Cuisines Negombo Sri Lankan restaurant, Canton, Cardiff: review

Cuisines Negombo sits where the interesting but short-lived Rasathi did. Unlike Rasathi, though, you can now eat in on a solitary table: so there is no need now to eat your Sri Lankan order in Victoria Park, though its demise means I never got to pitch them my ‘Patty in the Park’ idea.

Named after the city on the west coast of Sri Lanka, Negombo is Shehara’s first business. ‘I don’t want to cook like ‘here‘, she tells me. ‘I want to cook our food.’

That means big portions and bigger spicing, and a welcome lack of ‘tell us how spicy you want it’ pandering. Take it or leave it, and I’d recommend the former.

There’s a short wait so I pop next door to The Clive Arms for a pint of Guinness, some new-fangled stout type affair that people are discovering this year. Look out for the cool kids posting about it. You never know, it might just catch on.

Breakfast at Negombo might mean a herbal porridge with curry leaves, or coconut roti with the chilli, lime and dried fish condiment lunumiris, or rice pancake ‘hoppers’. From lunchtime on, there’s a lot of rice on this menu. A lot. Rice with curry, fried rice, biryani.
However, as all sensible people know, rice is the highest form of carbohydrate, so dig in.

There’s no mutton on today, so the chicken biryani it is then: a mound of the stuff, loaded with sizeable pieces of meat, the whole thing aromatic with curry leaves and cardamom and topped with a boiled then fried egg.

Egg kottu is the usual happy tumble of textures flecked with whole little green chillies spiking the smokiness and sweetness. Shehara serves the seafood rice with a robustly-spiced chicken curry.

Hefty pieces of thigh bob in a rust-coloured sauce punchy with clove and cinnamon. The rice, studded with green chillies and whole cardamom pods, shows a generous hand with seafood, with shell-on prawns, cockles and slivers of mussel meat.

Back to the pub: Negombo has put a smile on my face, even as that spicing lingers, and even the fact Toploader’s Dancing In The Moonlight is playing can’t dampen my mood.

This is something different for Canton and yet more evidence that this is one of the city’s more interesting areas to eat, from headliners like Purple Poppadom- which has never been better- to Fizz n Flour, Taste of Peshawar, perennial gem Maasi’s and all points in between. These are early days for Negombo, and things which will need a polish, but there is promise here: and a young business which represents strong value for money- I brought more home with me that I could eat in two sittings, and with a freshly-made watermelon juice I paid under £28- is always worth knowing about.

358 Cowbridge Rd E, Cardiff CF5 1HE