- A culinary journey around Asian hawker streets
The countries that make up South and Southeast Asia may all have their troubles, but it simply cannot be denied that their cuisines are incredible. Asian cuisine is in a league all its own. Each country in the region has its distinctive flavours and techniques as well as so much diversity when it comes to food.
One thing that makes Asian cuisine unique is hawker culture – the food you can find by the side of the road or in unassuming food courts all over Asia that serve everything from small snacks to full meals to delectable desserts, all served simply for flavours and textures to shine through.
This past week, Brunch visited one of Asia’s best-loved food franchises, PappaRich – the franchise that, since 2019, has become famous for bringing authentic Asian hawker cuisine to Sri Lanka, providing the flavours of Asia’s streets in a comfortable setting.
Location, location, location
We checked out PappaRich’s newest Sri Lankan branch in Thalawathugoda, which (on 6 August) marked its first anniversary.
Outlet Manager Niroshan Pushpakumara shared with us that the PappaRich team chose Thalawathugoda as its third Sri Lankan location because of its position as an emerging neighbourhood that was still quite close to Colombo while being home to many businesses, Government offices, and restaurants, which made the neighbourhood a catchment area of sorts.
By happy coincidence, PappaRich’s Thalawathugoda branch forms the third in a network of Sri Lankan outlets that are each six kilometres away from each other.
While PappaRich Thalawathugoda is the smallest PappaRich outlet, it features something its larger sister outlets do not – a private space that can double as a private event space as well as an informal coworking space for remote workers in the area looking for a temporary base to work from. The Wi-Fi is free and the PappaRich team is happy to do their part in fostering a peaceful environment (and great cuisine) for the remote worker.
With the capacity to fit 10-12 pax for meetings and conferences, the PappaRich team is also able to rearrange the space to an extent to suit the needs of the event.
Speaking on the reception that PappaRich Thalawathugoda has received from its residents, Pushpakumara, who has been part of the PappaRich team since before it launched in Sri Lanka in 2019 and has managed each of the other PappaRich outlets, shared that the beauty of PappaRich was that “it is a different taste and once people got to know about it, we’ve had a really good crowd coming in. Our busiest time is dinner and we do a lot of takeaways as well.”
Food, glorious food
As Pushpakumara pointed out, the food at PappaRich was different from the run-of-the-mill Asian food you get in Sri Lanka – it focuses on authentic flavours that bring to life the gastronomic experiences you would have at any hawker food stall in Asia.
When the brand launched in 2019, the flavours and cuisine that PappaRich pedals took some getting used to, with subtle, hearty flavours and (for us) unusual ingredients taking centre stage. Now, three years later, the brand has been able to establish itself and people have a better idea of the kind of flavours to expect from a PappaRich restaurant.
For our journey down Asia’s hawker streets, we started with Chinese Butter Chicken – pan-fried marinated chicken with a creamy, buttery sauce that, as Sri Lankans, makes you instantly think of chicken and cheese kottu, but somehow feels less sinful.
We then tried the Sambal Prawns – prawns cooked in Malaysian sambal (a chilli paste made from a variety of chilli peppers with secondary ingredients like shrimp paste). Though it looked fiery, this was a surprisingly mild dish that came with a hit of spice as well as a note of curry powder that made it a very interesting choice.
We then tried the quintessential Malaysian hawker dish, the Nasi Lemak – rice cooked with coconut milk and accompanied by Malaysian chicken curry, sambal sauce, eggs, peanuts, and fried sprats. A variety of different elements come together to create this dish of almost incomparable texture and flavour and PappaRich got each element right, with neither the curry nor the sauce overpowering each other and the sprats and peanuts providing a salty crunchiness.
We also had the Nasi Kunyit – an Indonesian fragrant rice dish cooked with coconut milk and turmeric, which has distinctly Indian flavours coming through. It came across as a mix of Nasi Goreng and Biryani, and we had it with delightfully crunchy and well-marinated fried chicken and sambal prawns.
Another popular hawker food is Hainan Steamed Chicken Rice – a dish of poached chicken and seasoned rice, served with a signature blend of soy sauce and oil, bean sprouts and a range of sweet and spicy sauces. The chicken was amazingly tender and flavourful when combined with the ‘umami-ness’ of the soy sauce. Crispy ginger also really helped elevate this dish.
No trip down a hawker street is complete without a bowl of hot, spicy noodles, and the Mee Goreng Mamak did not disappoint. Less fiery than the Mee Goreng most Sri Lankans are familiar with, the Mee Goreng Mamak’s flavours are subtle but powerful – the perfect balance of sweet and spicy.
For dessert, although we were stuffed by this point, we tried two Malaysian desserts – the sago and the egg pudding, both of which came drenched in thick, sweet coconut milk and gula melaka (palm sugar syrup).
These are not for the faint of heart and can be considered meals in and of themselves. They are, however, extremely sweet, as was the Syrup Bandung Jelly and the Milo Dinosaur – some of PappaRich’s signature beverages. The Syrup Bandung Jelly was a kind of Malaysian take on faluda and the Milo Dinosaur was the PappaRich rendition of a chocolate milkshake that uses the Lankan favourite Milo to sing its song.
One must-try beverage is the Lime Cooler, a refreshing lime mocktail topped with ice cream to create a float. It was quite the treat, but not overly sweet.
The beautiful flavours of Asia
The flavour profiles from PappaRich are definitely a departure from the flavours Sri Lankans are used to and if you’re looking for our typical fiery rice and curry, PappaRich is not the place for you (though we found the Nasi Kunyit to be closest to the Sri Lankan flavour profile).
PappaRich is a place for you to travel with your tastebuds, experiment with the different flavours of Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and China, and appreciate the subtlety of the different cuisine these places have to offer. It’s most definitely a gastronomic journey.