Rice and curry is not a dish. It is a format, and what arrives inside it changes every forty kilometres.
Ask for rice and curry in Colombo and you will get something different from what arrives in Jaffna, or Galle, or a tea estate kitchen at altitude. It is less a recipe than a table setting: rice in the middle, and anywhere between three and twelve small dishes around it, most of them vegetable, one or two of them not.
Start with the sambols
Pol sambol, grated coconut with chilli, lime and Maldive fish, is on almost every table and is the fastest way to understand the palate here: hot, sour and salty at once, with the coconut carrying it. Seeni sambol, its caramelised onion cousin, is sweet and dark and completely different.
The breakfast most people miss
Hoppers, bowl-shaped pancakes of fermented rice flour and coconut milk, cooked to order with an egg dropped in the middle. String hoppers are the other version, steamed nests of rice noodles eaten with a thin dhal and a sambol. Both are breakfast, both are best somewhere with a queue, and neither survives being kept warm.
Where to eat it
The best meals here are almost never in restaurants. They are in homes, in estate kitchens, and at the two or three stalls in any town that locals will direct you to without hesitation. On our trips this is usually the part people talk about afterwards, and it is the easiest thing in the world to arrange if you know who to ask.