The 212 column revisits New York institutions that have helped define the city, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.
Much of Bay Street, which runs parallel to Staten Island’s north shore, is a mix of nondescript restaurants and stores — a pizza place here, a barbershop there. But the Sri Lankan restaurant Lakruwana, housed in a brick building on the corner of Bay and Broad Streets, is impossible to miss. Its street-level facade, painted a vivid rose red, features a mural of dancing princes and elaborately dressed elephants. A five-foot-tall stone Buddha and a gleaming brass door mark the entrance. As soon as I walked inside on a recent gray spring day, I was seduced by the smells of roasted green chile, garlic and coconut.
Countless artworks and artifacts line the dining room: stone sculptures of Hindu gods, wooden masks, spears, straw baskets and water jugs. There are two life-size mannequins in traditional Sri Lankan wedding dress, the groom in a dazzling headpiece made of gold yarn and red sequins, set at the end of a small bar. Around the tables are chairs with impossibly high backs, elongated triangles fashioned out of black wrought iron and rope. Brightly painted red-and-yellow shutters hang from one of the walls. Even the bathrooms have witty visual interest. My favorite sign reads, “The Liar Falls Into Hell.”
The restaurant’s founder, Lakruwana Wijesinghe, who immigrated to the United States in 1975 from Kiribathgoda, a suburb near Colombo, Sri Lanka’s largest city, designed the chairs and shipped them along with everything else to New York in a 40-foot container. He was determined to put as much as possible of his home country into the restaurant, including huge wall panels set with native pink stones.
“[The design] was all my father’s idea,” says Julia, 26, Lakruwana’s daughter, who helps run the restaurant. “His name was Ruwan but, when he got his American citizenship, he wanted to put the word ‘luck’ in it, and the sound in our language is “lak,” so he became Lakruwana Wijesinghe,.”
Against the wall on a ledge beside the entrance is a long row of earthenware pots used for the lively all-you-can-eat weekend brunch, a fragrant and colorful feast consisting of three types of rice (red, white, fried), pork curry, pineapple curry and coconut sambal, among other dishes. For dessert, there’s mango mousse, caramel pudding and three other custardy sweets. A highlight for regulars — which you’ll need to order à la carte — is the lamprais, a traditional dish with a recipe, according to the restaurant, that is more than 300 years old. Each one is basically a combo platter — at Lakruwana, a mix of rice cooked in a spice-laden stock, slow-cooked meat (chicken, beef, pork or lamb), cashew curry, banana curry, stir-fried eggplant, a fried hard-boiled egg, a sardine cutlet and seeni sambal (caramelized onion relish) — all wrapped in a banana leaf and steamed together.
Other dishes on the menu feature Sri Lankan rice flour noodles, stir-fried with green chiles, onions and garlic and served with various coconut-based curries (pork, beef, lamb, shrimp or cashew, thickened with yuca and kale). Most fun of all are the hoppers, crispy pancakes made from fermented rice batter and shaped into bowls. They’re filled with lamb stew or curry and eaten with godamba roti, a flatbread described on the menu as a “square-shaped flour handkerchief.” Julia’s mother, Jayantha, does all the cooking using her own family’s recipes. She moved to New York from Germany when she was 18 in 1984 and staying with friends in the city. On that most romantic of all New York conveyances, the Staten Island Ferry, she met her future husband.
The young couple opened their first restaurant at 44th Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan in 1994 and branched out to Staten Island in 2001. Fifteen years ago, they opened in their current location, at 668 Bay Street, transforming what had been a run-down bar into this fantastical portal to a small island nation nearly 9,000 miles away. It isn’t the only Sri Lankan restaurant on Staten Island — the borough is home to the largest Sri Lankan community in the state, which is among the largest in the country — but it’s arguably the most transporting.
Before the Wijesinghes bought their home on Staten Island they had lived in Queens. “City people,” says Julia. “I was only 1 when we moved to Staten Island, so I grew up here. I’m more of an islander.” Lakruwana is only eight and a half miles from my apartment in SoHo, but I couldn’t help feeling like an islander myself, if just for the afternoon, as I sat in the middle of the Wijesinghes’s dining room, surrounded by this magical other world.
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