I had been wanting to come to Hopper Hut for a while due to its wide selection and variety of Sri Lankan dishes, so I was glad that I finally got around to trying this place. Located in a plaza in Scarborough, it offers no-frills, good and delicious Sri Lankan classics ranging from hoppers, string hoppers, biryani, and lamprais, to snacks and quick meals such as stuffed roti and rolls, samosa, ulundu vadai, and other fried items.
There is a large counter for quick take-out orders right in front (the first thing you see upon entering). The take-out counter always has a lineup of people. It's popular so it must be good!
There is a full-service, sit-down restaurant at the back, where the menu is a bit more extensive and has different pricing than the take-out counter.
The service we got was excellent. The staff were so friendly and helpful in explaining the menu items. All the dishes were cooked fresh in the kitchen at the back, and came out quite fast. Portion size for everything was BIG! One order of lamprais (rice combo with various vegetables, curries, and choice of meat, seafood, or vegetarian) could feed a group of 3-4 people.
Items that we ordered:
1) Lamprais (rice combo wrapped in banana leaf) - We got the lamprais wrapped in banana leaf with 2 seafood options (crab and squid). There was an option to choose either samba or basmati rice, and we got the samba (a variety of rice grown in Tamil Nadu, some other parts of India and Sri Lanka, and has a small ovular grain, compared to the long grain of basmati). It came piping hot in a banana leaf. It was VERY HEFTY - a good few pounds when you lift it. I liked the small ovular grain of the samba rice; it had a soft and fluffy texture that soaked up all the curries well.
On top of the rice were a mountain of all the good stuff: eggplant mustard, potato cutlet (one of my favourite items in the lamprais), pickled acharu, fried anchovies, boiled egg, lentil curry, and seafood curry. The squid was cut up in small square pieces, which had a nice chewy texture. The crab came as crab legs with the shells on (a bit messy and hard to eat, but fun). All of the content and curries were spicy, except for the potato cutlet and fried anchovies which were nice and crunchy (good texture variation to go with all the other soft-textured curries and rice).
2) String Hopper Combo - This combo was only available if you do dine-in at the restaurant (not available for take-out). The take-out version was 1 order = 25 string hoppers. The combo at the dine-in restaurant consisted of 10 string hoppers with meat, seafood, or veggie curry, and sambol of choice (onion or coconut sambol). We chose the coconut sambol (pol salmbol) because our other Hopper Combo already came with the onion sambol. For the curry, we went with the vegetarian curry, where we could choose either eggplant curry or dal (so many choices within choices!). We went with dal (lentils). It was a bit spicy but flavourful.
The string hoppers also came with a bowl of hot turmeric milk (also called Haldi Doodh / "Golden Milk"). It contained turmeric, ginger, cardamom, cloves, other spices, and small pieces of watermelon. It was my first time trying turmeric milk, which tasted interesting and unique to me.
3) Hopper Combo - There were different combos to choose from. The one we selected consisted of 2 plain hoppers, 1 egg hopper, and 1 milk hopper. They came with onion sambol which was spicy. The hoppers were quite big, thin and crispy on the outer edges, and thicker, soft, and chewy in the middle. I LOVED the hoppers and combination of crispy & chewy textures. The egg and plain hoppers were my favourites. The egg hopper had an egg in the middle with still-runny yolk (loved breaking the yolk). The milk hopper, which was made using coconut milk and sugar, was quite sweet. All the hoppers were good to eat with the curries in the other dishes. read more