HOPPERS

Recently I went to the new bloggers & critics acclaimed restaurant: Hoppers. Hoppers is a Sri Lankan restaurant owned by Karam, Jyotin and Sunna Sethi, the team behind Trishna and Gymkhana, and based on Frith street. When I heard it was related to Gymkhana, I must say that turned me off a little bit as I had an awful experience there due to bad service.

I've tried to go to Hoppers before Christmas but I did not really want to wait and have lunch at 4pm. This was before they introduced their app queuing system. I went to Hoppers last weekend and heard a lot of good things about their app queuing system, unfortunately (or kind of) I didn't get the chance to experiment with it as I managed to get a table straight away.

My sister and I were not familiar at all with Sri Lankan cuisine and dishes. As soon as we were seated, a very nice waiter explained to us the concept and the menu. He recommended that we order a dosa or a hopper which is a bowl-shaped thin pancake made with fermented rice and coconut milk batter, with a karis (equivalent of a curry).
We asked for the mildest curry, and were recommend the red pumpkin kari and the lamb kari.

We started our meal with two starters which are called 'short eats', we had the mutton rolls and the duck roti.
The mutton rolls were nicely crispy on the outside and had mild spiced rich mutton inside, and were served alongside a spicy tomato relish. The duck roti was a minced and spiced duck meat roti pastry and it was served with a nutty spicy sauce. Both starters were delicious, however we had a preference for the mutton rolls but we ate them with the duck roti sauce.

My sister and I like spicy food but only when it is not too hot. We made the mistake of drinking all our water with our starters and our mouths started to burn soon after!
A nice waiter seeing our distress, asked us if we wanted some yoghurt to calm the heat. We accepted without hesitation and ordered a second bowl to compliment our mains too.
It was really nice to have such attentive waiters.

For mains, we had one hopper each with a soft-yolked egg baked into it, with all the sauces: Poi Samboi, Seeni Samboi and a coriander chutney. We shared the lamb kari and the red pumpkin kari.
The lamb kari was very tender and melt in the mouth, but it was indeed spicy. The pumpkin was probably the most mildest dish of our meal. It went very well with the lamb.

We didn't have any dessert as we were too full, but during my next visit I might try one.

Overall, despite our mouths being on fire for the whole lunch, we had a very good experience at Hoppers.
The team was really nice and attentive, the food was superb, spicy and full of flavours. I will definitely come back to Hoppers if I don't have to queue for hours.
In my opinion, the only improvement this restaurant could do in the future will be to offer each dish with different level of spices so everyone can have more options.

9/10