Where to Find the Best Sri Lankan Food in Kuala Lumpur

If you are looking for great Sri Lankan restaurants in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia we’ve got you. Here’s our list of the best Sri Lankan restaurants in the city so you can get your ‘Lankan food fix whenever you want.

Sri Lankan Food in KL

Having spent the better part of five years living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and despite the city having an amazing array of fantastic food options covering virtually every cuisine, we would periodically get cravings for the particular flavour combinations of Sri Lankan food. As a result, we always seemed to be on the lookout for possible Sri Lankan restaurants popping up in and around KL.

Read on to see why I love Sri Lankan food so much, where to find the best Sri Lankan food in KL, the pros and cons of each restaurant and what to expect when you get there.

TLDR? Jump to the section/restaurant you want to explore below.

My love affair with Sri Lankan food

Background to Sri Lankan food

Restaurants

Teabags and Tasty Treats - My Love Affair With Sri Lankan Food

The first time I was called a ‘tea bag’ was whilst at college in Manchester. I should clarify right from the outset that the term is ‘tea bag’ not ‘teabagger’ or ‘teabagee’. These are very different things (if you don’t know what these last two terms refer to, get your grandmother to look it up for you on Google. That should make for an interesting afternoon…).

In my case ‘teabag’ was used to jokingly refer to me as someone who was white on the outside and brown on the inside. Like a teabag.

Like most terms having to do with race, in the wrong context and used with the wrong intention (mostly by low IQ’d morons) ‘tea bag’ could be a pejorative, similar to calling someone an ‘Oreo’, a ‘coconut’ or a ‘banana’. I however, took it as a compliment: it wasn’t like I had much room to argue and I mean that literally, as my mouth was probably full of vadai at the time. Mmmmm...vadai.

Showing my true teabag nature as I lovingly stare at Sri Lankan curries in Galle, Sri Lanka.

However, despite someone calling me out as a teabag fairly early on, it was only after meeting Sasha, whose parents were born in Sri Lanka, that I truly started to up my teabag game and realise that despite being a proud Brit, deep down I had always been a closeted Sri Lankan at heart (I am not opposed to the idea of a ‘coming out’ party for this by the way, so long as the catering is good).

As a 38-year-old (very) white man who likes nothing better than sitting in his sarong, with a pahana in the background, drinking Ceylon tea and eating curry and rice for breakfast, all whilst shouting ‘Aiyoh, bloody bastard!’ at Boris Johnson’s latest political debacle and looking forward to more curry (and possibly a nip of arack) later in the day, I am now happily living my best life as an ‘outed’ honorary Sri Lankan and am comfortable with my status as a teabag.

So there.

I even went to the extent of convincing my family of the joys of Sri Lankan food. The sight of my dad pouring nearly a full bowl of pol sambol (a coconut and chilli condiment) onto his plate with the words “beautiful, this stuff...” is a fond memory for Sasha.

The stuff of my dad’s dreams: Sri Lankan pol sambol.

As such, despite having a skin tone closer in colour to a bedsheet than any shade of brown, I still feel at least somewhat qualified, through many years of eating delicious Sri Lankan food at the in-laws, to share my recommendations for the best places to pick up that ‘sometimes rare but always rewarding’ prize that is Sri Lankan food. Restaurants that often qualify not only as the best places to try Sri Lankan food in KL but some of the best food in Kuala Lumpur, period.

As an aside, for those of you reading this and thinking it smacks of ‘cultural appropriation’, I have two things to share. Firstly, there is a big difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. I view cross-pollination and interaction between cultures as being an overwhelmingly positive thing and secondly, if you do think cultures shouldn’t borrow from or be influenced by each other I have some bad news for you about most cuisine and popular music…

Having said this, Jamie Oliver’s ‘jerk rice’ was just a bad idea all round. That ain’t a thing Oliver.

Nice and Spice

Speaking of cuisine, for those of you unfamiliar with Sri Lankan food and not spending your evenings reading recipes of Sri Lankan food, all I can say is, you are in for a treat.

For a detailed introduction to Sri Lankan food and particularly the many veggie and vegan options that it offers check out our 50 dish guide to Sri Lankan vegetarian and vegan cuisine.

Taking all the bits you like about Thai and Indian food and melding them together into something entirely different, the food of Sri Lanka employs a wide variety of spices, generous amounts of chilli and is as aromatic and complex as it is delicious. Its liberal use of coconut milk and roasted curry powder gives it a distinctive and marvellously spicy (not to mention mouthwatering) character.

