In March 2021, a year into the pandemic, the British Sri Lankan chef Cynthia Shanmugalingam, now 42, was quarantining at a hotel in Ahangama, a town on Sri Lanka’s southern coast. She’d traveled from her home in London and was self-isolating ahead of a six-month-long stay with her parents in Nelliady, at the island’s northern tip, where she was planning to write her first cookbook. Eventually, she completed a draft of “Rambutan,” as she titled it (and as she would later call her restaurant in London’s Borough Market that opened in 2023). But a less expected outcome of those weeks alone was that she met her future partner, the 46-year-old entrepreneur Joe Lenora; he was based nearby and they started talking online. Last January, they returned to Sri Lanka to get married.
For a venue, they chose Lunuganga, the former country residence of the Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa. A leader of the Tropical Modernism movement, Bawa lived and worked on the former rubber plantation, in the beach town of Bentota, for nearly 40 years before his death in 2003, when its care was taken over by a group of his close friends now known as the Geoffrey Bawa and Lunuganga Trust. Today the property — which sits on the shore of the vast Dedduwa Lake and includes 12 acres of lush gardens — operates as a 10-room hotel, although it retains the feel of a private retreat, with worn tile floors, whitewashed walls and furniture and objects from Bawa’s collection. “There are different chairs and tables around the place, or in front of a vista, where [Bawa] would like to take tea or eat lunch,” Shanmugalingam says. “It has an intimate, personal quality.”
On a warm evening last month, Shanmugalingam was back at the house, this time at the invitation of the Lunuganga Trust, which had asked her to host a dinner there. It was the first in a series of collaborative events between the chef and the property celebrating the region’s indigenous and heirloom produce. The gathering included a mix of designers, environmentalists and self-described seed nerds, each of whom had traveled an hour and a half up the west coast from Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. The festivities began with cocktails beside a butterfly-shaped pond, which shimmered with fireflies as the sun set over the lake, then continued with a family-style feast of lagoon prawns and crab and a jubilant cake-decorating spectacle that took place just moments before a storm rolled in. As the rain fell, the guests sought shelter and one last drink in Bawa’s ocher-walled former office, where the scents of TK and TK plants in the garden mingled with the wet night air. It was, Shanmugalingam says, “the most magical dinner I’ve done.”
The attendees: Among the 12 guests were Lenora, the chef’s husband; the author Shehan Karunatilaka, 49, and his wife, the art director and designer, Eranga Tennakoon, 36; the writer and documentary producer Amita Arudpragasam, 34; the fashion designer Amesh Wijesekera, 31; the environmental advocate Emma de Silva, 27; the artist Muvindu Binoy, 35; the fabric designer Sophia Sansoni, 24; the architect and chief curator at the Geoffrey Bawa Trust, Shayari de Silva, 36; and the horticulturist Soham Kacker, 24. “We’re all quite creative,” says Shanmugalingam. “We’re also all thinking about how to represent Sri Lanka in our work while having an international resonance. How do we use old materials or ancient methods in a contemporary way?”
The décor: Lunuganga’s gardeners dressed a long wooden table on the estate’s so-called red terrace — the region’s soil is rich with iron oxide, giving it a rusty hue — with elements gathered from the grounds, including moss, fungi, blue ironwood flowers and maidenhair ferns. Thilini Perera, 39, a curator at the Geoffrey Bawa Trust and a friend of Shanmugalingam’s, brought ceramics from her home, including several locally made blue-and-cream plates that had belonged to her grandmother. They were laid out — alongside green-tinged Spanish water glasses from Bawa’s own collection — on batik napkins and tablecloths designed by Ena de Silva, a pioneering Sri Lankan artist and friend of Bawa’s who had a room at Lunuganga named after her.
The food: To accompany the cocktails, Shanmugalingam served heirloom blue Ceylon olives from the property’s garden dressed in chile, black pepper and lime. (Despite their name, the small iridescent orbs are not olives but the sour, juicy fruits of the Elaeocarpaceae plant.) She paired these with a pomelo and sour citrus acharu, a spicy pickle made with lime juice: “A big kick to get things going,” she says. Later the dinner table was set with platters of peppery moringa leaf and foxtail millet (a mildly nutty ancient grain) with cashew and coconut; a flowering white mussaenda leaf and pumpkin fritti with fragrant Ceylon tangerines and curry leaf aioli for dipping; local snake gourd with graffiti eggplant and red, green and yellow tomato sambol (a Sri Lankan relish); and a cooling buffalo yogurt pachadi (a dip akin to labneh) with sweet, cucumber-like muskmelon and charred pink spring onions. These were followed by a crab pongal made with kiri narang rice — a tiny Sri Lankan heirloom grain that “tastes a little milky, and a little like orange,” says Shanmugalingam; prawns from nearby Bentota bay that were grilled tableside and served with goroka, a wild smoky and sour mangosteen; rare raw greens and rainforest fiddlehead ferns, which have an okra-like taste, with a sesame-and-coconut sambol; and a guava, daikon and cured lime sambol made with small pink-fleshed guavas indigenous to Sri Lanka.
The drinks: At sunset, guests were offered pineapple margaritas with a chile-and-salt rim, as well as fresh watermelon juice. For dinner, Shanmugalingam had brought over three natural wines from the European supplier Tutto Wines that she serves in her restaurant. They included Cantina Giardino, a bubbly white with a salty finish from a 90-year-old vineyard in Campania, Italy, and Barraco, a perfumed blend of white grillo, catarratto and zibibbo grapes from Sicily. The third wine, served at the cake table, was Tutti Frutti Ananas, a pomegranate pink mix of magrana and syrah from Roussillon, France. Together they brought a “a little taste of London” to the proceedings, says Shanmugalingam.
The music: Shanmugalingam made a laid-back playlist featuring hip-hop and Sri Lankan diaspora artists. Among the standout tracks were “Good Love 2.0” by Priya Ragu, “Luchini (a.k.a. This Is It)” by Camp Lo, Jai Paul’s “All Night (Unfinished),” “Jars of It” by Steve Lacy and “Vikram Vikram” by the Tamil actor and film director Kamal Haasan.
The conversation: Wijesekera described his new collection and how, in dividing his time between Berlin and Colombo, he’s beginning to favor the latter, not least because of its inspiring fabrics. And Karunatilaka explained that, in the wake of his Booker Prize win in 2022, he wants to get away to the country’s quiet Kurunegala hills to write again.
An entertaining tip: “It’s all about a big cake finale,” Shanmugalingam says, referring to her towering, fluffy coconut dessert cocooned in white frosting. “It’s very easy to make a cake the day before. We whipped up all the coconut cream and butter for the icing and then left it in the fridge until we were ready to go.” The cake was placed on a candle-covered side table, and guests gathered around, pink wine in hand, as Shanmugalingam finished it with rambutans, passion fruits, black mangoes and sweet, fragrant local mandarins called jambu narans. “It was quite theatrical,” she says. “A bit like a wedding.”
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