Cheese & Chocolate Rottis at Hansika Roti Shop Hikkaduwa Sri Lanka

When I went recently with a group of IT BPO people to Galle for a career fair, I found out that not everyone knows about chicken/cheese and chocolate rotis. They're just like egg rotis but, instead of egg, they're filled with chocolate or cheese and chicken. These tasty beasts are endemic to Hikkaduwa - the original rotti shop is in Narigama Beach.

Recently, as our normal roti shop (opposite the original) had run out of chicken, we drove on a little and saw a really nice place with a signboard advertising cheese / chicken / chocolate rotis "with recipes from the UK!" This was the Hansika Roti Shop.

Most roti shops are not places you can take anyone. This shop however is more like a restaurant with nice wooden benches attached to tables. Most rotti shops have menus on the wall. Here, when we sat down, they gave us a printed, laminated menu with multiple pages! (It even has a burger section - I will write about that later when I revisit...)

So we ordered cheese and chicken rotis (LKR 80) and chocolate rotis (LKR 140). And they came, well presented and plated, with cutlery, even. Both were really good with a lot of cheese inside the cheese and chicken roti and decent amounts of chocolate inside the chocolate one.

Satisfied, I decided to solve this "recipes from the UK" business. I walked around and saw a newspaper clipping hanging on the wall about a Lahiru "Larry" Jayasekara, who came from Hikkaduwa and worked under Gordon Ramsey and was now, at 23, running his own place in UK.

When I asked the lady at the cash register about it, she beamed with maternal pride and told me he was her son and gave me a list of his accomplishments. As my brother is also a chef, we had a long chat about the perils and pleasures of chef-relatedness.

So, if you go to the Hikkaduwa Beach Festival, drop by Hansika for a chicken and cheese roti. And, while you're there, ask Mrs Jayasekara (behind the counter) about her son. It's a nice finish to an excellent menu.

Drifters Narigama Hikkaduwa Sri Lanka Hotel Review

Drifters - in the Narigama part of Hikkaduwa - is close to all the Hikkaduwa clubs, close enough that you can crawl across the road after a good night/morning.

For breakfast, they give you gigantic slices of bread with parippu and pol sambol for breakfast and, even better food wise, is walking distance from the Roti Shop. Nothing like a parippu/pol sambol/paang and chocolate/banana roti breakfast!

What I liked about the place was that a) the owner treats locals the same way as he does foreigners b) they have these wooden beach beds with leather covered mattresses and coconut thatched roofs on top so brown people who aren't as sun-addicted as the white people who sun burn red can lie on the beach also.

Drifters is clean, cheap and basic. So there's no point really waxing poetic about it: rather, I'll show you some pictures of the rooms, surroundings and bathrooms.

Amaya Reef Hotel Hikkaduwa Sri Lanka Hotel Review

Recently, we visited Hikkaduwa. Hikkaduwa, north of Galle, Sri Lanka is a town known for its accommodations for backpackers. Usually, this means cheap, small hotels, with cheap, small rooms, unexceptional food and few amenities (save the beach which is usually on the doorstep.)

This time, however, we stayed at the Amaya Reef hotel run by the Connaissance hotel chain. These hotels usually have better amenities and better food than the usual hiker joints and we were particularly looking forward to staying at the Amaya Reef as it had been refurbished recently and had gushing articles written about it in the local magazines.