Plate50LA Indian & Sri Lankan Restaurant

🇱🇰 SRI LANKA
📍 2411 W. Olympic Blvd., Westlake, Central Los Angeles
🅿️ Very small parking lot for plaza
🥤 No Alcohol

🌱 Vegetarian Friendly

EDITOR'S NOTE: This meal was enjoyed in a dine-in situation but it should be noted that wait times, despite being the first customers, were much higher than average for food to arrive. If this is something that will be a problem for you, try delivery as drivers seemed to be coming in constantly to pick up orders and those meals were all ready to go out the door.

Back in June when Plate50LA first opened, eyes were opened wide to see the addition of another Sri Lankan kitchen in Los Angeles, especially for those centrally located. For their first few months of operation the business was only available via pickup and delivery, but recently their tiny bare-bones dining room has been opened for dine-in service. The brightly lit space still seems like a ghost kitchen pickup lobby as drivers come and go, but if you have the time, you can enjoy your meals fresh and avoid adding another stack of styrofoam to the city dump.

About an hour after opening on a recent weekday, the chairs were still on top of the three tables available but were promptly put down when asked if eating in was an option. The smells were a hint that the kitchen had already been making quite a bit of food, and immediately made any feelings of hunger triple. Orders were placed, chairs were settled in, and the anticipation built.

And as the note at the top describes, it kept building. And enough time passed that expectations started to go down as confidence fell. Thankfully once food did start arriving, it was all excellent and proof of an enormously talented chef. People in the area will probably benefit the most from the wide array of Indian classics that are assuredly executed very well, but hopefully they eventually find their way to the Sri Lankan items that pepper each section of the menu.

The best portal straight back to your memories in Sri Lanka is an order of any of the deep-fried goodies that you see in so many storefronts and probably ate multiples of each day. Sri Lankans call these "short eats," and you should ask when you arrive which ones they might have on any given day. It is likely not all of them, so order as many as they do. Despite four on the menu (buns, pastries, rolls, and patties), on this occasion only the rolls ($1.75 each, above) were available, stuffed with fish and egg. They were clearly just made from scratch and excellent, a very good sign of things to come.

 

Bring at least one friend but preferably three so you can order plates like the coconut roti with chili paste ($2.50, above), two very slightly sweet breads that beg to be slathered with the spicy chili and any other sambals and curries that might make their way to the table. These are much more dense and filling than naan so ration yourself despite their deliciousness.

If you are here for Sri Lankan food, the Sri Lankan traditional plate ($14.50, below) will of course stand out on the menu, a spread of basmati and four other dishes. Normally it includes tuna ambul thiyal, a sour fish curry, but on this day that was not available and substituted with the chicken curry. Lentil curry, coconut sambal, and sweet and sticky tempered sprats rounded out the meal with just about every taste and texture necessary.

The chicken curry did not seem like a downgrade at all despite the initial disappointment, and both the sambal and lentils were great to have around for joining with just about everything. Sprats are similar to anchovies and add an intense umami to anything they join, and are another reminder of tastes you experience almost daily in Sri Lanka.

There are a few options for curries available, all seemingly prepared differently. The Sri Lankan shrimp curry ($14.50, below) only alludes to "authentic spices" on the menu but is creamy from coconut milk and brown sugar, and probably contains half the spice cabinet. Garlic and ginger pervade. It could use a few more shrimp, which are all quite small to begin with, but the big plate of basmati is enough to make the curry hearty when you run out of the crustacean.

The most surprising section of the menu might be the options for Sri Lankan curries that were all meatless, listing lentil, mixed vegetables, mushroom asparagus, beet, and brussels sprouts options. When inquired about, a sixth off-menu option was presented and ordered, the young jackfruit curry ($12, below), meaty hunks of the fruit in a wonderful curry similar to how the chicken was prepared.

While orders of butter chicken and sag paneer were showing up on the next table, small tears were forming in the eyes of those who wanted this Sri Lankan chef to thrive. Undoubtedly the Indian food is going to pay the bills for a while, but hopefully one day this can become a destination for anyone in the mood for something a bit more rare in Los Angeles without the means of getting to the Valley or Anaheim.

