Tingle your tastebuds

Jetwing Sea to upgrade local culinary standards:

Amalshan Gunerathne

Huddled up alongside the serene beaches of Negambo, ‘Jetwing Sea’ provides you with a unique banquet that can get your taste buds tingling. It is probably one of the few hotels around where you get the chance to taste fresh seafood. Further enhancements will be added to the hotel, as an upgraded version of the ‘Jetwing Sea’ will open its doors to the public from January 15. Priyantha Weerasinghe, the Executive chef for the Jetwing Negmbo Region, expressed his thoughts on the upgrades they have installed to enhance services.

“This time we are introducing a special feature, a special restaurant called Lellama. At Lellama the food is cooked in an innovative and nutritious method using fresh local herbs (homegrown), spices, wines and pastes. The wine list has been compiled to enhance the menu. Seafood served at Lellama is caught fresh and cooked with traditional Sri Lankan flavors. For the past 20 years, we have used locally caught fish. According to my knowledge, we are the only restaurant that uses locally sea caught un-dipped green mussel. Our octopus, cuttlefish, scallops, squid oysters and crabs are all caught from local suburbs.”

When queried about the food served at the hotel, Priyantha explained: “We have a wide variety of set menus which the customer can choose from. For breakfast,

we serve a buffet with fresh juice. At Lellama, we provide an exclusive meal, which we call as ‘Lellama Special Rice. And also Lellama offers a special soup called ‘ Negombo Lellama Laksa Soup’. The dessert includes Chocolate Parfait, Hazelnut Cream, Terrine Accompanied with baked Almond Peaches, Strawberry and Coulis Bluberry Salpicon etc.”

Priyantha has been in the industry since 1991. He has won four gold medals at Food Asia Maldives competition and two Gold Medals in UAE culinary challenges. He was also instrumental in bringing great glory and recognition to the Jetwing hotels in the ‘2010’s Culinary Challenge’ organized by the Chef’s Guild of Sri Lanka. His main forte is seafood. Yet, he is also exceptionally skilled in Japanese, Indian, Thai, and European Cuisine. Speaking to the Zest, Priyantha said, “Our task is to take the food standard of Jetwing Sea to the international level, so that we can give a better service to our visitors.”