Sri Lanka’s street food vocabulary – hopper bowls, kotthu rhythms on iron griddles, pol sambol ground on granite stones and jaggery palm sweets wrapped in banana leaf – tells the island’s cultural history more honestly than any museum exhibit. Guided street-food walks in Pettah market, Kandy’s Dalada Veediya and Jaffna’s palmyra-shaded stalls each deliver completely different flavour chapters.