Lakruwana

Lakruwana sits at 668 Bay Street in Stapleton, on Staten Island’s north shore, in a rose-red corner building with elephants and dancers painted on the facade. The family opened the first chapter in Manhattan in September 1995 (house history puts the original at West 44th Street near Ninth Avenue) before settling into this Staten Island room. Owner-chef Jayantha Wijesinghe cooks with general manager Julia Wijesinghe; the house still frames the project as a family Sri Lankan restaurant built around indigenous spices and a dining room packed with masks, murals, flags, and sculpture.

That geography matters for this city’s South Asian map. Queens covers Indian, Pakistani, Bangla, Nepali, Tibetan, and Indo-Caribbean corridors; Staten Island holds the densest Sri Lankan restaurant cluster. Lakruwana is the Michelin Guide and Infatuation-backed sit-down when you want hoppers, kottu roti, and lamprais without pretending Manhattan has a deep Sri Lankan strip. New Asha on Victory Boulevard is the smaller counter-service alternative if you want Viji Devadas to plate a mixed curry lunch; Sagara Food City is the grocery-with-kottu stop when you only need takeout.

Come for a weekend buffet line or a weekday banana-leaf lamprais. Bring wine or beer if you drink: the room is BYOB. Groups of six or fewer are first come, first served; larger parties use the house request form. For Southern California’s Sri Lankan market-deli lane, compare Baja Subs in our Los Angeles guide.

The Infatuation calls Lakruwana one of the best Sri Lankan rooms in the city and one of New York’s strongest all-you-can-eat deals on weekends: clay pots of fried rice, egg curry, dal, and eggplant cooked down until it tastes like a different vegetable, with incense and pork curry in the air while you wait. On weekdays it steers diners to à la carte lamprais, the banana-leaf packet meal. The Michelin Guide copy centers street-food hits: kottu roti stir-fried with godamba bread, chicken, vegetables, and curry; hoppers as bowl-shaped crepes with yellow fish curry; and an oversized shareable platter, plus heat that lands hotter than mild North Indian defaults.

The New York Times has covered the room more than once, including a 2013 dining feature on clay-pot service and a 2025 T Magazine piece that treats Lakruwana as part museum, part restaurant: a north-shore cultural mainstay with a weekend curry buffet and custard-like desserts. Public reviews (Google often sits around 4.5 across a large sample) repeat lamprais, kottu, hoppers, cutlets, mango lassi, the maximalist decor, and owners who work the floor. Friction shows up as weekend waits, real chile heat, and weekday hour quirks (some listings show a mid-afternoon break). Confirm before you ferry over for a late lunch.

Vegetarians can work lamprais, vegetable kottu, hoppers, dal, and eggplant curries; the loudest orders still include pork, chicken, fish, and shrimp. This is a destination ferry-or-drive meal, not a Jackson Heights walk-up between sari shops.