Restaurants in Jaffna & The North
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Mangos
Behind a new café that looks somewhat half-finished is a solidly built timber-roofed dining pavilion with open sides. Here you can get good rice-and-curry lunches and traditional South Indian specialities for dinner, including excellent masala dosas (dosas stuffed with spiced vegetables) cooked to order.
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Royal Park Garden Restaurant
The cosy garden here is a great place for dinner when the weather’s not unbearably hot: attractive twinkling lights and little pavilions nestle amid ornamental trees. The Rs 180 mushroom paneer masala (mushroom and unfermented cheese curry) is richly delicious, and there’s tasty soup for Rs 60. No prices on menus.
reviewed
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Top Cream House
This restaurant, right at the main roundabout, is an ordinary eatery (watch out for flies), but it has a relatively extensive and high-quality selection of curries with fresh rotti or string hoppers (tangles of steamed noodles). Shrimp curry, shells and all, costs Rs 50.
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Sinbon
Unusually, local women feel confident enough to come to this modern cafe unchaperoned for coffee (Nescafé Rs 40), cakes or ice-cream sundaes (Rs 80). It’s ideal for passing the time when you’re waiting for a bus. Next door is an air-conditioned supermarket.
reviewed
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Rose Garden Restaurant
This is a big, excellent-value, party-hall restaurant. Food of widely varying styles includes a spicy tom yam goong (Thai shrimp soup) that lacks lemon grass but is generously full of shrimps for a mere Rs 80.
reviewed
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Three Star Hotel
This typically fly-infested servery has particularly delicious rice-and-curry meals. The vegetable curry is mild, the saffron rice is laced with raisins and for Rs70 you can add a chunk of prefried chicken.
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Café Yours & TCT Supermarket
The tiny modern café attached to this Danish-owned supermarket serves reasonable instant coffee and makes mini pizzas to order.
reviewed
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Pulley’s Balmoral
Food here is good value. Diners bring their own booze (until the place gets licensed).
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Thanj Hotel
Basic, friendly place for fresh hoppers (bowl-shaped pancakes) in the evening.
reviewed
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Sri Palm Beach
The menu of this comfortably air-conditioned upstairs place is wide and reliable. It serves very good fried chicken ‘65’, as well as masala dosas (paper-thin rice- and lentil-flour pancakes) after 6.30pm.
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Old Park Restaurant
Although it’s a bit like eating in someone’s front room, the Old Park offers some of Jaffna’s tastiest cuisine and is paradise for garlic lovers. Its small garden is pleasant for a cold beer.
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Malayan Café
This downmarket but popular and wonderfully olde-worlde eatery has marble-topped tables, long glass-and-wood cabinets and occasional blasts of incense to bless the in-house shrine. The cheap vegetarian fare is served on banana leaves and eaten by hand. When you’re finished, fold up the leaf and post it through the letterbox-shaped waste chute in the hand-washing area.
reviewed
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Hotel Rolex
This is a bustling local eatery with a good range of food choices.
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Cosy Restaurant
Along with its attractively lantern-lit dining terrace, sheltered by cadjan (coconut-frond matting), the great attraction here is the tandoori oven, with which the chef produces excellent fresh naan (flat breads), as well as succulent chicken tikka (chicken marinated in spices and dry roasted); arrive early, as supplies are limited. There’s a long menu of alternatives.
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