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I COULD USE YOUR HELP

Eat the World Los Angeles is and always has been free. It is a hobby born of passion and never solicits money or free food from restaurants. No advertisements block the content or pop over what you read. If this website has helped you explore your city and its wonderful cultures a little better please tell your friends about us and if you have the means to contribute, please consider doing so. Eat the World Los Angeles is a labor of love, but also takes a lot of money and time everyday to keep running.

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Sri Lankan Delight

🇱🇰 SRI LANKA

📍 19016 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana, San Fernando Valley

🅿️ Parking lot for plaza

🌱 Vegetarian friendly

 

EDITOR'S NOTE: An updated version of this article (23 April 2025) is available as part of the Historical section of our Substack page. Check that out here:

https://eattheworldla.substack.com/p/sri-lankan-delight-tarzana-market

While there are many Indian markets around the Southland that carry a smattering of Sri Lankan products, and another Sri Lankan establishment in Northridge that's shelves are hit and miss, it is Tarzana that unlocks the keys to all your wishes for cooking the foods of this island nation. Spices, preserves, teas, grains and dhals, curries, sodas and juices and much, much more have been available from this location for three decades. You can even get personal items shipped to and from Sri Lanka and Los Angeles if you need.

If you are new to Sri Lankan products or otherwise curious, the store is also fun for a wander. Its shelves are almost too tidy and organized given that the aisles always seem to be full of a few people. The market is not large, but it seems to have an endless amount of fresh and packaged goods.

For those that are not as well-versed in the kitchen and just looking for options ready to eat, this is not a restaurant but the freezer section is worth checking out. They have frozen meals, appetizers, and desserts that are made and assembled in Sri Lanka for the market and shipped to sell in Los Angeles.

Despite the home cooking and imported aspects of the foods, most packages are either $4.99 or $5.99, making the filling up of your freezer an economical possibility.

Vegetable stuffed roti and patties and fish kottu.

Widely available as home-cooked fast food in Sri Lanka, kottu is a perfect quick plate when you do not feel your most adventurous while traveling or when an exceptional hunger starts to bring pain. It will be no time before a satisfying mound of hot and wonderfully greasy kottu will show up, usually beneath the fold of a few sheets of the day's newspaper.

The dish is made up primarily of Sri Lankan roti called gothamba, chopped up (the literal meaning of kottu) and mixed with ingredients. On a Sri Lankan corner, you will be able to pick and choose exactly how much of each ingredient you want, a little more egg, a lot more chili, etc. As you can imagine, all the ingredients and spices are added already for freezer version, but they do a good job catering to average Sri Lankan levels.

Both the vegetable patties and stuffed roti are spicy and simultaneously full of spices. The roti is especially buttery and miraculously good for something that has been frozen for so long. Customers who have an air fryer will find the best results using that appliance.

In Sri Lanka, these stuffed roti are called elawalu roti and can be found cooked in carts or the storefronts of restaurants and come in a variety of shapes of which a triangle is the most common. Usually found in the same warmed cases and only made recently, another "short eats" favorite are patties with fish or vegetables.

The only slightly disappointing dish of this round was the fish biriyani (below), which despite a package showing long strands of basmati was actually just nubs of broken rice and very dry by the time it was warmed up.

The rice is already infused with plenty of spice but does come with whole and ground peppers to mix in if you want to thoroughly punish yourself. The filet of tuna and the eggplant are good, but unfortunately there is just not enough of either for the portion of rice.

🇱🇰🇱🇰🇱🇰

I COULD USE YOUR HELP

Eat the World Los Angeles is and always has been free. It is a hobby born of passion and never solicits money or free food from restaurants. No advertisements block the content or pop over what you read. If this website has helped you explore your city and its wonderful cultures a little better please tell your friends about us and if you have the means to contribute, please consider doing so. Eat the World Los Angeles is a labor of love, but also takes a lot of money and time everyday to keep running.

Thank you!