A beautiful Sri Lankan breakfast spread at my in-laws.

However, unlike some other cuisines, Sri Lankan fare can be a little more tricky to find (I can’t count the number of times I have typed ‘Sri Lankan food near me’ into Google and come up with zero results) and depending on where you go, the experience might be very different. Below is a list of what we think are the best places for Sri Lankan food in KL and some advice on the dos and don'ts for each.

Restaurants Serving the Best Sri Lankan Food in Kuala Lumpur

Ali Yaa

Unquestionably, the most up-market place offering Sri Lankan food in KL, Ali Yaa, or to give its full title ‘Ali Yaa Island Restaurant’, has for quite some time been regarded not only as one of the top Sri Lankan restaurants in KL but one of the best restaurants in KL, period.

It is not difficult to see why. If you have the coin to pay for it, the quality of the food at Ali Yaa is excellent. The decor and surroundings are perfectly in keeping with the idea of a swish night out and the service is outstanding.

Ali Yaa’s menu is helpfully divided up into distinct sections for elolu (vegetables), kothu, curries/sothies, rice/breads, appams, specials and sambals. For those unfamiliar with Sri Lankan food, this can be helpful and the staff will be on hand to assist you in selecting the tastiest combinations (and also to recommend their signature cocktails which, laced as many of them are with the favoured Sri Lankan spirit arrack, are definitely worth a try once in a while).

For those seeking to dive in straight away, my usual approach at Ali Yaa would be to choose a staple (rice, hoppers, puttu or idiyappam) a curry and a selection of sambals.

Another approach is to try the kothu. Typically a street food dish, mostly comprised of godamba roti (a thin tossed flatbread similar to a roti canai or paratha), kothu is mixed with combinations of meat, vegetables and egg.

The racket created in the preparation of this dish is a trademark sound in Sri Lanka. Kothu is prepared by furiously chopping godamba roti, meat and/or vegetables with two cleavers on a hot plate until it resembles something that looks a little like fried rice.

The noise creates a rhythmic clacking that can be heard all over (for me it's a spicier but no less enticing equivalent of the music from the ice cream truck. ‘Clack, clack, clack,’ they say. ‘Kothu’! I say in response). Ali Yaa is one of the best places to try this Sri Lankan street food in Kuala Lumpur.

There is no taking away from the quality of the food served at Ali Yaa. The crab, in particular, is famous (unless, like Sasha you take an unusual approach to eating said delicacy by flicking the extremely spicy sauce from this dish onto your eyeball. An action that created two separate waves of pain, one as Sasha’s eyes smarted from the initial sting of the sauce and another in my arm after she whacked me for laughing.)

The chicken curry at Ali Yaa is delicious, though thicker, richer and less reliant on roasted curry powder than in many other Sri Lankan restaurants. The sambals are equally mouth-watering with the seeni sambol in particular, being the perfect balance of spicy and sweet (just bring me a bucket of the stuff next time).

My only criticism of Ali Yaa is that the price can at times be prohibitive, especially if you happen to be a Lankan food enthusiast (read: greedy bastard) like me. In my experience prior to Ali Yaa, Sri Lankan food had always been served almost as a medley of dishes. The plate, once full, looking like a painter’s palate with its spread and variety of colours and textures.

This is a result of the fact that many of the Sri Lankan meals I had enjoyed before involved small amounts of several dishes, usually a main, a staple and a variety of sambals or supplementary small vegetable dishes and/or pickles to compliment. It is a mishmashed variety of flavours, that somehow comes together to exceed even the sum of its parts.

A typical Sri Lankan breakfast table with kiri buth, sambols, pol roti and pani pol.

This variety on the plate, in which you might have one salty, one sweet and one sour sambal alongside your main dish, is one of my favourite aspects of Sri Lankan food.

It is a way of eating that is available to you at Ali Yaa, but only if you pay for each individual part of the meal. If, for example, you want a fish/chicken/mutton/prawn curry and a vegetable dish, each will cost you and if you want extra sambals you will pay for them separately too. In other words, that traditional way of eating is going to cost you an arm and a leg and I don’t tend to keep many of them in my wallet.

This is sort of the equivalent of paying for a ‘meal’ at a burger joint and then finding that the fries cost extra, if you want lettuce on the burger there’s a charge or that the ice in your drink is going to be another two quid.

