A Conversation with
Cynthia Shanmugalingam

The kitchen is my favourite place in the flat, and sitting at the window overlooking the terrace when the sun’s going down in the summer is really lovely. It’s surprisingly peaceful: The market is loud, and there are deliveries at all hours—dairy deliveries come at 2 or 3am, and the pub finishes quite late. But that spot feels like a little oasis. We’ve got a tiny, little Sri Lankan barbecue outside, which I cook on in the summer. Sometimes me and my husband just have dinner in the kitchen, looking out, with the window open.

I didn’t have breakfast this morning, but yes. I’m trying to cut down on gluten and bread because I don’t get on with it that well, but I love having egg fried rice in the morning. I make it with broccoli and black beans and whatever I have in the fridge, that’s my favourite thing to start the day with.

I feel like I am, yeah. Some things I like to do the same all the time, but I also like spontaneity. If you’re a cook setting up a restaurant, you want to always do new things. But it’s also lovely to have a sense of home, something you’re returning to.

A walk by the river, I try to do it every day. When I moved here, I was like, ‘There’s no parks or outdoor spaces’. I used to live near Victoria Park in east London, and that really kept me sane But the river curiously has a similar property. You can see a long way without buildings in the way. And I try to swim two or three times a week, I’m not very good and only swim for 20, 30 minutes at a time, but that really helps. It’s maybe the one thing I do that my phone can’t be a part of, and I’m completely switched off. I even have a shower speaker so I can listen to podcasts in the shower.

Yeah! But it’s important to have some time when you’re not putting anything into your mind.

I love to. I really like Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, he does these long-form interviews with people; I like Long Form, a podcast for writers; I like Soundtracking with Edith Bowman, she interviews directors, and lots of interviews about film don’t get to what’s happening in the film and why they’ve made the choices they’ve made, and somehow the music is the way into it. I like this terrible, nerdy podcast called Switched On Pop, where these guys break down pop songs. They are very uncool, but they know lots about music. And have you heard of Dissect? They’ll do eight episodes on one album, and he’s done a Kendrick album and Beyoncé, breaking down all the references and samples and meanings. Especially for Kendrick, as it’s so layered.

So meaty, so dense, and you’re blown away. It’s like Shakespeare.

I’ve never thought about whether people see it in that way. The restaurant, maybe, as a whole—I do think restaurants are similar to film projects because they’re really stupid things to do with your money and insanely risky, and so many fail. And they have this addictive quality where people who love it can’t not do it. But with dishes, I just think about what I would like to eat and what I’d like to make for someone else.

The throughline is where there’s a Sri Lankan resonance or a dish I’ve had or know of, and I’ll think about how I can translate it to here, using the ingredients we have here, and what would make it the best version of it we can make—in the pursuit of deliciousness and not anything else. It’s quite hard to explain how you feel about food, you feel stupid trying to articulate it. But I’ve been trying to unpack it with the team to help explain what dishes work and why some dishes don’t. I always think about the philosophy of the rural: The restaurant is really based on rural Sri Lankan cooking in villages, and that’s why we cook on fire and make our own spices.

No, I feel people want that, and I slightly disappoint them. Now I cook the same few things all the time: chicken or fish curry, plain rice, a fresh sambol, and maybe dhal. It’s what I grew up eating when you have half an hour to eat some food. I don’t have as much of a sense of wanting to make something complicated, which I used to have more; I think that’s now in the restaurant, and I just eat to feed myself. When people come over, I love to cook other stuff, like Middle Eastern food or a risotto or Chinese.

Exactly. And it feels like a holiday for my mind, not like ‘Oh, this could work for the restaurant’. I’m free of that.

When I was little, I didn’t like seafood. I thought it looked like bugs, but my parents weren’t having that, and I wasn’t allowed, really, to not eat anything. So, I ate it all, but didn’t like it until later. I don’t love celery and anise-y flavours like pastis. I find that flavour harder. I didn’t use to like coriander leaves, but now I do.