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Rice n' Spice Sri Lankan Cuisine

🇱🇰 SRI LANKA
📍 1732 S. Euclid Street, Anaheim, Orange County
🅿️ Parking lot
🥤 No Alcohol

EDITOR'S NOTE: An updated version of this article (06 September 2024) is available as part of the Historical section of our Substack page. Check that out here:

https://eattheworldla.substack.com/p/rice-n-spice-sri-lankan-cuisine-anaheim-orange-county

Rice N' Spice was not the first Sri Lankan restaurant to come to Orange County, but for the duration of its life it has remained the only one currently open. Since its doors swung out to the eclectic strip mall it lives in at the beginning of 2016, it saved trips to the Valley for families of that island nation living in the more southern reaches of Los Angeles County and its neighbor to the south.

As of mid-April, the restaurant is still just open for takeout, so you will see Sri Lankan families sneak in and out quickly with their meals while old timers of a much different crowd come out of the fully open sports bar on the corner for a smoke. There is also a Mexican restaurant in this two building plaza, as well as a vegetarian Vietnamese, a few chain fast food spots, and a diner. The perfect place for one of the Southland's more rare foods to inhabit.

While hoppers and string hoppers, two uniquely Sri Lankan versions of starch are a bit risky during pandemic times and hard to reheat, it only makes looking forward to the next sit down meal all the more exciting. In its place, an order of beef kottu ($13.49, above) may not be much to look at after reheating and re-plating, but is a great source of starch all the same.

This dish can also be referred to as kottu roti, or chopped roti, and is a stir-fried delight made with a different recipe from every chef. For those that have traveled to Sri Lanka, it of course brings back great memories of many melt-your-face-off meals had in the casual restaurants of cities and towns. There the dish is never not spicy, but here they have allowed for a mild, medium and spicy spectrum. Medium did just fine to form beads of sweat on the forehead.

Rice N' Spice sell what they call lunch packets, which originally were just presumed to be the description of lamprais, but are more simple meals of rice, vegetables, and the meat of your choice. The thing they do share in common is being wrapped up in a banana leaf and easy to transport and reheat. This lunch packet may be closer to what a lamprais was back in the days of its Dutch Burgher roots, especially considering the name is a derivative of what means "packet of food" in Dutch.

But nowadays at least, lamprais are a complex cacophony of ingredients, based again around rice and wrapped in a banana leaf for cooking. The chicken lamprais ($13.49, above and below) is a packet that also contains a hard-boiled egg, sambol made with fried shrimp, eggplant, and pineapple curry. The meat has been marinated for what seems like forever, and the rice is simmered in broth, a combination that gives you such different pleasures with each bite.

You can snag this dish for $11 on Sundays, when it is on special.

The restaurant has been advertising these, especially in the last year, as perfect for freezing and eating later. Sometimes you may find specials to get a free one after buying three. Having a freezer stocked with lamprais does not sound like a bad idea, pandemic or not.

You can smartly finish off a meal here with a slice of watalappan ($3.49, below), a firm custard pudding made with coconut milk. A drizzle of palm sugar and crumbled cashew nuts top the dessert.

Tuesdays and Thursdays used to be "Hopper Night" here in Anaheim, so we can only hope that the restaurant brings this special back once things are returned to normal.

🇱🇰🇱🇰🇱🇰

I COULD USE YOUR HELP

Eat the World Los Angeles is and always has been free. It is a hobby born of passion and never solicits money or free food from restaurants. No advertisements block the content or pop over what you read. If this website has helped you explore your city and its wonderful cultures a little better and you have the means to contribute, please consider doing so. Eat the World Los Angeles is a labor of love, but also takes a lot of money and time everyday to keep running.

You can Venmo me @JAREDCOHEE, Cash App $JaredCohee, or click here to send PayPal donation, where no account is necessary. Thank you!

Baja Sub Market & Deli

🇱🇰 SRI LANKA
📍 8801 Reseda Blvd., Northridge, San Fernando Valley
🅿️ A few parking spaces with more on the street
🥤 No Alcohol

EDITOR'S NOTE: An updated version of this article (12 January 2024) is available as part of the Historical section of our Substack page. Check that out here:

https://eattheworldla.substack.com/p/baja-sub-market-and-deli

 

From the outside at least, Baja Sub is just one of those local spots in Los Angeles that serve their neighbors and have been doing so for years. With a bright red pepper in between the words of the name, and "Mexican Grill" the only other food advertising offered to passersby on Reseda Blvd, it would take a stroke of luck walking in to buy cold beer or cigarettes or the word of a friend to know a Sri Lankan steam table and full menu was awaiting you inside.

