Fahim and I ate at Olive’s Kitchen & Grill Family Restaurant, which has Chinese, Thai, and Pakistani cuisine. It’s also Halal.

I had a mango lassi – excellent! – and Fahim had a fruit juice cocktail – also excellent. We’d ordered salads for starters, seafood for him and Caesar for me.

The Caesar Salad (Rs. 330) had leaf lettuce, green bell peppers, cucumbers, feta cheese, black olives, small pieces of chicken fried until crispy, and Caesar salad dressing. With three strips of processed "cheese" food on top for, uh, good luck, I guess. Most emphatically *not* what a Caesar salad is, but just as emphatically excellent. Despite the "cheese" stuff.

Fahim’s Seafood Salad (Rs. 490) had cucumbers (which he picked out since he hates cucumbers), shrimp, olives, bell peppers, and basically the exact same vegetable as in my "Caesar" salad. It had an excellent mustard dressing that I would love to replicate. Also an excellent salad.

Although I should mention that they made a major cucumber mistake. They didn’t use English cucumbers – we have a short variety here that grows to about six inches long. Instead, they used a local type that has a very tough outer skin, the kind that’s so tough and chewy that, as a cook, I would never serve to anyone. I would absolutely have peeled those cucumbers because the skin is so tough that it’s really required.

And that is the extent of my complaint about the salads.

We’d also ordered Butter Chicken (Rs. 600), Chicken Pepper Fry (Rs. 600), Devilled Mushroom (Rs. 430), and Mixed Fried Rice (Rs. 450).

We didn’t finish our salads. We were expecting smaller portions, but no, as it turns out, the salads were more than adequate as a meal in and of themselves. I couldn’t even finish my salad. The rest we took home.

We ate the take-home portion for dinner and enjoyed it. It wasn’t as spicy as either of us would like, but we do have higher tolerances for spicy than normal people. The Chicken Pepper Fry could have used a bit more salt for my tastes, but my salt-meter has been broken for over a year now, so it could just be me.

The mushrooms unfortunately were canned, which means the wrong taste and texture. Canned mushrooms are just all wrong. Fifty kinds of wrong, really. Thing is, many restaurants here use canned button mushrooms since they’re only available fresh infrequently. Yes, we can get abalone, oyster, and those sorts of mushrooms easily enough, but they also have a strong smell and flavour that can be offputting or just not right in many dishes. Actually, I just plain hate oyster mushrooms – they smell too oyster for me, and that means I can’t tell if they’re fresh or rotten. Just all wrong.

But I digress.

The mushroom dish. I’d rather they labelled the mushroom dishes as "when fresh mushrooms are available and in season" and skipped the canned mushrooms altogether. Or warned that they were using canned mushrooms. Canned mushrooms are really just that inadequate.

Still, the food, while not excellent overall, still qualifies as very good and I definitely would willingly eat here again. And I’d love to have that non-Caesar Caesar Salad again, too.

Olive’s Kitchen & Grill
No. 25 Marine Drive (adjoining Miami Reception Hall)
Colombo 06
Telephone: 2504937,2504929
Delivery within city limits.

Subway the restaurant/fast food/whatever you call it chain doesn’t exist in Sri Lanka. The nearest Subway is in India, and while India has a lot of them, that doesn’t really make up for not having any here. And I get rumblings for subs every now and then, so, knowing that the Marrybrown has subs, we decided to give it a try.

First thing I noticed when we walked in? Free wifi. This is the only place in Sri Lanka where I’ve seen free wifi. I connected – no password needed, even – and sent a few tweets. Yup, it sure did work.

The menu isn’t hugely extensive, but it does include such delights as Hotouch Totilla, whatever that is.

We ordered the Satay Classic and two subs.

The Satay Classic was okay. Not great. Not a huge amount of flavour. But edible.

The subs we took home to eat later. They were… disappointing. The lettuce was beyond wilted and all the way to black and half-rotted. Not appealing. At all. Beside that, they had virtually no redeeming value – they tasted… okay. In a pinch, they’d hit the hunger gap. They were edible, but not much more than that.

Would I go back? Only if we had no food in the house and there was nowhere else to eat. But I wouldn’t recommend it, no.

Tags: Marrybrown, restaurants, subs, Sri Lanka

On one of our forays out-and-about, I took some pictures of things I saw along the way. Here, we have a corn stand at the side of the road, most likely squatting on land they don’t own as many road-side stands do.

To the immediate left, you can see a fruit stand selling watermelons. Out of view is other produce for sale. To the right of that, you can see the corn husks on the ground, then a pile of corn on the table. In the background, you can see the large round pot (they tend to be around 20" in diameter and about 12" high) that’ll be set up with boiling water, a wood fire going underneath it. The person running the stand will boil the corn for customers to buy.

These corn stands are surprisingly (to me, anyway) common here. They’re not absolutely everywhere, but they’re seen frequently enough for anyone with a corn hankering.

Tags: corn, corn on the cob, roadside stalls, Sri Lanka

There’s a restaurant that Fahim and I go to every now and then called The Sizzle, and by every now and then, I mean four times in the last year or year and a half or so, and by that, that makes it our most frequented restaurant. Because, yes, we really don’t go out that often at all. I’ve talked about The Sizzle before.

The first time we ate there, we were offered a preferred customer type of card with discounts. We signed up, of course, being the cheap people that we are, using Fahim’s name and birthday.

The discount isn’t a huge amount – 10% off lunches during the week – but since we generally go out for lunches, that works for us.

Recently, Fahim received a coupon in the mail for 10% off for his birthday from The Sizzle, expiring a month after his birthday. Cool! Well, that’s what we thought at first, anyway… (See, that’s foreshadowing… )

See, nowhere on The Sizzle’s coupon did it say anything about not combining it with any other offers, not valid if…, and so on. No disclaimers of any kind. And they know we get discounts because of our preferred customer card, and them knowing Fahim’s birthday because of it, although I doubt they keep track of the fact that we always go at lunch.

So we went to The Sizzle for lunch, we enjoy our food and Fahim gives them both the preferred customer card and the birthday coupon. We get the bill, and…

10% off, total.

No comments or explanations from the server. Not even an acknowledgement that we provided a coupon for 10% off and a preferred customer card for 10% off. Not 10% off for the preferred customer card + 10% off for the birthday coupon. Just 10% off.

And that’s what I call a scam.

And the loss of a couple of customers.

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As a PS to this, I really really really really really wish The Sizzle would turn the music/sound off on their site. Or at least provide a way for us, the poor hapless visitors (or ex-visitors, in our case), to turn it off. Because, yes, it realy is that annoying. No, it’s not cute, nor does it make us think that our experience at the restaurant will be good because of the sizzle sounds. It really just annoys.