This isn’t just me being an entitled brat by the way, it is just the way that Sri Lankan food had always been presented to me. If you ordered a Sunday roast and found that each separate part of the meal was priced individually it would seem a little odd to you too.

It’s a matter of preference and I wouldn’t dream of lecturing people on how they should serve their own cuisine, but Sasha’s parents, both ‘bonafide born in the motherland’ Sri Lankans, who are SO Lankan that they drink kothumalli when they get ill and fall asleep watching Sinhala teledramas, shared similar opinions.

It might be expensive but you still have a good time at Ali Yaa.

Plus it isn’t as if the staff at Ali Yaa don't want you to enjoy the food in that way - of course they do. They just want you to pay for it and from a business point of view, that is entirely understandable.

If you have the money to eat out at Ali Yaa then you definitely should, as the quality of the food is excellent. All I am saying is that after looking at the prices, on some occasions, we were forced to rein it in a little and at times omit elements of what we would consider a ‘full’ Sri Lankan meal. And honestly, sometimes if you skip a sambol, you miss it.

Having said this, Ali Yaa are listed in The Entertainer app, which is essentially something you can download in KL (at the time it cost us about 80 ringgits, which we pretty much made back the very first time we used it). The app gives you deals, bonuses and money off at a variety of restaurants and entertainment venues.

Ali Yaa’s deal through The Entertainer is particularly enticing as at the time of writing, it allows for a free main course dish with every one purchased and there are multiples of these ‘vouchers’ on the app. So if you go with a group and are happy to share and order a selection of mains, you can then use your free dishes to explore the various options and sample a little of everything.

See, there’s always a way around.

Do: Save for special occasions, try the crab curry, the cocktails and the kothu

Don’t: Forget your wallet, or eat the crab curry via your eyeball.

Top Tip: Use The Entertainer app to spread the cost (some of the offers give you up to 50% off your meal) and sample a wider variety of dishes. If you are after a takeaway, look up Ali Yaa on food delivery apps. That’s right, Sri Lankan cuisine can now be delivered to your door in Kuala Lumpur!

Bonus Tip: Ali Yaa hold an appam brunch on the first Saturday of each month. For 65RM per person, you can try a selection of Sri Lankan starters, vegetarian kothu and as much appam of your choice that your body can handle (there are five different types on offer) plus chicken, mutton, fish and vegetable curries and sweet appam. Sounds like a good deal to me!

Address: No 48 G&M, Jalan Medan Setia 2, Bukit Damansara, 50490 Kuala Lumpur.

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Yarl

Owned by the same people as Ali Yaa but created to an entirely different business model and aimed at a slightly different clientele, Yarl is situated in Kuala Lumpur’s famous Little India which is incidentally not only one of the best places for Indian food in Kuala Lumpur but one of the best for vegetarian food in Kuala Lumpur too.

If you can resist the gorgeous aromas and abundance of choice presented by the many Indian restaurants on the area’s main drag and are prepared to cheat on Indian for once, then you can find Yarl on a side street, easily accessible from KL Sentral Station.

This restaurant, which is like a lower budget version of Ali Yaa with prices to match, occupies a niche somewhere between the mamak/nasi kandar restaurants and a sit-down family restaurant. The decor inside is quite dark and it is a good place to escape the heat, albeit by eating stuff that is terrifically hot in the process (it may just have been me, but it certainly seemed that the chefs at Yarl were more liberal with the chilli and spices than the perhaps more reserved chefs at Ali Yaa who cater to palates less used to having their taste buds scorched off).

Yarl Sri Lankan restaurant Kuala Lumpur copy.jpg

The menu at Yarl is more basic and at certain times of the day, food is served buffet-style, with a number of plans available (on the occasion we visited during buffet time I opted for two veg and one meat dish with rice, which came with additional sambals and poppadom for a bargain price).

The selections from the à la carte menu were fantastic and covered all the greatest hits of traditional Sri Lankan food, from idiyappam (string hoppers) and appam to kiribath (coconut rice) and pol roti (thick coconut breads with onion, coconut chunks and chilli).

It was sometimes surprising to our Malaysian friends used to appam/hoppers being a sweet dish served with coconut milk, that we often wanted to have it served with sambals or curries as it often is in Sri Lanka.

I may have a strange expression here but trust me, the food at Yarl is damn good.

