Pete Wells Visits Sri Lanka by Way of Shaolin

[dave sanders for the ny times]If there's good food abuzz, Pete Wells will find it. He ended 2012 with a review of Thirty Acres in Jersey City. He's already been to Brooklyn this year, and now he files on Lakruwana on Staten island.

Eric Asimov wrote about Lakruwana in 1995, explaining, "the restaurant, at the time the only Sri Lankan restaurant I knew of in New York, was unlicensed. To get to Lakruwana you had to climb six floors above a pornographic theater near Times Square. You entered a suite and walked to a back room past shelves of exotic canned foods like jackfruit and shark curry. In the back was a wooden picnic table with benches and, unaccountably, an umbrella. That was the "restaurant."" Fortunately, the restaurant operates legally now.

"Lakruwana relocated to Staten Island," Wells explains, "where an estimated 5,000 Sri Lankans have settled over the past few decades." It'll take some extra time to get to, but go to Lakruwana on a Sunday, when the restaurant serves an all-day buffet, the food for which is kept hot in clay pots that sit over open flames. On what's inside, Wells writes, "Lifting the lids, I found deviled chicken in a chile sauce with a balance of sweetness and spice that grew more captivating the more I ate; sticks of pineapple in a lightly hot curry paste soured with tamarind; chopped kale mixed with coconut and stir fried just until the greens begin to relax, a wonderful thing to do to kale; fat yellow lentils stewed in coconut milk with the warming flavors of mustard seeds, curry leaves and cinnamon sticks." Wells awards one star.

In a seperate article Wells penned for Diner's Journal, Wells explains how he came to discover Lakruwana, writing that, after Hurricane Sandy, "Staten Island was one of the places very much on my mind, and soon I began driving across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to scout for prospects." Wells goes on to mention a handful of dining options and praise the oft forgotten borough. [NYTimes] [Diner'sJournal]