Green Grass Hotel and Restaurant in Jaffna Sri Lanka - Where to Eat In Jaffna

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Jaffna's cuisine embraced the peninsula's limitations and evolved in glorious isolation from the Indian subcontinent and the rest of Sri Lanka. Accordingly, Jaffna food is very different from the rest of Sri Lanka's and, when you visit, you might want to try some.

Good luck with that! Jaffna is still getting used to being open after 4pm so places to eat out are still few and far between.

The only place we found, after two or three hours walking around Jaffna town asking for crabs and kool, was Green Grass Hotel and Restaurant, +94 221 222 4385, off Hospital Rd. It was a place a friend from Jaffna (who now works in Colombo) found for us. It is different from the usual dark, dingy places that dot Jaffna town in that the tables are set in a big garden with a gaudy fountain.

Taste of Asia Jaffna Restaurant Colombo Sri Lanka - Jaffna Food Wellawatte Sri Lanka

Jaffna cuisine is Sri Lanka's only indigenous Tamil cuisine. Just like Sri Lankan Malay food, it started off South Indian hundreds of years ago and evolved into its own unique variant. Shamefully, though, if you ask the average Colombo-ite (Colombo-ian?) to take you for Tamil food, you'll likely end up at a South Indian vegetarian place.

This is because there are so many South Indian restaurants and hardly any Jaffna restaurants here (other than the over priced, now closed Peninsula and the over priced, still open Palmyrah at Hotel Renukah). If you wanted decently priced Jaffna food, you had to invite yourself over to a Tamil friend's house.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, with the end of the war, a couple more reasonably priced Jaffna restaurants have opened up. The first one, Taste of Asia opened just a few months ago on Galle Rd, Wellawatte (it's the sea side, between the checkpoint after the Savoy cinema and Kinross Ave, next to the Perera and Sons).