At Yarl, that option is wholly available and the hoppers were consumed with the appropriate relish and gusto. Sasha, who has proclaimed herself the official ‘appam auditor of KL’ and has also on occasion unceremoniously dismissed the fare at some KL appam stalls as being like a “ballu dhiva” aka having a consistency ‘like a dog’s tongue’ was particularly impressed by the the appam at Yarl and gave them full marks for the ratio of crispy to spongy.

For the uninitiated, an appam or ‘hopper’ is a sort of pancake that is essentially a heavenly hybrid between a pancake, a dosa and a crumpet.
Bowl-shaped, these wonderful creations are generally crispy and light on the ‘walls’ of the bowl and thicker in the base. They have a sweet yeasty taste to them that makes them the perfect accompaniment to curries and sambals, if and when that option is available.

Service at Yarl oscillates between the sublime and the ridiculous, depending upon who serves you, with some waiters being chatty, informative and attentive, whilst others are just plain rude. My advice though would be to take the risk and if you do get a clown serving you, take solace in the quality of the food he is serving, because it is fantastic.

Do: Try the hoppers and the vegetarian sets.

Don’t: Let the bad service displayed by some staff members put you off.

Top Tip: Food here is similar to Ali Yaa but a good deal cheaper so if you want to save your pennies, this is the place. If you want additional sambals just ask as (most) of the staff are happy to help.

Address: 50, Jalan Padang Belia, Brickfields, 50470 Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan, Kuala Lumpur

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Sri Lankan Kiribath coconut milk rice.jpg

Serendib

This fancy restaurant became one of Sasha’s favourite ‘long lunch away from work’ haunts when it opened back in 2016 and has quickly become a star of the KL Sri Lankan restaurant scene. Located in the heart of KL in G-Tower on Jalan Tun Razak, rumour has it that Serendib was the brainchild of former Ali Yaa chefs. Although this story isn’t on the website, the menu is pretty similar all the way down to the sambal set offered on their menu.

The similarities don’t just end there: like Ali Yaa, Serendib is also renowned for its crab, which can be cooked in four different ways, Negombo, Jaffna or Poriyal style or as a sothi. At Serendib, the crabs are also actually Sri Lankan mud crabs, which makes the whole crab-eating experience taste more authentically Lankan.

However. there’s so much more deliciousness here other than crab. The vegetable cutlets are to die for: deep-fried balls of melt-in-the-mouth goodness whilst the brinjal/aubergine moju has just just the right balance of sweet and sour. The sambal set I mentioned above is also divine, with the seeni sambal being particularly tasty - I’d recommend ordering more than one sambal set if you can.

For something a little different, try the pineapple curry which perfectly combines Sri Lankan flavours of lemongrass, cinnamon and fennel with fruity pineapple and tastes just like a tropical cuddle. In case you are worried, this is definitely NOT the equivalent of putting pineapple on a pizza as Sri Lankans can curry anything.

Sasha was too busy eating at Serendib to take any photos, so enjoy this close up of seeni sambol instead. You’re welcome.

But if you are looking for a real star of the show, it has to be the sweet appam, served with thick coconut milk and chunks of palm sugar. One of these definitely isn’t enough, but you are in luck - one of the best things about Serendib is that despite its glitzy appearance and central KL location, the food is reasonably priced. Any kind of appam (sweet, paal, egg or plain) is only 4RM (compared to 7/8RM at Ali Yaa) so you can definitely have more than one as I tend to do.

Ordering a single appam runs counter to my Sri Lankan food consumption training, which was conducted both at the in-laws house in Harrow and in Sri Lanka itself in restaurants and at Sasha’s cousin’s house.
In all cases the general idea seemed to be to bring out piles and piles of the good stuff until you physically could eat no more. Lankans do not like you to go hungry.
So, having gotten into the habit of happily munching through five or six hoppers at a time (and potentially going way beyond that figure when hungry) it came as a shock to the system to find that some maniacs only eat one. Who knew?

Sri Lankan food trainers AKA Sasha’s mum and dad.

Finally, the team at Serendib aren’t afraid of using authentic Sri Lankan spice levels (unsurprising considering that one of the founders trained under the celebrated Chef Publis Silva, famed for his traditional Sri Lankan cooking style), so prepare for some spicy shennanigans!

Do: Try the pineapple curry and the sweet appam.

Don’t: Try to drive to Serendib during evening rush hour as the traffic on Jalan Tun Razak is horrendous.

Top tip: Serendib is on the eaitgo app - if you book through the app you get 25% off your meal.

Address: G Tower, GTower LG 07 & 08, 199, Jln Tun Razak, 50400 Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan, Kuala Lumpur.

