Chef Cynthia Shanmugalingam’s Memories Of Sri Lanka Have Inspired The Buzzy New London Restaurant Rambutan

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The first time I remember going to Sri Lanka, I was three. These are my memories: being chased by a kid goat through my grandmother’s house; cleaning my teeth with charcoal; being teased by family members; and meeting my very beautiful cousin, Dashini, whose hair went past her bum – I had never seen anyone with such long hair. I was born in 1981 in grey Coventry. Sri Lanka was like stepping into technicolour. Now, as a chef, I hope to bring that feeling to everyone who eats at my restaurant or cooks from my recipe book.

My family are from a village in Jaffna province, right at the northernmost tip of the island, where the earth is distinctively red. It is tropical, soundtracked by cacophonous birds, and very rural: chickens in the front gardens, stray dogs out in the lanes, children cycling their bikes around. A temple, not too far away, blares out loud tunes on Friday. There’s a humble series of houses surrounded by tobacco fields and back gardens, where vegetables grow: fragrant pandan, green chilli, lemongrass, onions and curry leaves.

We’re from the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka, and there have been anti-Tamil riots since independence. On the way up to Jaffna during our visit, my mum saw burnt-out buses – in 1983, thousands of Tamil civilians had been killed and their businesses destroyed. They were pulled out of cars and tarred and tortured. Those riots were a turning point in how safe people felt to live there. After that trip, I didn’t return till 2012. I was 30 when I went back to Jaffna with my mother, to the village where our family is from.

By the time the war ended in 2009, almost nobody we knew was left there. The whole community had gone. My parents had already left Sri Lanka because my dad got the opportunity to work and live in the UK in 1968. But after 1983, most of our family tried to get out of the island. Because of the war, my grandmother and two cousins came to live with us. My mother had five kids – two of which weren’t her own – to whip into shape and get showered and send to school, and then cook their food and clean the house. (Immigrant mums, right? They’re a whole other level.)

We ate Sri Lankan food every day at home, including rice and curry for almost every dinner. I used to hate prawns because they looked like bugs, but my family ate lots of those, along with crab, squid and even shark (on occasion). My mum curried everything and made good use of the produce here: leeks, beetroot kale, beans, tomatoes. “Oh, I found this thing called asparagus in the market,” she’d say, “so let’s make a curry out of it.”

Now, in Sri Lanka, our family village is so full of melancholy. So much of what made it magical was having a whole village of family members and people you knew, often all in one house. It feels like these fragments of memory, the photos and hand-me-down stories, come to life in this place. I still remember being three, eating sugar cane and red bananas – I call them the Gucci of bananas – with their meaty texture and ice cream-like flavour.

It was that trip back with my mum, in 2012, when I realised I wanted to bring this cuisine to London with Rambutan, my restaurant. That was the first time that I cooked with her in the village, where you can buy your crab from some dude who just got it from fishermen off a boat, pick your curry leaves from the garden, your coconut milk from a coconut in the garden, moringa leaves from the tree, spices from the mill in the village – so fresh, so delicious and so simple. It was missing in London, where Sri Lankan food can be quite oily or rich. After George Floyd died in 2020, there was this whole conversation about who gets to tell our stories. When Sri Lankan recipes appeared in newspapers, hardly any of them had been written by Sri Lankan people. With Rambutan, my cookbook, I felt like, “This is an opportunity for me to write about our food.” Similarly, Rambutan is in Borough Market – a magical, thousand-year-old bit of the city (there’s even an Act of Parliament about it) – that has been, in some ways, a European place.

Mine is an insider-outsider’s take on Sri Lanka and our food. I do a version of a katsu sando with delicious coconut sambol and dosas – fermented pancakes – with grains such as corn and other seasonal variations. I want to cook food that is reflective of the fact that I come from two places: I’m caught between two worlds, a hybrid of the UK and Sri Lanka. Now that doesn’t mean that I want to do roast potatoes in a Sri Lankan way, or shepherd’s pie with curry leaves – that’s fine, but it’s not interesting to me. Personally, what makes London exciting is that I can get amazing West African plantain and cassava, or use a Taiwanese way of making delicious brioche-y bread to make my fish buns. London has such a melting pot of immigrant communities that have shaped a lot of how I think about food. It’s an opportunity, in other words, to represent displaced diaspora kids like me.