Doctor by day, café captain by night - The Morning

This week, we engaged in a dialogue with a lively and cheerful individual – a doctor and the visionary behind Coffee Colombo.

I am the type who is always excited to wake up and wake everyone up. I usually start by standing on my balcony, appreciating the Sri Lankan blue, cloudless skies, and screaming, ‘good morning’ to everyone that I meet.

I end up staying up pretty late every day, mostly until midnight, but I make sure to have either black tea with no sugar or strong filter coffee. After that, I do my night skincare routine and share every detail of my day with my loved ones. Sharing and talking about my day make it complete.

Generally, I am someone who believes that being passionate about everything you do is the key to success. My love for meeting people, interacting, and bringing them together – which I truly believe is my purpose – makes it effortless. Most importantly, Coffee Colombo serves authentic Jaffna cuisine, which is comfort food to me. It comes straight from our hearts and I am more than proud to bring a piece of my hometown to Colombo, and perhaps, worldwide.

Number one is authenticity. It is not easy to find good Jaffna food in Colombo. Every dish on the menu has been carefully curated and made to perfection, just like how we would cook for a family.

It is unique, and by that, I do not only mean the taste of Jaffna cuisine itself but also the way we have put together the dishes. A good example would be our best-seller, Jaffna crab pittu. The dish comes with white pittu, crab, pol sambol, and crab gravy. You can add on anything, but you can’t change the core set. It is assembled in a way that brings out the best flavours when eaten together.

Our little café radiates Tamil culture – may it be the simple interior, the music we play, and even celebrating festivities like Deepavali. I even go the extra mile to dress in traditional wear whenever possible. Coffee Colombo is an experience and I would love for everyone to live it, at least once.

I am a Jaffna Tamil. As I mentioned earlier, this is everyday home food to me. We don’t glorify our cuisine like we do with Italian, American, or even fast food, for that matter. There was a gap in the market, and I was quick to notice it.

Coffee Colombo was started five years ago as a standard café with Instagram-worthy food and that was not sustainable. There are plenty of places doing that, and I didn’t want to be in a race with all of them. We started with one dish, Jaffna crab pittu, which became viral, and here we are today, serving probably the best Jaffna food in Colombo.

As for ensuring its authenticity, all the recipes are my mother’s and we have trained our staff accordingly. Our spices, seafood, and even coconuts come all the way from Jaffna to sustain the taste. All the curries are quality-checked personally every day by myself and my mother to maintain the standard of every dish. Moreover, I am personally present at Coffee Colombo after work to ensure operations run smoothly.

The foundation for both, or the formula for any career, is similar. In medicine, you need to always be ready to learn, especially from your seniors or those with better experience. Accepting your mistakes without justifying them and actively reflecting on how to avoid repeating them is crucial in medicine, just as it is in business. Improvising, learning, and applying is ‘the prescription’ and ‘the recipe’.

There are no black-and-white, hard-and-fast rules in business. Every business model is different, just as every patient is different. Not everyone needs to like my crab curry and not every patient needs to respond to the same treatment.

Substituting negative thoughts with positive ones makes an enormous difference in your attitude. Thoughts are always followed by actions, which in turn lead to consequences and reactions. By maintaining positive thoughts, I always believe my results will be positive, so why stress?

Sleeping with a clear mind, waking up fresh, and not carrying the previous day’s baggage help improve the quality of my day.

I always have something to look forward to, even if it’s as simple as having a chai tea or going for a car drive at the end of the day. I consider that a self-treat and it keeps me motivated throughout the day.

Most importantly, my rule of thumb is that I don’t play a game if I can’t own it, so I always focus on what I believe is my forte.

Believe in your intuition. Be humbly confident but not overconfident because the day you think you know it all is the day you stop becoming a better version of yourself.

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