Local Knowledge: Upali’s

At 6pm on a Monday night, the spacious dining room at Upali’s in Glen Waverley is quiet. Takeaway orders are ringing through, and a handful of customers chat under the “wall of fame” – hung plates signed by Sri Lankan celebrities who’ve dined here – but it’s mostly empty.

Lunch trade, on the other hand, is when Upali’s comes alive. Melbourne’s Sri Lankan community flocks for a taste of home during what is traditionally the biggest meal of the day in Sri Lanka. The set lunch menu here is excellent value. It consists of rice, three vegetable curries, one meat or seafood curry, papadams and sambols (condiments to be eaten on the side), all for $15.95.

Local workers and students at nearby Monash, Deakin and Holmesglen campuses filter through during the day for street-style snacks such as roti with melted cheese and diced red onion, kottu roti (small squares of roti stir-fried with vegetables, spices, egg and meat – usually chicken), and hoppers (bowl-shaped fermented rice and coconut crepes served either plain or with an egg, and eaten with sambols).

Owners David and Cathy Cruse ran a pub for 26 years in Knox before they opened the original Upali’s in Colombo about six years ago. The husband-and-wife team had attempted retirement, but David was “bored to tears”. His cricket buddy, named Upali Dharmadas, encouraged them to open the diner and offered to back them financially. Two years later Cathy moved back to Melbourne to open the second Upali’s in Glen Waverley, where the menu is almost identical to the original.

For an island around the size of Tasmania, Sri Lanka’s cuisine is diverse and dense. The food, while distinct, has been marked by influences from India, Malaysia and Indonesia; the Arabic spice trade; and European colonisers.

Sri Lankan dishes are rarely served by themselves, and certain pairings work better than others. “You can’t just have a curry and rice, you need to have the different layers,” says Cathy.

For example, gotu kola sambolaya, a salad of pennywort leaf, coconut, green chilli and onion chopped to a fluffy tabouli texture, is best eaten with rice. Cooked sambols such as seeni sambolaya (sweet onion jam with curry leaves, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom and tamarind juice) and coconut sambol (grated coconut, dried chilli and red onion) are spooned onto roti or hoppers for breakfast or dinner, but not mixed into curries.

Most diners here order a selection of curries, devilled dishes (meat or cashew stir-fried in a sweet-and-sticky sauce), rice, breads and sambols. Then, “just put everything in the middle,” says David, who compares ordering a beef curry on its own to ordering a plain steak.

Upali’s curries are fiery and focused. Rather than a mix of vegetables, it’s more common to see a curry of just one vegetable – jackfruit, pumpkin, potatoes or even raw cashews – cooked with onions, garlic, chilli, coconut milk and spices. The menu explains that each dish is cooked to its region’s spice preference. If you see a ramekin of luminescent green sauce on the table and you can’t handle heat, go easy. It’s made in-house from fresh green chillies, onion and garlic, and it’ll hit you in the nose. The dry spices, ordered in from Sri Lanka, are just as pungent and distinct. One sambol tastes strongly of cloves, another of cardamom.

The five chefs in the kitchen are all former Tamil refugees from the northern part of Sri Lanka, and David is from a village just outside of Colombo. Much of David’s extended family has lived in Australia since the 1940s. His mother’s family moved to Australia after World War II, but his father was not able to emigrate, so both of his parents remained in Sri Lanka. David moved here when he was 19 and met Cathy while working at a Melbourne hotel.

“He was in room service and I was a breakfast waitress,” says Cathy. “Now it’s 33 years and four children later.”

David spends most of his time in Colombo (Cathy manages the Melbourne eatery), but he was in Melbourne when Sri Lanka was rocked by the Easter Sunday terror attacks that killed 257 people in 2019.

Cathy broke the news to diners and staff in Melbourne. “All through lunch every single person had their phone out,” she says. “For the next couple of days everyone was working but no one was really concentrating. It was very quiet, very sombre.”

David returned to Colombo two weeks after the bombings, to an empty restaurant and a city that was almost unrecognisable.

“He cried when he rang me because he said it’s just so sad the streets are empty, the hotels are empty, the locals aren’t going out,” Cathy says.

Back in Melbourne, the staff members donated their tips to Sri Lankan hospitals.

“Normally the staff get a few dollars a night,” Cathy says. “But within a couple of days $320 was put in that jar.”

Upali’s
248 Blackburn Road, Glen Waverley
(03) 9887 6700

Hours:
Sun & Mon 11am–9pm
Wed & Thu 11am–9pm
Fri & Sat 11am–10pm

upalismelbourne.com.au

This article first appeared on Broadsheet on July 23, 2019 and was updated on September 15, 2023. Some details may have changed since publication.