The cocktail bar and smokehouse co-founded by Don Ranasinghe and Lahiru Perera, recently became the first Sri Lankan bar to place in The World’s 50 Best Bars extended ranking (51-100), coming in at No. 86.
The bar’s drinks programme has a tiki backbone while championing the region, focused on local spirits and ingredients, with house-made syrups and tinctures at the forefront of the cocktail menu. “The crux of it was with tiki and tropical drinks being kind of an appropriated culture and something that was represented outside of islands, it was about bringing that back to an actual island,” says Ranasinghe. “For example, with the Mai Chai all the ingredients are made within a 4km radius of each other, next to the rainforest, and the monsoons create really rich soil. So we work with our small-batch partners and it’s an example of tying in Sri Lankan ingredients with the tropical, tiki drinks culture from the late 1920s.”
Old & Smoked
We’re very much an equally led food and drinks operation,” says Ranasinghe. From a drinks perspective we have a menu of 10 and five of those will change each year. A lot of the reason for that is that we’re a destination.
“When we change the drinks the core is still the same. It’s really a journey of exploring various forgotten ingredients or those that are not used so much in the country. We’re known for a lot of tea, so that and cinnamon would be the kind of go tos. It’s a case of constantly looking at what small-batch, fresh, organic ingredients we can source, then we put that into a drink. It’s looking at an ingredient first and developing a drink behind it.”
Within the serve, the “Ceylon cinnamon syrup is a nod to the much-used staple of the early tiki pioneers, and one which was a secret in Don The Beachcomber’s bar preps”, adds Ranasinghe.
S&B house arrack blend, chai-infused arrack, cinnamon syrup, smoked orange bitters, Ceylon bitters
Method: The cocktail is made to a classic Old Fashioned template, served stirred over ice in a mixing glass, then poured over a clear chunk of ice and smoked with halmilla wood chips.
To create the ingredients, the base spirit is a house blend of three Sri Lankan arracks, one of which is cold infused in a blend of Ceylon chai, low-grown black tea and spices over 48 hours. The house-smoked orange bitters and Ceylon bitters are both made in a three-week-long process.
Mai Chai
Chai rum, triple sec, spiced orgeat, chai syrup, elemakule tiki bitters
Silvertip White Negroni
Colombo 07 gin, silvertip tea vermouth, cardamom, Ceylon olive bitters
No.23
Tequila, naarang (calamansi), falernum, passion liqueur, Ceylon bitters, kaffir bitters, mezcal spray
