining style - with a touch of playfulness that reflects Mala and Mike’s personalities. 

Sureshot brewery taproom. (Credit: Kelly Bishop)

Family recipes from a Sri Lankan ammie (mum) and archie (grandma)

All of the dishes are based on Mala’s Sri Lankan family recipes which she has had fun recreating from scrappy notes with plenty of mistakes along the way. Like the time when a recipe called for a wine glass of honey but it turned out it should have been a (much smaller) sherry glass. 

Sri Lankan food has hallmarks from many European cuisines due the country having been controlled by the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French and the British at various times. It’s a super interesting cuisine and one that’s not found much in Manchester except maybe for a few dishes that crossover to South Indian restaurants. The supper club I went to at the brilliant Sureshot brewery tap was enlightening as well as being an absolute feast. 

Roasted paan and seeni sambol butter. (Credit: Kelly Bishop)

What’s on the menu at The Little Sri Lankan?

Dishes vary from event to event but let me tell you what we ate.

Our starter of roast paan is a dish that came to Sri Lanka via the Portuguese. Paan means bread in Sinhalese, this is made from plain flour rather than bread flour which gives slightly less of a rise and is roasted to produce a lovely crisp crust. In Sri Lankan bakeries, Mala says, ready-toasted bread is handed out to long queues of busy people rushing off to school or work or wherever. TLSL’s version is served with whipped seeni sambol butter. Seeni means sugar in Sinhalese and sambal is a spicy, tangy Indonesian relish, not too dissimilar to a red onion chutney. These are blended into their own homemade whipped butter (made from churning cream) to spread thickly on the bread alongside a sweet coconut sambol. 

In Sri Lanka, tourists can buy fresh fish from fishermen and take it to a hotel where chefs will cook it for them. Typical dishes include spicy hot buttered cuttlefish or fish - brought to the country by Chinese migrants. A lot of the food is what they call ‘bar food’ which tends to be super spicy and is designed to eat while drinking beer. Taking inspo from this is the next dish, Cornish mackerel. Mala and Mike try to work only with locally sourced ingredients and their mackerel comes from Easy Fish in Heaton Chapel. Mala’s mum created the mackerel recipe, marinated in salt, turmeric, chilli and lime. It’s then scored and charred to juicy perfection.

Charred mackerel. (Credit: Kelly Bishop)

A vegan option using squash is marinated in the same spices, sous vide cooked then charred. The dish is served with a Cinderwood heirloom tomato and cucumber salad - not too dissimilar to the Indian kachumber salad - made with coconut vinegar. Coconut is a major export of Sri Lanka and is sold in the form of water, vinegar, alcohol, sugar, and more so you find it almost everywhere in Sri Lankan cuisine. 

This also comes with a ‘white’ breadfruit curry with turmeric and coconut. This big spiky green fruit from the same family as the mulberry and jackfruit has a starchiness like potato or yam. 

Beer list and all important Scampi Fries at Sureshot. (Credit: Kelly Bishop)

You could do a PhD in Sri Lankan curry powder

Sri Lankans love curry powders that they make up in advance from separately roasted whole spices. The lightly roasted yellow version is used in white curries and has a milder flavour, then there is a more deeply flavoured darker roasted curry powder. There is also a bright red Jaffna curry powder from Northern Sri Lanka - where lots of people from Tamil Nadu settled - that contains a lot of chilli hence its fiery colour.

The base of 98% of Sri Lankan curries is coconut oil (not ghee, they don’t use it in Sri Lanka), sliced onions cooked until transparent, rampe (a leafy member of the pandan family), garlic and sometimes ginger, followed by the curry powder of choice. Mala has endless knowledge of the complexities of Sri Lankan curry powders and loves to chat with guests about it so come armed with questions. She tells us every family in Sri Lanka has its own different recipe that uses more or less the same ingredients but with varying ratios. These curry powders always include sweet spices like cinnamon, cloves and fennel seeds but Mala’s has more cardamom than some as that’s one of her favourite spices (mine too).

Sri Lankan mutton curry, parippu, pickle. (Credit: Kelly Bishop)

Don’t be scared, says Mala, grinning. The main course of mutton curry is searingly spicy. It’s made with the darker more intense curry powder because the intensely flavoured meat can handle it. In Sri Lanka, the meat is always cattle before it is food, so it’s older and has done some work. This flavourful meat benefits from long slow stewing. Goraka (a kind of tamarind) is often used to help tenderise beef and lamb. Mala’s mum taught her a mutton curry is ready when sauce looks like it’s curdled.

Vegans get a marrow curry made with white curry powder, but also quite spicy. On the side is parippu, a mild dal which you can eat to temper the heat. The curries are served with red rice (which Mala tells us is very good for your skin - and looking at her glowing cheeks, I would definitely trust her for skincare advice), aubergine pickle, and tangy carrot sambol. “Sri Lankans can make sambol out of anything,” says Mala.

Watalapam tart, dreamy. (Credit: Kelly Bishop)

Dessert is very much my cup of chai. A classic Sri-Lankan-Malay watalapam custard which Mala and Mike have ‘fancied up’ by baking in a tart case (Mala started out as a pastry chef). It’s a kind of coconut egg custard tart with extra spice from copious cardamom, cloves and cinnamon as well as texture from cashew nuts and sweetness from jaggery and kithul pani, a kind of smoky Sri Lankan treacle. Mala explains that in hot countries you need to eat more sweet stuff to keep your energy up. She tells us that Sri Lankans like to ‘overcook’ the custard so it goes thick and curdy like a squidgy lemon tart. Even on a warm day, this dessert makes me think about rolling around like an exuberant collie in damp autumn leaves. 

Schooners of beer at Sureshot (credit: Kelly Bishop)

Beer and curry - a tried and tested combo

I have to also give a quick tip of the hat to the venue for this particular supper club, Sureshot Brewery. A really cool space serving fantastic locally made beer with brilliant names like Small Man’s Wetsuit, His Name Is Wodders, and The Best Penguin In The World (which features a graphic of the famous curry house dessert, the Punky Penguin, which TikTok went mad for when I posted a video of myself eating one. You can buy Sureshot beer in their online shop but deffo head down one weekend and have a beer at the tap room too.

I’ve said again and again how the most thrilling element of Manchester’s dining scene for me is that you can basically travel the world here when it comes to food. If you’re curious about Sri Lankan food, these supper clubs are fun, friendly events but the food really is top-level cookery. If you’re looking for an even more intimate style of supper club, Mala and Mike of The Little Sri Lankan have recently started inviting guests into their own home in Reddish for supper club events. I’ll be heading down to one of those as soon as I can. I’ve copied their upcoming events below for you. 

• Friday 29 September - Platt Fields Market Garden

• Saturday 7 October - Cloudwater (with beer pairing) Manchester

• Wednesday 25 October - The Beeswing (with cocktail and wine pairing) Manchester

• Sunday 5 November - Roast dinner supper club at ours (AKA their home), Reddish

• 19 November - Supper club at ours (AKA their home), Reddish

I have loads more stories of food from around the world done well here in Manchester. If you’ve not already subscribed to my mailing list, I send out one or two emails a week talking about food and drink - mostly in Manchester. My newsletter is a labour of love that I put a lot of time and effort into. Subscriptions and shares significantly support my work. Thank you for reading, it means a lot.