It’s a version of a fish finger sarnie, the classic British sandwich and a thing of beauty. But it has a Sri Lankan spin on it. My dad used to make the filling of what we called a fish cutlet—it’s really easy, just tinned fish, boiled potatoes, and spices. It’s a fun thing to make the fish fingers yourself, and the mayo and sambol are so punchy and full of flavour. It’s a British-Sri Lankan hybrid, like me.

Fish I was always OK with; it was more crustaceans.

I feel like they were around with the dinosaurs with their little eyes. And it’s such a thing, where I’d go back to Sri Lanka on holiday, and they’d make squid, prawns, crab curry, loads of them, and I’d be like, ‘Oh dear’.

Not many, but there’s this box we put the remote control on, here. We have photos from Sri Lanka, and a map of [Geoffrey Bawa’s Lunuganga Estate] where we got married.

It’s crazy how beautiful it is. It’s one of the first places me and Joe went to together. And I also have fabrics from Sri Lanka, which really bring a bit of joy to this grey landscape.

There are definitely dishes I’ll try at home that are for the restaurant, and I like to have the chefs here, as it’s nice to step outside of the chaos. When I’m there, people are always asking questions, and you’re in different headspaces. So, I bring them here to have a few hours or a day to see what works. I’m more comfortable cooking here than in the restaurant; I always describe myself as a cook and not a chef. I’m comfortable cooking for eight people at home, but I don’t cook in the restaurant for guests. I don’t chop onions fast enough! But it is important to have a boundary, I do try and think of this space as a sanctuary.

If you love food, you’re constantly thinking about it, like all the time. A mackerel sandwich in Istanbul with parsley and onion and lemon—you’re thinking about whether you want to do a version of that, and it’s part of the joy. But it’s nice to not have to do that all the time, which is a freedom other cuisines can give you.

English restaurants, like Mountain, or 40 Maltby Street, which is my favourite restaurant in London. The menu has a shape and is always familiar but inventive.

No, I never thought I’d do anything in food. I never thought I had something to offer, I just ate it. But my mum was always talking about food: She’d be like, ‘Did she put cumin in it? Someone put cream in that curry’. Her family, they were all food detectives. I did that as well, asking why something was good.

And everyone loves to eat, so I thought everyone did that. But I hated my office job and met this girl who worked for an American kitchen incubator, so I decided to try doing that in London. I didn’t know anything about food business, but I thought, how hard can it be? Turns out, very hard. But it came easily to me, and I decided to start cooking the food I felt represented me. That’s how I started cooking Sri Lankan food, a version that didn’t really exist in restaurants here. There’s a disconnect between restaurants and the home, where, in the latter, mainly women do the cooking and in restaurants it’s all men. There’s a difference in how it feels, and I wanted to bring more of that home energy here.

I agree. I don’t know how it’s happened, but I feel we have one of the best gender balances of any kitchen in London. Our head chef and general manager are women, and I’m a woman, so maybe that’s part of it, that people are attracted to work at Rambutan because of that. I think it’s important to have a mix of different people and energies, and that’s what makes London such a magical place. I always say Rambutan is a London restaurant, and it couldn’t exist in Sri Lanka. It’s part of this dialectic between London and Sri Lanka, it’s not air-lifted from Colombo and dropped here. I don’t want it to feel like that or have this ‘Sri Lanka World’ feeling when you come into the restaurant.

Exactly. I want people to feel like they’re here, and it’s 2025, and there’s that vitality.

I didn’t really want to write and didn’t think of myself as able. But when Covid hit, I had to pull out of the site I wanted in Shoreditch. I started to write a book about what I wanted to do in the restaurant. I had the time and could really think about what I wanted to say. There are some writers who write about their heritage, and it’s like a Merchant Ivory film with handed-down recipes from their mum or sitting on their grandma’s knee while she kneaded chapatis, which is lovely and often true. But my relationship with my parents wasn’t like that at all. Also, people are always going to Sri Lanka and saying people were so smiley and friendly, but there was a genocide there, and it’s one of the most militarised places in the world. Sri Lankan people can be angry, and jealous, and dicks, and wonderful, like all of us. There’s humanity there, and I wanted to write about real people and experiences, and this sense of me being there and not there and what it meant for the food. Because I decided to tell that story, the writing became easier.