Meeting a friend who lives in the neighborhood and had also been tipped off from an Uber driver, the restaurant had all the makings of a special food experience. Baja Sub is also a market and the corner shop does sparsely populate its shelves with Sri Lankan and South Asian packaged goods, but it seems the real life is squared directly with the non-Mexican and non-sandwich oriented side of the offerings.

Around 15 years ago, the popular Mexican joint was purchased by a Sri Lankan. Instead of replacing everything and starting over by attracting new customers, he left the menu in place and made sure not to push anyone away. Nowadays you will see mostly Sri Lankans and other South Asians here eating and chatting, but if you are in the mood for a burrito or huevos rancheros it can still be done seamlessly.

It also seems to be somewhat of a community corner, as people getting together to eat will linger around for much longer if they are talking and catching up. Unfortunately that cold beer for sale cannot be consumed while dining, something that is mentioned on a few ALL CAPS posters with exclamation points (!).

Those coming for the first time should prioritize their visit by going for the $14.99 all you can eat buffet. It does not appear like much at first, but there are always curries, grilled and fried meats, vegetable options, rices, and an array of fried appetizers with various fillings.

As seen above, a group of three tackled this option and was able to sample just about everything from the restaurant's buffet, especially when second trips were made. The friendly staff kept bringing out new egg hoppers and string hoppers to make sure nothing cold was eaten.

A line of three vegetable curries ended up being some of the most delicious fare, seen above from front to back were lentils, potatoes, and a potato and vegetable mix. All three were added to those second helpings.

If they have biriyani on offer, this is recommended because they do rice very well. Even the simple stir fried egg rice that is always on the steam table is really nice. If you feel like focusing on one dish rather than many, kottu ($10.99 chicken/$11.99 beef or fish, not shown) is a stir-fried favorite made from torn up pieces of roti, egg, vegetables, the meat of your choice, and a good deal of heat.

A visit on Fridays and Saturdays will ensure that the hoppers are available, a fact that even makes the back of current owner Premil Jayasinghe's business card. Friday is probably the best night to come, when the buffet is dubbed the "Grand Hopper Night Buffet" and both hoppers, kottu, pittu, and polroti are all available.

Regardless of the day you find yourself here, the food is destined to satisfy.

Also found here, or if not across Reseda Blvd. at Bombay Spiceland, grab a small jar of Maldive fish. Through enough contact with Sri Lankan cuisines, and sometimes those of southern Indian states, a crucial ingredient always seems to be Maldive fish. Without doing the proper preparations, one might wander in and look for this over ice or in the freezer, but it comes in small glass jars.

This is its natural state, for tradition dictates that the flesh of the fish, in this case skipjack tuna, is smoked and dried by the sun before being cut into small pieces. This manner of preparation allows the small pieces to retain a very long shelf life and was used long before there was electricity.

 

 

The "chips" actually come out of the jar looking like small wood chips (below), and are certainly not meant for satisfying a late night snack crave. In the cuisines of the Maldives and Sri Lanka, the Maldive fish is used similarly to how dried shrimp paste is used from Myanmar to Malaysia, as a concentrated base of taste.

 

A typical purchase (somewhere near the Indian Ocean, but not in the Valley) would usually be a large filet that has been smoked and sun dried whole, taken home like a piece of wood, and then broken apart as needed in the kitchen. 

🇱🇰🇱🇰🇱🇰

I COULD USE YOUR HELP

Eat the World Los Angeles is and always has been free. It is a hobby born of passion and never solicits money or free food from restaurants. No advertisements block the content or pop over what you read. If this website has helped you explore your city and its wonderful cultures a little better please tell your friends about us and if you have the means to contribute, please consider doing so. Eat the World Los Angeles is a labor of love, but also takes a lot of money and time everyday to keep running.

Thank you!

VENMO: @JAREDCOHEE

CASH APP: $JaredCohee

PAYPAL: (no account necessary, use link)