Picture of Jaffna House, SW17 0RN

Historical version 5 of Jaffna House, SW17 0RN (view current version)

Sri Lankan (and South Indian) restaurant on Tooting High Street. It has a cafe and takeaway part at the front on the High Street, and a licensed restaurant part out the back (accessed via a separate entrance down a side street).

Kake, DrHyde, bob, and ilmari visited on a Tuesday evening in October 2008. We'd booked a table for 8pm, and were glad we did, as the restaurant part is very small and filled up quickly.

Although the menu also includes many of the British curry house standards, we were there to try the Sri Lankan dishes. We let bob do the ordering, as he'd had previous experience with Sri Lankan food.

We started with masala vadai (deep-fried lentil cakes, 80p apiece) and mutton rolls (deep-fried mutton and potato croquettes, 90p apiece) photo; these were basically OK, though the vadai were a little dry. We also had a portion of devilled prawns (£4.90), which were great; they'd managed to get a good amount of browning on the outside of the prawns without overcooking the interiors.

For our mains, we had mutton kotthu (chopped flatbread with scrambled egg and mutton, £4.50) photo, mutton curry (£4.50) and aubergine curry (£2.75) photo, carrot sambol (£2), rice (£1.50), and string hoppers (£2.50).

Sri Lankan food tends to be quite spicy to the average British palate, and although our meal wasn't unpleasantly spicy to us, it was just at the edge of Kake's enjoyment threshold, and would have been challenging at the least to anyone who doesn't like chilli — and bob mentioned later that he thought they'd toned it down for us.

Even though we also had a couple of lassis, a bottle of wine, and several bottles of Lion Stout, the final bill was only £15/head including service, which as DrHyde pointed out was "practically free".

Kake's verdict: I would happily come back.

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Last visited by Kake, DrHyde, bob, and ilmari, 28 October 2008.
OS X co-ord: 527379 OS Y co-ord: 171410 (Latitude: 51.426870 Longitude: -0.167590)
This is version 5 (as of 2009-06-04 10:58:51). View current version. List all versions.