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Mention Sri Lankan food to most Penang diners, and the response is often a pause. Fried rice, maybe. Curry, definitely. Beyond that, the cuisine remains something of a blank space on the local dining map, overshadowed by its louder, more familiar neighbours from South India.
Aliyaa is betting that this is about to change.
The restaurant has taken over 44 and 46 Lebuh Melayu, two heritage shophouses in the heart of Georgetown, and built a menu that leans into everything unfamiliar rather than softening it for a local crowd. There is a whole crab dish that arrives with an apron. A nine course tasting menu that runs close to two hours. And a spice vocabulary, kalupol, varuval, sothi, that most diners walking in will be encountering for the first time.
A shophouse, restored rather than reinvented
Step inside and the building does most of the early talking. The original timber roof trusses remain exposed overhead, pitched high above a floor that shifts between terracotta tile and dark timber as the space moves from room to room. The louvred shutters and panelled doors, the kind found across George Town’s UNESCO-listed core, have been kept rather than replaced.
Against that backdrop, Aliyaa has added its own layer. Brass pendant lights hang low over marble topped tables. Cane backed chairs in black frames sit against dark timber cabinetry with woven panel doors. On one wall, nine framed illustrations of patterned elephants run in a grid, a quiet reference to the restaurant’s own elephant emblem. Elsewhere, black panels etched with Tamil and Sinhala script sit near black and white photographs of Sri Lankan street scenes and stilt fishermen, and tiffin carriers are displayed on open shelving like small artefacts. All the photographs were taken with passion by the owner, Abbi Kanthasamy.
The dining room unfolds gradually rather than all at once, a function of the shophouse’s narrow footprint. Diners move through intimate nooks and a corridor lined with framed photography before the space opens up at the top of the stairs, where a full bar runs the length of one wall. Arched, internally lit shelving holds the spirits there, and a run of industrial chrome pendant lamps gives the upper floor a noticeably different temperature, dimmer, more evening than dinner.
Before the tasting menu even begins, there is the whole Sri Lankan crab, priced separately from the rest of the menu and treated as an event of its own. It arrives whole, bathed in a rich, spiced gravy, with an apron handed over before the shell is cracked. The message is clear enough: this is not a dish built for tidy eating.
That same appetite for doing things properly runs through The Aliyaa Experience, the restaurant’s nine course chef’s degustation, priced at RM95++ per person with a minimum of two guests. It opens with a fish cutlet, hand flaked and fried to order, before moving through chicken kalupol, prawn sothi, and a pineapple curry that resists the sweetness most diners expect from the fruit. Mutton varuval, a smoky eggplant salad, and a sambal quartet follow, before dunthel bath, a ghee rice finished with crisp fried shallots, ties the table together. Sweet appam, a coconut pancake softened with palm sugar and cardamom, closes the meal. A vegetarian version of the degustation is available on request.
In addition to the tasting menu, guests can also choose from an A La Carte Menu offering a wide selection of individual Sri Lankan specialties.
Mocktails, Spice Route, Pola Bloom, and Lanka Boi among them, are poured alongside the courses, designed to sit with the spice rather than cut against it. Once the plates are cleared, the evening does not simply end. Guests are invited upstairs, where the bar takes over and the night finds a second gear.
There is an easier version of this restaurant that Aliyaa could have opened, one with a shorter menu, familiar dishes, and none of the ceremony around a whole crab or a nine course commitment. It chose the harder one instead.
Whether Georgetown’s diners take to a two hour tasting menu on a heritage street better known for char koay teow and clan jetties remains to be seen. But the bet itself, that there is room in Penang for Sri Lankan food told in full, rather than in shorthand, is the more interesting story here.
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