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Lankan Cafe

This hidden gem of a restaurant is located in PJ and is tucked away upstairs above another successful Indian curry house and on the same row (but opposite end) from the even more famous ‘Raju’s’.

Given the choice between the three establishments, however, I would definitely say it's worth taking the time to climb the stairs and find this place. Lankan cafe is unpretentious and does not pretend to be a high-class Michelin starred dining experience.

What it does offer is a cosy little place, with some slightly eccentric decor, but excellent service, great prices and some marvellously authentic Sri Lankan food.

The menu at Lankan cafe is divided up by time of day, with different meal deals for each block of breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can also order à la carte if you so wish and there is invariably some kind of ‘selection’ deal going on at all times.

If you can get a variety platter then do. This is a great way to sample a wide variety of Sri Lankan dishes and staples as it includes hoppers, pittu, idiyappam a small amount of lamprais (a baked rice dish similar to biryani in which the rice and other ingredients are cooked together and served in a banana leaf) as well as a wide variety of sambals (the sweet, spicy and salty ‘condiments’ and chutneys that are served alongside most Sri Lankan meals) and is both filling and great value.

The Lankan Cafe variety platter is to die for and provides more than enough food for two people.

Another great option is the buffet lunches that Lankan Cafe serves up. Now before we start, I must say that I am not usually a big fan of buffets in general, but this self-service approach is actually perfect, as it not only allows you to sample a wide variety of dishes from the usually generous selection available but also allows you to enjoy a Sri Lankan meal as God intended, with a little bit of a lot of things.

Make sure to try a little of each of the sambals that are usually laid out at the start of the buffet, though you may want to experiment with each first, as Sri Lankan food can be notoriously fiery and in the name of authenticity the chefs at Lankan Cafe do not mess about when it comes to the use of chilli.

The chicken curry at Lankan Cafe tastes far more authentic than in some other places and is usually served in a smaller portion with two or three large-ish pieces of chicken on the bone and a thin gravy, which might seem a little watery to those used to the thicker consistency of some Indian curries. This thinner curry, served with your choice of staple, is bursting with flavour.

Now this selection of curries is what I am talking about.

It is also worth checking what ‘short eats’ or snack/appetizers they have available each day. The ‘rolls’, which are essentially meat/fish/vegetables cooked with spices and then wrapped in a thin godamba roti dipped in breadcrumbs and fried to create a crispy golden ingot of deliciousness are great here.

The watalappam, a kind of sweetly spiced egg custard dish to be enjoyed as dessert (and one of Sasha’s particular favourites) is also not to be missed, though it is unquestionably the quality of the appam that really sets the place apart.

The hoppers can be ordered individually, but it's best to order a ‘set’ of two, in which you can mix and match plain, sweet (with coconut milk) and egg appam depending upon what you fancy that day.

Egg appam at Lankan Cafe in Kuala Lumpur

My usual order is one sweet and one plain, whilst Sasha usually opts for one egg and one sweet. Each low priced set comes with a hot drink and we usually go for the Sri Lankan ginger milk tea, enjoyed in unapologetically rude slurps. It’s the Sri Lankan way and oddly, seems to make it taste better.

Do: Try the appam and wattalappam and definitely try to get there on a day when the buffet is being served. It’s cheap, cheerful and delicious.

Don’t: Expect fine dining. Lankan Cafe is called a cafe for a reason, it has a laid back atmosphere and is a great place to work, but if you’re expecting the Ritz, you might be out of luck.

Top Tip: Though it has gotten better recently, it was often the case that taxis/Grab drivers found it hard to find Lankan Cafe. The easiest way to get around this is to order your taxi to Raju’s which is at the end of the same row and turns up a lot more often on driver’s radars, or to the 7/11 in the middle of the row.

Address: Jalan 5/59, Bukit Gasing, 46000 Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Kuala Lumpur.

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And that’s it for these food-related shennanigans!

Sadly, at the time of writing this article, I discovered that one of our favorite Lankan food haunts that I was going to include - Hoppers KL - has now closed.
The restaurant specialised in taking advantage of the appam’s natural shape and using it as the edible receptacle for whichever flavour combination/filling you choose, essentially serving the dish in the hopper itself. So basically there were nasi lemak hoppers, goat curry hoppers and even prawn curry hoppers.
There’s no word as to whether they will be coming back…I am crossing my fingers that they do because they were a really creative addition to KL’s Sri Lankan food scene. Aiyoh!