Dining Out 021: Kolamba East
Dinner in Spitalfields.
Before I start this week, I have a small thing to say which is that Dining Out is now on Instagram. I’ll be posting daily bits and pieces on there (the handle is @dining___out), so you might enjoy following if you enjoy both the newsletter Dining Out and the social media app Instagram. Thank you. Now I will do the review.
I have learned a lot since I started writing Dining Out every week. These lessons include:
– My personal optimum reservation time is 7:30PM (you’ll pretty much always eat at 8 o’clock and there’s enough time to have a drink before);
– If there are croquettes on the menu, I will order them;
– I have been very lucky to eat some properly exquisite things over the past few months but honestly my favourite food is just still garlic bread.
All useful information, obviously, though my favourite thing I’ve learned over the last few months is this:
– I absolutely love Sri Lankan food.
I think what I’ve enjoyed about the Sri Lankan cuisine I’ve tried in particular is the willingness to combine sweet, sour and savoury, as well as the no holds barred approach to spice. In recent months, I’ve visited three genuinely magnificent Sri Lankan places – the first, of course, is the brilliant Rambutan in Borough, whose black pork curry is one of the most unique things I’ve ever eaten, so much of its fire coming simply from black pepper, and the second is Soho’s Paradise, where there’s also huge amount to love there, including a crab dish that looked like a round, orange little sunshine on the plate, and is among the prettiest things I’ve ever been presented with at a restaurant.
The third of these very good Sri Lankan spots is the brand new Kolamba East in Spitalfields (which is a new east London sister restaurant to Kolamba Soho), which I visited last week, and which I will tell you about at a bit more length today.
Located right in the heart of Spitalfields*, the place is sleek in that capital ‘r’ Restaurant type of way – a big bar in the middle, lots of sweeping surfaces – but crucially what I’d say is that it feels comfy. It’s beautiful, of course, but it’s also chill, like Jemima Kirke. The food follows suit: it’s not quite as self-consciously “elevated” as at Rambutan or Paradise, and I think that’s a good thing. It’s more laid back – you can order dal and biryani and soft shell crab (more on this later because: fucking hell) – and in terms of the dishes on the menu, I’d say it’s easily as accessible as a Dishoom, only the flavours are more interesting, the spice level is turned up Spinal Tap-style (very complimentary), and the cooking feels quite a lot more precise.
We sat up at the bar and ordered cocktails – I had the very upbeat house spritz because there could be an apocalypse scenario and I would still be ordering the house spritz – and then got into the business of choosing from the menu, which is a “sharing concept”. There’s a huge selection on offer but the general shape of what we went for was: poppadoms with mango chutney, black pork ‘mas paan’, hot butter soft shell crab (our server recommended adding this and based on the strength of that I’d now trust him with my life), whole rib jaggery beef, dal, roasted pineapple aaaaand a hopper for good measure.
I will say now that literally everything was great – I didn’t have a single complaint. At one point I ordered a mezcal margarita and it came with sambol on the rim, and that felt like a good symbol of the way that at Kolamba, even menu items that feel like standards had been reconsidered to make them as good and as cohesive as they could be.
Where starters were concerned, the mango chutney had savoury depth to balance out that sometimes aggressively sweet fruit, and the black pork was a perfect little trial by fire, wrapped up in a cute bun.
The runaway champ of the course – and to be honest probably the meal – however, was soft shell crab, deep fried in hot butter. There’s an extent to which fried soft shell crab like that is never not going to be lovely, but I’d say that the touch in the kitchen at Kolamba – which comes equipped with the understanding of the need to crowd please (and the desire to!) without skimping on flavour to humour the famously conservative British palate – was what really made it. It’s indulgent and complex – the spice blend brims with chilli, and the final product that calls to mind the absolutely irresistible textures of – honestly – a KFC, coating juicy, flaky crab. Tell me you don’t want to get your hands on that, and I’ll call you a liar.
I’m not sure any other dish quite hits the heights of that ridiculous crab, but that’s an extremely high bar. The jaggery beef is a spectacle at the table: tender meat comes on the bone, with a rich, dark sauce, while the dal is spicier than you expect, and better for it – it’s topped with some fried lentils for cronch. Roasted pineapple, too, was a great analogue to the meat, and its sweet, glossy sauce really put our hopper, for dipping, to work.
All of this stuff together just felt really satisfying, all the elements in harmony with one another, and many of them so tasty that you start doing that thing where you keep on eating even when you’re full, just because you want to keep experiencing roasted pineapple sauce or beef marinated in unrefined sugar. But as great food so often is, my real proper enjoyment of it was saturated so much by the place – its chilled out but really attentive service, and its fun, if not quite casual, vibe, which was nicely observed.
When I’ve really liked eating at a place, I can tell, because when I finish my meal, I find myself thinking about the people in my life I’d like to go back with. This time it was my dad, who loves food with heat and the cuisines of south Asia. I think he’d really like Kolamba East – though that’s largely because it’s hard not to like Kolamba East, where dishes you recognise are given a little shake-up, where food is genuinely for enjoying, and where what they are doing with butter and soft shell crabs should probably be interrogated by science.
* On this occasion the 7:30PM reservation time did bits – meant we had time to stick our heads in at the Pride of Spitalfields, one of London’s truly great pubs, after work but before getting too hungry x
This visit was arranged by Tonic Comms but thoughts all mine hehe xx
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.
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