Best seafood restaurant in Colombo?

The Ministry of Crab in Colombo is one restaurant that merits an occasional pilgrimage to the island

When Dharshan Munidasa, the chef of Ministry of Crab, Colombo’s best known seafood restaurant, came and sat down at our table, my fellow diner didn’t waste much time before he delivered the ultimate compliment a chef can receive. By then, we had feasted on two gigantic crabs between us that could have fed four. One was the restaurant’s wok-fried garlic crab seasoned with Italian olive oil, Japanese soy sauce and garlic, the other a more traditional Sri Lankan curry crab. The garlic and olive oil crab had stunned us into silence.

Ministry of Crab is on the San Pellegrino 50 best restaurants in the world list, and ever since I had arrived in Colombo on a recent trip, friends extolled its virtues and were determined we should eat there. They tried on Saturday night only to be told that every table in the large restaurant in the Old Dutch Hospital complex was taken, no matter what time we were prepared to eat.

Then at the venture capital competition for start-ups I was attending a day or two later, the chorus started again. If  Munidasa’s culinary celebrity were not enough of a draw, two of South Asia’s most popular cricketers — the charismatic Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene — are his partners in the venture. A phone call or two later and we were being ushered to a table where the place card had the name of the person I was dining with and a printed message from Jayawardene: “Thank you so much for coming to MOC. I hope this partnership with my longtime batting partner Kumar & our new coach Dharshan will be a knockout. Hope you all will be bowled over:}”

Sports puns aside, this was a winning outing. Every so often, which is to say all too infrequently, all the advance praise you have heard about a restaurant turns out to be entirely justified. The service was outstanding, from the descriptions of the various preparations of crab all the way down to the finger bowl, which has tea to cut the oiliness, venivel (a Sri Lankan disinfectant) and flowers. The crabs are from another universe; I had never seen such large ones nor eaten the crustacean so succulently prepared. My fellow diner was even more impressed. Which is why minutes into his conversation with Munidasa, he was asking the chef if he would consider opening the restaurant in India in partnership with him.

Munidasa declined almost immediately. He had been asked the same question by an Indian company before. The problem, he said, was that Ministry of Crabs requires a certain size of crab and there may not be enough in the Indian Ocean to satisfy him. Size apparently matters at the Ministry of Crab. The menu, which is mostly crab with a few shrimp, oysters and clams and a chicken dish or two thrown in, describes the options as ranging from a half kilo crab to a Colossal (between 1.2kg and 1.4) to a Crabzilla (a credulity-defying 2 kg upwards). As the restaurant’s “constitution” states, “We won’t buy anything frozen, and we certainly don’t freeze our seafood. The only use we’ve found for freezers is to store our food refuse for disposal.”

That is about as definitive a statement of seriousness about food quality and local sourcing as you are likely to find. Munidasa in person was as politely unyielding as I imagine B R Ambedkar must have been. He explained that people were often pestering him to open the MInistry of Crab for lunch, but again a lack of adequate supply made that impossible. So my fellow diner’s grand plans got no further, but I empathised with the impulse. When food is this good, you don’t want to have to jump on a plane to get to dinner.

Dharshan Munidasa with Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene

That said, Colombo is just a short hop from India — a new nonstop service by Air India from Delhi started in mid June — and restaurants this capable (not to mention the astonishing handloom cotton shirts, toys and lungis at Barefoot) merit the occasional pilgrimage. I have been travelling there every year since I first visited with my parents in 2002 during a brief respite in the war with the Tamil Tigers. On repeated visits, I have become a fan of its seafood restaurants, its Chinese food and of course its Sri Lankan food. On this trip, a much happier affair because it seems an interregnum to be treasured between the defeat of the Tigers, the electoral drubbing of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa and his likely and worrying resurrection from the ashes in the not so distant future, I made a return visit to The Lagoon, the almost subterranean restaurant at the Cinnamon Grand hotel and found it just as good. The baked crab appetiser was subtle and rich and so was the squid.

In the manner a groupie would, I continued to try and track down a young Australia-returned Sri Lankan chef named Mark who was presiding over the restaurant of a small boutique hotel called The Havelock Bungalow when I first stayed there a decade ago. His risottos, pastas and tarts are the best I have tasted in Asia, but the trail to his next venture has long gone cold, alas. I abhor restaurants in hotels in India because the service tends to be pushy and the food overpriced but in Colombo, I am also a huge fan of the Hilton’s Curry Leaf restaurant, which had recipes from the great Sri Lankan cookbook writer Felicia Sorensen. On one occasion, the chef there was so bemused by my quizzing him on their unusual preparations for Sri Lanka vegetable dishes that he sent to my table a coconut cream hopper — imagine an appam suffused with condensed milk made of coconut. I felt then as I did after my feast of crabs a few weeks ago at the Old Dutch Hospital: restaurants this good should also have wheelchairs at the ready to help diners get to their cars. All that was waiting for us when we finished our feast at the Ministry of Crab was a Nano taxi, which wasn’t nearly spacious enough for two very over-fed diners.