SYDNEY, Australia — The chef O Tama Carey is blessed with a number of remarkable origin stories. She was conceived, she said, on the banks of the Mulgrave River in Queensland. Her unusual one-letter first name came from the imagination of her father, who told her it stood for omitama, a Japanese word that he translated as “precious jewel.” (The real explanation, she said, comes down to “having hippie parents.”) And her restaurant, Lankan Filling Station, in Sydney, sprang from a series of dinners — some of Australia’s first pop-ups — that celebrated Ms. Carey’s Sri Lankan ancestry.
An island nation with a population of multiple ethnic and religious groups, Sri Lanka has historically served as an important trading post for India, Indonesia and other Southeast Asian cultures. The country’s cooking has absorbed the flavors of the broader region, as well as influences from periods of Portuguese, Dutch and British settlements and colonization. The Sri Lankan diaspora is much larger in Australia than in the United States, and though the cuisine isn’t a sizable part of our dining culture, it is far better represented here than in America.
Lankan Filling Station takes that representation and amplifies it, putting it into a trendy urban context with all the necessary accouterments: cocktails, natural wine and a narrow, moodily lit, crowded room that thrums with energy.
Ms. Carey grew up in Adelaide; her mother, who is from Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, immigrated to Australia with her family as a teenager. During Ms. Carey’s childhood, her mother rarely cooked Sri Lankan food, except when she held dinner parties. Those meals, and the food Ms. Carey ate when visiting her grandmother in Perth, gave her a solid connection to her heritage.
After she graduated from high school, Ms. Carey and her mother visited Sri Lanka together for an extended trip. When Ms. Carey continued her travel alone, she found herself in London without any money. A family friend put her in touch with a restaurant owner.
In Lankan Filling Station’s bustling, corridor-like dining room, you’ll be given a menu and a pencil to mark your selections.CreditRachel Kara Ashton for The New York Times
“I was tricked,” Ms. Carey said about her start in restaurants. “I’ve never escaped.” When she returned to Australia, she worked at an izakaya; it wasn’t until she persuaded the chef Kylie Kwong to hire her at the restaurant Billy Kwong, in Sydney, that Ms. Carey decided to make a career out of cooking.
After she left Billy Kwong, she and her friends began experimenting with pop-up dining, often serving Sri Lankan food in restaurants on nights they were closed. Eventually she took a job as the executive chef at an Italian restaurant in Sydney called Berta, where Ms. Carey quickly gained recognition for her bold and creative cooking. After she left Berta in 2014, she returned to the idea of cooking Sri Lankan food, and Lankan Filling Station opened last July.
Along with the head chef, Jemma Whiteman, Ms. Carey offers a menu of traditional Sri Lankan dishes, modified ever so slightly with modern touches. Spices are ground fresh daily, and curries that would usually be made in large batches are instead cooked to order, the proteins marinated overnight to intensify flavor. The brunch menu plays more with the crossover between Sri Lankan and Australian flavors, but the regular menu is dedicated to showcasing this complex food in all its glory.
[Don’t miss Besha Rodell’s next column. Sign up for the weekly Australia Letter for the best of our local and global coverage.]
In the bustling, corridor-like dining room, you’ll be given a menu and a pencil to mark your selections. There are snacks, like toasty cashews cooked with ghee and a kick of curry powder, or crab cutlets — deep-fried breaded crab balls that sing with a tingle of green chile and the vegetal savor of dill. You’re encouraged to choose a hopper, the lacy bowl-shaped rice flour pancake that accompanies many Sri Lankan meals. You can choose plain, or with an egg cooked into the bottom, or go for the string hoppers that are made from impossibly thin vermicelli-style rice noodles fashioned to resemble a white bird nest.
The hoppers are there to sop up your curries: prawns in a fiery combination of chile, paprika, cardamom, turmeric, cumin and fennel; or eggplant cooked lush and soft in a tomato-tamarind sauce that becomes more like a glaze, spicy and sour and sweet.
There’s an incredible dry black curry that coats the meat of the evening — usually goat or lamb — made from toasting multiple spices (including clove, cinnamon, cardamom and coriander seeds) separately until they’re on the edge of burned. They’re then ground into a powder and tossed with the meat, providing a deep, smoky, beguiling flavor.
Don’t skip over the section of the menu dedicated to sambols and pickles; in fact, I insist you order liberally from this treasure trove, or make life easy on yourself and get the mixed sambol plate. I have a particular affinity for the pol sambol — incorporating coconut, chile and lime — with its kaleidoscopic depth from pungent, cured Maldive fish.
If there are fewer than six people in your party, there are no reservations to be had. The room is packed by 6 p.m. on most nights, leading to long waits. The space can feel quite hectic, and service often gets swept up in this mild chaos, so that attention is pretty hard to come by after initial interactions. (Like wine? Buy a bottle. The futility of trying to order a second glass is, well, sobering.) And I’ve heard complaints regarding prices and portions — the former considered high, the latter small.
I take issue with the complaints about value. In a city where people regularly pay $20 for European-style small plates, it galls me to hear grumblings about dishes that include complex chile powders made from individually toasted spices, some of them quite difficult to find; curries cooked with organic ingredients; and recipes culled from a lifetime of knowledge and multiple research trips.
What is the worth of such a deep culinary history? And who gets to decide that? Lankan Filling Station is one of many incredible Sri Lankan restaurants in Australia, but it is also writing a thrilling new chapter in what that cuisine means here and now.