It did, and it enabled me to take six months in Sri Lanka writing and being immersed in it. I hung with my parents most of that time and was in the zone.

I never felt like that was the case for me. All the stories in the book are things that happened. One is about my cousin, who is a cop. He loved it, and he was extremely overweight; he had a triple bypass surgery and a stroke, and food was basically what killed him, but he was unrepentant about eating what the fuck he wanted to eat. When he woke up from his surgery, he asked for black wild boar curry, which is so fatty.

He was like, you sorted the thing out, and I’m alive, so give it to me. No one was going to tell him no. That story doesn’t feel like a cliché, you know? I also wrote about how when you went to someone’s house in Sri Lanka, it’d be so confusing to find; addresses are so weird there, it’s like 22 upon 10. What is 22 upon 10?

The roads always change: One will get renamed, but people end up calling it a third name anyway. You eventually find the house, and people run around to get ready. They ask you questions like, ‘Are you studying?’ I’m like, really too old for that. And they bring you little things on trays. It’s a feeling of being ignored and catered to at the same time.

It’s that sense of, does this really exist? Will we be able to find it again? I’m not sure. But those are the vignettes I wanted to give, to introduce people to characters from the mad play that is my family and my friends.

It’s one of the most moving things about doing the book; I’ve heard from lots of people from all kinds of immigrant backgrounds. I didn’t think the book would carry as far, but it has this amazing reach. I’ve had people come to the restaurant, and cry.

It’s a story about curry leaves, and how my mum always insisted on cooking with them. It was the only non-negotiable for her. During the war and after the uprising, everyone was getting out, but my grandma was still in Sri Lanka, and my five-foot-tall mum filled our freezer with curries and went to get her. She managed to get her a visa, all while there were cousins living in the house along with three of us kids, and she’d worked full time and went to night school and did all the housework on her own. There were only a few non-negotiables for her, and the curry leaves were one of them.

Yeah, they are, and I do always bring things back. Fruits are what I’d like to bring back, but they rarely survive.

I called the restaurant Rambutan partly because it’s a Javanese loan word: There was once an ancient Javanese kingdom that spanned all the way up the continent, and there’ve been all these influences over the years. So ‘rambutan’ is the same in all these different languages. But also, the fruit is never as good as you get it here; there’s a melancholy and sadness to the fact that you can’t bring it back with you. You can’t bring Sri Lanka back with you either.

We try to fly in the minimum, so spices, rice, curry leaves, green chillis. But all the vegetables, fish, and meat come from the UK and Europe. It’s just trying to get the best thing you can get, and seasonality is not just for white people. It’s the oldest way anyone has cooked in the world because we didn’t have fridges and preservation and GMO.

The book didn’t get on any best-books-of-the-year lists in the UK, but it got on the LA Times and New York Times lists. I think America has more in the way of culture about being caught between worlds—it’s amazingly rich. People are much more aware and interested in it. But there are some people who are like, ‘This is not what Sri Lankan food is’. We’ve had a dhal on the menu on and off, and I’ve had people tell me that unless you have it on, it’s not a Sri Lankan restaurant, because they’d been on holiday there and ate it with everything. I’m like, ‘OK, the restaurant is open and serving people and not doing dhal, so it’s technically possible to do a restaurant that doesn’t do dhal’.

Yes, exactly. Some people feel attacked if what is familiar to them is not in the food or the restaurant. But some dishes are versions of home-cooked things, or things I’ve made up as a version of something else. Our hot butter cuttlefish is battered, and we have fried squid with lemongrass and spring onions, and you have it at the beach or as a bar snack. We do it as a sandwich; it’s not unrecognisable, I didn’t put miso or anything in it. We have bread in Sri Lanka, so it wouldn’t be impossible to do that there, but some people feel upset that it’s not totally traditional.

Yeah, I was afraid. In London, there are a bunch of Indian restaurants in particular that are explicitly based on colonial clubs and institutions. They’re named after things related to the army, and there’s a sense of heavy-handed design. I didn’t want to do anything of that—anything based on a colonial idea of Sri Lanka. The period of design I’m most interested in is the post-independence period, where a whole generation of architects like Geoffrey Bawa were figuring out their own idea of modernism and how it related to their own traditions. The restaurant was supposed to reference that. But I feel like you’re allowed to do a restaurant without pictures on the walls if you’re like, Lyles or St. John—only certain kinds of restaurants are allowed.

