Recipe: Rambutan’s Chef Cynthia Shanmugalingam On The Sharing Dish To Please A Crowd

When it comes to hosting a dinner party, there’s a lot to think about: the table settings, the playlist, the drinks, the invite list... But a true host knows that, really, it comes down to one thing: the food. Get the main dish right, and everything will fall into place around it. After all, who cares about matching plates when what’s served on it tastes like heaven?

With this in mind, Service95 turned to Cynthia Shanmugalingam – the chef and owner of one of our favourite London restaurants, Rambutan – for some culinary advice. Her Sri Lankan restaurant is tucked away among the wonderfully foodie chaos of Borough Market, serving up a flavour explosion of traditional Tamil dishes with a twist – think hot butter squid buns to start, followed by succulent hogget chops and fragrant cashew and charred leek curry, all mopped up with lemongrass butter roti.

Shanmugalingam’s food is vibrant, truly delicious and designed to be shared – so during a season filled with traditional (and let’s face it, often dry) turkey dinners, who better to help us plan a vibrant main course that will please any crowd?

“I used to host [dinner parties regularly] before I started a restaurant, but now I feel like Rambutan is a dinner party every night,” she says. “We talk a lot about the analogy of hosting a dinner party at the restaurant: what you’d like your guests to feel; if someone came round your house and wanted something, how would you react? I still have a lot of my big Tamil family over for lunch or dinner. There’s a special kind of chaotic loveliness to doing that.”

When it comes to serving a crowd, her dish of choice is always a curry. “It’s the ultimate centrepiece [when it comes to ] dinner party cooking: it’s simple to make, nourishing to eat, beautiful to look at and made for sharing,” says Shanmugalingam. “[Writer and chef] Elizabeth David said that ‘good food was always trouble’, and I love the idea that it’s the labour that makes it a gift – you getting in all the ingredients, making it nice and taking care of people.”

The chef’s top tip for hosting: do all the ‘trouble’ in advance. “Try and get as much done the night before, so it’s mainly assembling and having a fun time on the day,” she says. After all, the beauty of a dinner part is that “it is so fun to bring people together, to get the tunes right and light candles and feed them and look after them. You’re not rushed, there’s no afterparty, it’s just lovely.”

Here, Shanmugalingan shares the recipe she’ll be cooking for guests this season...

Cynthia Shanmugalingan’s Fried Sweet Plantain Curry

“I love this plantain curry – it’s sweet, spicy, crunchy and naturally vegan – and it’s kind of a mash-up of Trinidad and Sri Lanka, which makes it the perfect London dinner party story. I’d never have cooked with this kind of plantain until my old housemate Lara and her mum Ingy showed me how. It’s lovely with just plain rice, a few sambols and maybe some quick rotis.”

Serves 2-3 (simply double or triple to recipe to serve a bigger crowd)

1-2 tbsp coconut or vegetable oil
2 ripe, almost black yellow plantains, peeled and sliced
1 red onion, peeled and finely sliced lengthways
2 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
10 fresh curry leaves
2 green chillies, slit lengthways
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1⁄2 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp salt, or to taste
1 lemongrass stalk, bruised
100ml tinned coconut milk
1⁄4 tsp Sri Lankan curry powder
1⁄2 tsp ground turmeric

1. Start off by shallow frying the plantain. Get ready by setting aside a large baking sheet with a wire rack on top to place the fried slices when they’re done. Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a frying pan over a medium-high heat. When hot, lower in the plantain slices and fry until golden brown, then flip them over and fry on the other side. This should take around 30 seconds on each side. Allow them to dry on the rack so they stay nice and crispy.

2. To make the curry, fry the onion in the same pan you cooked the plantain using the remaining oil over a medium-high heat. When it starts to brown, add the garlic, and about 30 seconds later add the curry leaves, chillies, mustard seeds, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, salt and the lemongrass. Stir-fry for about 1 minute until fragrant, then add the coconut milk, Sri Lankan curry powder and turmeric. Cook over a high heat for 3-5 minutes so that the coconut milk has had time to thicken slightly.

3. To plate up, mix two-thirds of the fried plantain into the curry, and dish out the whole curry into a bowl. Finish by arranging the remaining fried plantains on top so they remain crispy.

Cynthia Shanmugalingam is the chef and owner of Rambutan, and the author of Rambutan: Recipes from Sri Lanka

Olivia McCrea-Hedley is Copy & Production Editor at Service95