Rambutan to serve hoppers for first time in week-long Sri Lankan breakfast pop-up

Rambutan, the Sri Lankan restaurant on Stoney Street in Borough Market, will open in the mornings for the first time since it launched, running a week-long breakfast pop-up from Tuesday 25^th August to Bank Holiday Monday 31^st August. The restaurant, founded by British-Sri Lankan cook and author Cynthia Shanmugalingam, will serve hoppers for the first time as part of a menu drawn from the Sri Lankan breakfast dishes she grew up eating.

The pop-up will run daily from 9.30am to 11am. Walk-ins will be accommodated, with a limited number of tables available for advance booking.

Hoppers, bowl-shaped pancakes made from fermented rice flour and coconut milk, are a fixture of Sri Lankan breakfast tables and are typically cooked to order in a small curved pan. Their absence from Rambutan’s regular menu has been notable given their popularity in London, where several restaurants have built their offering around them.

The menu is built around Sri Lankan breakfast staples, including plain and egg hoppers, butter roti and coconut and seeni sambols. Larger dishes will include an Egg Curry, a Spicy Red Fish Curry and a Coconut and Lemongrass Dal. Kiribath, or milk rice, will be served with lunu miris, a chilli-based accompaniment. The kitchen will also offer its own version of a Sri Lankan breakfast toastie, filled with Neal’s Yard cheese and seeni sambol, an onion relish cooked down with tamarind, cinnamon and spices.

Drinks will include Sri Lankan Cardamom and Cinnamon Chai, Watermelon Juice and a Tamarind Cooler, alongside alcoholic options: an Acharu-spiced Bloody Mary, a Mango Mimosa and Mutta Kopi, made with egg and coffee and spiked with arrack, a Sri Lankan spirit distilled from coconut flower sap.

Shanmugalingam said: “Breakfast in Sri Lanka can be quick and every-day, or a massive elaborate feast. Most of the Sri Lankan dishes that are best known here in London are actually breakfast foods – we’ve often eaten our hoppers, rotis, milk rice and fish curries before the rest of the world has had their first coffee. We’ve never made hoppers before but my cousins and aunties won’t stop going on about it – so for one week only we are going all in.”

Shanmugalingam was born in Coventry and travelled to Sri Lanka during childhood holidays, eating dishes adapted by her mother, grandmother and aunts at home. Her cookbook and culinary memoir, Rambutan: Recipes from Sri Lanka, published by Bloomsbury in 2022, won the Fortnum and Mason’s Best Debut Cookery Book award in 2023 and was named among the best cookbooks of the year by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Bon Appétit.

She opened Rambutan in Borough Market in March 2023. The restaurant’s cooking draws particularly on Tamil village-style dishes from the north of the island, where her family originates. 

Food Desk

For further information, visit Rambutan’s website here.