Food, glorious FOOD!

Last night 30 of my classmates and I descended up on a Sri Lankan/South Indian restaurant about 20 minutes from the campus. A classmate organized the outing because he feels that it is important to experience a society’s culture through its food. He also feels that it is important to get out of the cocoon of Harvard Square. The purpose of this outing was to enjoy an ethnic cuisine, while also to learning more about the culture of the food.

Oh my goodness, where do I start? It was a small out of the way place surrounded by cemeteries, and I’m not sure we would have been able to find it without the voice from above saying “In 300 feet, turn left.”  

The food was great.  Since it was a small place, it had been arranged for us to try several Sri Lankan specialties family style. There were six of us seated at my table.  It was like eating in grandma’s dining room, even down to the clear plastic cover over the table cloth!  The first course was lamb soup.  Personally, I didn’t see or taste any lamb but that may have been because the pepper in the soup had seared a hole in my tongue!  YOWZA!  I like spicy food, but this ‘young grasshopper’ had to pace herself. The mango juice I was offered cut through the spice like a hot knife through butter.  Yay!

 

Lamb soup

The second dish was Chicken 65.  Don’t ask me why it was named that.  I just know that it was tasty.  It was served with coconut bread.  (Cultural insight: South Indian/Sri Lankan food is rice based.  The breads are made with rice flour or rice flour and coconut.  No wheat!)

Chicken 65

Coconut bread (savory)

Then they just kept bringing out the dishes. 

 

Pumpkin Curry (mango juice in the background!)

Okra

An AMAZING dry fish curry

Coconut dish

Lentils

And we kept eating…I think there were 3 dishes that we ate before I could snap a picture. Oops!

After dinner, the proprietress, host, and chef Premila gave a short speech about her journey to the US.  She is a Sri Lankan Tamil, the minority group in Sri Lanka.  Since 1983, the Tamils had been in a civil war with the Sinhalese. (The civil war lasted for over 25 years before ending in 2009.) She spoke of how her baby brother was killed in a military bombing of a church playground and spoke vaguely of the atrocities of war that she witnessed first-hand. (As a condition of her being able to flee, she is not to speak against the Sri Lankan government. She did not speak against the government at all, but I’ve read books about war. She didn’t have to say much for me to paint an accurate picture.)

A dear, dear friend of mine is a Sri Lankan Tamil.  Her family was fortunate enough to have the resources to flee to their home at the very beginning of the war, so this was the first time I had the opportunity to hear a first person account of what had happened there. Regardless of whether or not you feel the LTTE was a terrorist organization, there were tremendous civilian Tamil casualties that need to be acknowledged and addressed. Sri Lanka is a country that needs to be rebuilt and healed after 25+ years of continuous war.

Last night was a something that the Harvard classrooms cannot teach.  They’re good, but a student can only learn so much through case studies and analysis.  Everyone at the dinner was touched in some way. How often does a humble neighborhood restaurant get the opportunity to host a group of 30+ world leaders in the making?  We are the future leaders that care about public policy and human rights abuse and who will be in a position to do something about it.  She was thankful to have a rapt audience and we were honored to hear her story.

Although an experience like our dinner cannot be replicated, I’m already looking forward to the next outing.