Located at: Colombo City Centre, 137 Muttiah Road, Colombo 02, Sri Lanka

Visited on: 31st January, 2023

Beira Kitchen is Courtyard by Marriott Colombo’s all-day dining restaurant that serves local and international cuisine. Following the hotel’s opening in January 2023, the restaurant does not yet dish out its buffet on a daily basis, but instead lays it out whenever they have a decent number of reservations. We happened to visit on a day that they were serving their lunch buffet and were quite pleased with the overall experience. The restaurant is located on the ninth floor of the hotel and parking (with an elevator to the hotel) is available on the third floor of Colombo City Centre’s car park.

The spread is perhaps not (yet) as vast as other buffets that you would come across at some of Colombo’s older and more popular hotels, but was worth it for the LKR 5,750 that they charged per person. The restaurant serves alcohol after 3:00 pm, but has an interesting line-up of mocktails (all priced at LKR 1,200 each) and other non-alcoholic beverages that they offer.

While the drinks took some time to arrive, they looked bright and inviting and we were keen to try the three mocktails that we had ordered. Lavish Arrow comprised of pineapple, lime and orange juices with honey and soda, and was sweetly light and refreshing. Scented Thriller had been put together with elderflower syrup, lime, mint leaves, ginger and soda. This, too, was quite good – almost mojito-like, but a little sweeter and sprightly with the ginger. Hint Wink was made with cranberry and passion fruit juices, with lime and soda. This was a bit on the sour side and didn’t have much sweetness to it. Perhaps not something for everyone’s palate.

There was an interesting choice of salads, starters and pickles, and I couldn’t help but sense a bit of a Mediterranean influence running through most of the choices – which is great. I particularly liked the inclusion of the dried fruits, seeds and nuts, as well as a good selection of cheeses. The apple salad was great with its mayo-based dressing and topping of chopped nuts, and the chicken salad was quite tasty and unique with boiled potato and cauliflower. The vinaigrette-like dressing that I tried with my lettuce was quite nice, too – a bit like a twist on the conventional vinaigrette with a nice local hint to it.

There were two choices of soup on the day – cream of pumpkin, which we picked, and a broth with chicken and vegetables. The soup was definitely under-seasoned, but I got the impression that this was deliberate. The salt and pepper grinders at the table got a flex with this one! The choice of bread was decent, too, with the texture of the seed-topped white roll in the image below being nice and soft.

Everyone’s favourite from the main course was the steamed fish with its cilantro-lime, herby-tart sauce that was absolutely delicious. It was like a toned down but flavoursome version of your conventional steamed fish in chilli-lime sauce. Needless to say, everyone went for seconds. A close second was the devilled kankun, whose name seemed a little misleading as its sauce was more sweet-and-soy than ‘devilled’. But whatever it was, it was pretty good. The pilaf was light and had a subtle but pleasant flavour to it as well. The pork chop with pineapple wasn’t bad either, with a nice barbeque-like flavour on its crust. I’m told that the wok-fried vegetable, which I missed out on trying, was pretty good, too.

A few things that could have used a bit of tweaking included the honey-glazed beetroot – whose sweetness definitely came from the root vegetable itself rather than from honey, the noodles – which could have used a bit more seasoning, and the prawns in the prawn curry – which also seemed unseasoned. Nothing that marred the experience of the meal, but definitely a few things that can be worked on.

Beira Kitchen had a few eye-catching desserts, and there was nothing to complain about the ones that we tried. There were two stand-outs there, the first being the salted caramel (yeah, the name of it was just ‘salted caramel’ – nomenclature, in general, is perhaps one area that Beira Kitchen could put a little more thought into), which was delectable but not too sweet or rich or anything of the guilty sort that would stop you from having just that little bit more. The other was the base of the key lime pie – baklava-like in taste and texture, and such a delight. I wished they would have a dessert of this base alone as an option!

Of course, these are early days and there’s still a long way to go for Beira Kitchen. But based on this visit, things are looking promising. And we look forward to more exciting culinary experiences from Beira Kitchen and Courtyard by Marriott Colombo in the future.

Yummy Rating: 4.0 / 5.0