Dish finder in Colombo

Rice with four to six small curries — dhal, a meat or fish curry, greens, beans or pumpkin — and sambols. The everyday lunch, sold in packets everywhere at midday.

Bowl-shaped pancakes of fermented rice flour and coconut milk, crisp at the edge and soft in the middle. Order an egg hopper and eat it with lunu miris.

Steamed nests of thin rice noodles, eaten with dhal, a light coconut gravy called kiri hodi and pol sambol.

Flatbread chopped on a hot griddle with egg, vegetables, curry and meat or cheese, to a rhythmic clatter you will hear before you see the stall.

Rice cooked in coconut milk and set into diamonds, eaten with a sharp onion sambol. Made for the New Year and on the first day of every month.

Fresh grated coconut pounded with chilli, red onion, lime and Maldive fish. On the side of almost every meal.

Red lentils simmered in coconut milk with turmeric and curry leaves. Mild, everywhere, and meat-free as served.

Tuna cooked dry with goraka, a sour fruit, and black pepper until almost black. A southern dish built to keep without a fridge.

A Dutch Burgher parcel of rice cooked in stock with mixed meat curry, frikkadels and sambol, baked in a banana leaf. Colombo bakeries take orders.

Crisp lentil fritters topped with whole prawns, sold from carts on Galle Face Green at sunset.

Chicken stir-fried with onion, peppers and a sweet-hot chilli sauce. The standard order with a drink, also made with prawns or pork.

Steamed cylinders of rice flour and grated coconut, eaten with coconut milk and curry. Common in Tamil cooking and in Colombo's breakfast shops.

Thick buffalo-milk curd in a clay pot with kithul treacle poured over. Sold along the roads south of Colombo.

A steamed custard of coconut milk, jaggery, eggs and cardamom, brought by the Malay community and now at every celebration.