The expectation is that if you’re cooking ‘ethnic’ food, for want of a better word, it should be more of a bonanza, or it’s a drinking den.

Yeah, such specific tropes. And I feel Rambutan doesn’t fit into them, which was nerve-wracking. I still feel anxious about it. I mean, the restaurant seems to be busy.

There’s an audience of people who love it and understand it. But you have no idea really if it’ll resonate with anyone.

I think people should be allowed to cook everything—it’s one of the great joys of living in a metropolis like London, you get exposure to cultures and cuisines and can fall in love with them. I grew up in Coventry, and my friends were Nigerian and Pakistani and Indian and English, and we all went to each other’s houses and tried their mum’s food. It was a gift, growing up somewhere with a rich immigrant culture. But what I care about is who gets to tell the story. When I pitched my book to publishers, I counted the number of Sri Lankan recipes in the Guardian and Telegraph and other newspapers over two years; there were 19, and none of them were written by a Sri Lankan person. An Indian chef, an Israeli chef, some people who went on holiday there and came back—that’s totally great, but why are Sri Lankans not part of that conversation? Apparently, the best baguette in Paris is by a Sri Lankan Tamil guy, and I’m so happy that’s the case. Why shouldn’t they be able to make perfect patisserie? But, when it comes to Sri Lankan food, there should be some Sri Lankan voices representing our own culture and stories as well.

Totally. Diaspora communities often have this slightly fossilised idea of their own cuisine, and they feel protective of it because they are in some ways under attack or feel fragile where they’ve settled down. Often, people in Sri Lanka are more relaxed, it’s not as heavily laden with what’s traditional or correct. My idea of authentic is we roast and make all our own spice mixes in the restaurant; we don’t buy them powdered, and we don’t have stale spices. We try and make things as old fashioned as possible. Someone else might be like, you don’t have mutton rolls on the menu. But if you buy them frozen, or it’s not the best version, is that authentic?

The organising principle.

I’d say, don’t be afraid to be a bitch, as decisions reside with you. In Sri Lanka, there is a sweet humility in the things someone might do for you: As kids at our cousin’s house, they’d always sleep on the floor, and we’d sleep on the bed. If you go to a bus stop in the morning, three of your uncles come with you with tea and biscuits for the journey, and people will walk three miles with you to show you the way to a place. They’re small things, but there’s a feeling of warmth and generosity, and that is something you can try and distil and hire for. Now, I realise my vision of what I want Rambutan to be, that has to be the guide.

Honestly, I wish the critics were a wider pool of people more representative of London’s food culture now. I just mean, maybe not the same five characters. It’s also gotten quite polarised: We’ve had an amazing mushrooming of people who really represent small undiscovered places in pockets of London with big immigrant communities, but it’s either that or—

Giles Coren, yes, and there’s little in between and overlap between those two customer bases. I do feel like food media in the broadsheet newspapers in the UK, it feels dated to me. The person who picked my book to be in the New York Times list was Yewande Komolafe, the Nigerian chef and writer for the Times, and I don’t know if that person exists at any of the newspapers in London or the UK. Here, it feels more one-dimensional.

It’s not the same thing. But people who review and rate us on social media, I love those guys; they have such interesting, different audiences.

I think social media itself is quite overwhelming. I try to switch it off, but now, you kind of can’t. But there’s also this amazing ability to look at things around the world: like people cooking on hot pots in KL in Malaysia. I’ll wonder if we can do that, do a version of it in the restaurant. I’m sure in the end, it leads to, not homogenisation, but too much borrowing from different cultures, but I find it an amazing resource as well.

Have you seen The Scent of Green Papaya? It’s beautiful, and the cooking is so lovely. She’s doing everything with lots of skill in her own world and on her own terms. It looks very delicious, and I’ve never been to that bit of the world. When I see that, that’s what I want to eat.

Exactly! I can finally go.