A Beloved Mainstay of Sri Lankan Culture and Cuisine on Staten Island
The 212 column revisits New York institutions that have helped define the city, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.
Much of Bay Street, which runs parallel to Staten Island's north shore, is a mix of nondescript restaurants and stores — a pizza place here, a barbershop there. But the Sri Lankan restaurant Lakruwana, housed in a brick building on the corner of Bay and Broad Streets, is impossible to miss. Its street-level facade, painted a vivid rose red, features a mural of dancing princes and elaborately dressed elephants. A five-foot-tall stone Buddha and a gleaming brass door mark the entrance. As soon as I walked inside on a recent gray spring day, I was seduced by the smells of roasted green chile, garlic and coconut.
Countless artworks and artifacts line the dining room: stone sculptures of Hindu gods, wooden masks, spears, straw baskets and water jugs. There are two life-size mannequins in traditional Sri Lankan wedding dress, the groom in a dazzling headpiece made of gold yarn and red sequins, set at the end of a small bar. Around the tables are chairs with impossibly high backs, elongated triangles fashioned out of black wrought iron and rope. Brightly painted red-and-yellow shutters hang from one of the walls. Even the bathrooms have witty visual interest. My favorite sign reads, 'The Liar Falls Into Hell.'
The restaurant's founder, Lakruwana Wijesinghe, who immigrated to the United States in 1975 from Kiribathgoda, a suburb near Colombo, Sri Lanka's largest city, designed the chairs and shipped them along with everything else to New York in a 40-foot container. He was determined to put as much as possible of his home country into the restaurant, including huge wall panels set with native pink stones.
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