Sofia Levin reviews: Elephant Corridor

In a sentence: Specialising in Sri Lankan signatures for more than a decade
The damage: starters $11 to $24, mains $23 to $33 (more for seafood)
Top tip: staff are extremely helpful, don’t be shy, ask for suggestions
If you like this: try Hop & Spice in Braybrook or Pavlov’s Duck cafe in Fitzroy for a hopper breakfast

I adore Sri Lankan food, but Melbourne’s best is in the suburbs. On Sunday night I carpooled to Glen Waverley with some friends, where Elephant Corridor has been serving Sri Lankan and Northern Indian cuisine for 12 years.

You can’t miss the orange signage, or the marquee that’s been erected over the restaurant’s parklet. Warm tones continue inside with rope and wooden light fittings, Buddha statues and a panoramic photograph of a mosque-studded skyline at sunset.

We coincidentally visited on “hopper night” (Monday and Sunday), where groups can order unlimited plain and egg hoppers for $35.90 per person, along with a curry and sambol. For the uninitiated, a hopper is a thin, bowl-shaped pancake made from a slightly fermented coconut milk and rice flour batter. The egg version has a fried egg in the middle. Both are perfect for mopping up fragrant, spice-laden dhal, curries and sambol.

The thought of limiting ourselves to hoppers with such a vast menu wasn’t an option. We ruled out the Indian dishes and decided to stick to a Sri Lankan feast, though the smell of tandoori chicken passing on its way to another table made us question the call.

Everything came out at once, enhancing the feasting experience. Smaller sides and accompaniments included a salad of karawilla (bitter gourd) and red onion, the gourd fried so that the sweetness was exaggerated and bitterness reduced.

A signature ingredient in Sri Lankan cooking is Maldive fish – dried, cured fish shrapnel used to bring out depth and umami. It’s often skipjack tuna and is similar to ikan bilis, the dried anchovies used in a lot of Singaporean and Malaysian cooking. Maldive fish is ground up in the classic sambols here: pol sambol made from coconut and chill that forms an orange crumb, and sweet and sour seeni (onion) sambol.

My surprise favourite was the dark pork curry. It’s also known as black curry and usually contains goraka (aka “Indian tamarind”), a fruit that’s dried and rehydrated for cooking. It adds a slight sour note and tenderises meat. The dark colouring comes from roasted curry powder, which might contain any mixture of coriander, cumin, black pepper, fennel, cardamom and curry leaves – to name a few. The saucy pork cubes arrived in a lidded, cast-iron dish. Each piece was lean and tender; while the gravy was so moreish we ordered extra hoppers to mop it up.

Jaffna crab curry, made with blue swimmers, also came in a cast iron dish, stained golden brown with turmeric and tamarind. It packed a decent chilli kick, which is typical of northern Sri Lankan dishes.

From the carb department we ordered chicken kothu roti, stir fried roti that’s chopped on a hot plate with stainless steel scraper blades with omelette and veggies, as well as lamprais, a Dutch Burgher specialty that comes from the Dutch word lomprijst, which translates to a packet or lump of rice. Traditionally it’s wrapped in a banana leaf for on-the-go convenience, but at Elephant Corridor it’s arranged on a plate with spiced curry (with your protein of choice), a fried fish ball, wambatu moju (fried eggplant pickle) and fried plantain.

I was disappointed that there was no watalappan available for dessert, a coconut custard pudding that’s sweetened with jaggery and spiced with cardamom, cloves and nutmeg. We settled for pistachio kulfi instead.

We opted to take advantage of BYO wine, but you can also order arrack (made from fermented coconut palm sap), including in a sour with habanero lime syrup and as an old fashioned. Wine is extremely well priced by restaurant standards. It’s less than $9 a glass for drops such as Lightfoot & Sons Chardonnay from East Gippsland and Helen’s Hill Pinot Noir from the Yarra Valley.

Elephant Corridor
179 Coleman Parade, Glen Waverley
elephantcorridor.com.au