Raja Bojun Sri Lankan Food @ Tekka Centre – Deliciously authentic Sri Lankan cuisine with dishes like mango curry and stir-fried banana flowers

Sri Lankan food is not that easy to find in Singapore, but at Rasa Raja Bojun, there are trays upon trays of freshly cooked meats, vegetables and curries almost daily. If you love Sinhalese cuisine, or want to experience its rich homecooked flavours, you won’t go wrong here. Owner Mr Odi has been serving up the hearty fare for about 10 years now, and he’s still going strong.

Being a complete newbie, I recruited a friend who’s more familiar with Sri Lankan cuisine, for lunch, opting for a mixture of classics and signature dishes.

Pepper chicken ($4) is one of the best-known Sri Lankan dishes around, so I was really excited to try it. The greenish-brown gravy looked rich and oily, so I was surprised that the flavour was lighter than expected. This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill black pepper chicken. The pepper was much more aromatic, fruity and fragrant. The chicken was also tender, such that even the flimsy plastic cutlery could handle it.

The fish curry ($3) was good too. Though we really couldn’t say what kind of fish it was (mackerel, maybe?), it was meaty and clean-tasting, and went swimmingly well with the savoury, sourish curry.

The mango curry ($4), their unique signature, was well-balanced, with sweet, sour and spiced flavours. The curry was quite syrupy in both texture and taste, yet because of (and this is purely guesswork) the onion, peppercorns, mustard seeds and other spices, it’s never too sweet.

Something I’ve been wanting to try was the banana blossom ($2). Here, it’s stir-fried dry into a yellowish-green mass that had a soft crunch and mild flavour. Maybe because it’s my first, I quite liked it, but my lunch companion thought it was just ok.

He was more taken with the gotukola sambal ($2), a raw green salad made with pennywort and coconut. Supposedly full of health benefits, it was a bit too sharp and astringent for me, though I did like it as a palate cleanser between dishes. I also quite enjoyed the savoury, crunchy beetroot that balanced its natural sweetness with spice.

The cooking there is more homey than restaurant grade (the rice, for example, was clumpy, and my lunch buddy thought the food was better the last time), but I liked the array of food and how the prices just can’t be beat.