Café Nova has a strategy for Sri Lankan food in Chicago and beyond

Kiso Sivarasa and his partners envision a nimble “Pandan Express.”

By MIKE SULA

The first Sri Lankan Panda Express quietly opened in Rogers Park late last March.

That’s what Kiso Sivarasa and his partners hoped when they launched Café Nova on the ground floor of Loyola University’s Granada Center, just a few doors down from Subway and across Sheridan from Taco Bell and Potbelly.

“We want to grow into something that big,” he says. “Ten curries laid out in the front, and then you pick your rice, pick your protein.”

South Indian food has a small but solid presence in Chicago’s culinary landscape, but until now there’s been nothing to represent the food of its southeastern island neighbor.

Sri Lanka’s food is more intensely seasoned, more coconut-reliant (if possible) than, say, Kerala food, due to its proximity to the coastal spice trade. Consequently it features a distinct

Indonesian and Dutch influence. You wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that by scanning Café Nova’s o cial menu, which features just six dishes that could be called uniquely Sri Lankan (though only four are labeled as such). There’s no permanent Pandastyle buffet set up yet either, but on most Sundays, Sivarasa’s chef, Ravi Bopage, lays out a sprawling all-you-can-eat Sri Lankan spread featuring some dozen dishes, most of which he can make to order anytime—with enough advance notice.

Originally from the capital Colombo, Bopage has cooked all across the world over the past 25 years. He met Sivarasa in 2016 when they were both cooking at Devon Avenue’s late vegetarian South Indian Mysore Woodlands. Sivarasa, from northern Vavuniya, recently graduated from medical school in St. Vincent, where he was working the dosa station, while Bopage was the executive chef.

When they joined forces at Café Nova, they prominently featured the thin, crispy rice flour dosas, the crepes stu ed with a variety of toppings, and familiar northern Indian appetizers and main dishes like saag paneer and chicken tikka masala.

One item, however, jumped off the page. Kothu paratha is a variant of Sri Lanka’s most popular street food: a finely chopped and griddled mix of flatbread, cabbage, carrots, leeks, and scrambled eggs, served with a thick, smoldering bone-in chicken curry, flecked with mustard seed, redolent of Ceylon cinnamon. There’s also a chicken thigh curry, swimming with mustard leaves; and tomato-based tuna curry. The dal curry takes on a particularly Sri Lankan profile, with a heavy dose of turmeric, pandan and curry leaves, and mustard seeds, subject to a single sauté, indicative of the cuisine’s tendency to feature single rather than multiple masalas.

At first, that was it. The partners wanted to establish themselves with a broad selection of dishes to appeal to a diversity of Loyola students. But repeated requests for more Sri Lankan dishes led to the first Sunday buffet in late May, with dishes featuring harder-tosource ingredients, like Maldive fish chips: dried, cured, and shredded tuna flakes that contribute an oceanic umami flavor to potato and eggplant curries, the latter also containing the fibrous drumstick seedpods of the moringa tree, meant to be split open and dentally scraped like an artichoke leaf. There was chicken goraka, a deeply browned, almost gumbo-like curry, made with dried Garcinia cambogia fruit, or the Malabar tamarind, adding a bracing tartness. There was banana blossom fried rice, and a fiery cassava-spinach curry, mellowed with vegetal, vanilla-like pandan leaves. At the end of the long spread was a pan of chili-spiked coconut roti, alongside bowls of katta sambol, a fiery salted chili condiment deepened by Maldive fish chips.

When I returned a few weeks later for a late afternoon lunch, Sivarasa served a handful of these things, but also a sweet-and-sour carrot chili pickle, and vivid green shrimp curry with pandan and mustard leaves, the invertebrate analogue to the chicken mustard curry.

For now, he says they’ll make any of the omenu Sri Lankan dishes upon request, as long as folks are patient—give them a 45-minute heads-up. Going forward, Sundays will be devoted to Sri Lankan cuisine. If you miss the bu et from noon to 4, you can order Sri Lankan dishes a la carte until closing. The next Sri Lankan bu et is this Sunday, July 2.

It’s all part of a broad strategy. As a side hustle, Sivarasa currently rents a trio of Honda Metropolitan scooters from Café Nova. A few more will make their way to their second location at 655 W. Irving Park, opening within a few weeks.

“I want to see at least five to seven in the Chicago area,” he says.

@MikeSula