Eating in the Jungle at Jungle Beach, Sri Lanka

While doing some research on top beaches in Sri Lanka, Jungle Beach was mentioned a couple of times as an interesting, slightly off the tourist track, place to explore. What does a beach have to do with the Travel Bites blog...we thought absolutely nothing. We were wrong.

About 3km south of Galle we turned off the Colombo Galle highway and slowly made our way down a very narrow and badly surfaced road. As the road quickly deteriorated into a rocky track we decided to grant our little car and its tyres mercy and abandoned the car to travel on foot. Past a giant white pagoda, down and up a hill and finally down a steep jungle track, we came out to a beach clearing and found Jungle Beach. For what is quite a small, but beautiful beach, completely hidden and more accessible by boat then other forms of transport, we were surprised to find a makeshift seafood restaurant set up ready to tempt with icy cold beers, cocktails and fresh seafood of course. They really did have the market cornered here and could have charged anything but the prices were ok and the location was stunning so we thought "why not?"

We were intrigued by the Jumbo Prawns that looked more like medium sized lobster than prawns, so we opted for two of those bad boys, accompanied by chips and salad. The beer arrived quickly and it's sub zero temperature was appreciated and quite unanticipated given the location! The mojito was sadly disappointing, arriving a good 30 minutes later and containing more undissolved sugar than mint. If only I could bring myself to like beer....

Lunch showed up looking quite impressive. The prawns had been splayed and cooked with liberal doses of garlic, onion and pepper. A nice combination of flavours, but one that did not exactly let the true flavour of the prawns shine through. The salad was simple, yet fresh which provided a nice balance to the grease hit of the prawns and French fries. It was mainly shredded cabbage and carrot with thin strips of pineapple that gave the salad some sweet moisture.

RECOMMENDED

The meal was not cheap. It was not incredible and i certainly would not send someone off into the wild to track down this place for the sake of the food.  But given that it was set on an idyllic beach in the middle of nowhere, and that it offered fresh food which was nice enough, I would recommend hunting out the beach and having a beer if nothing else. The food - take it or leave it in my book.




The bill (for 2):
2 x Jumbo prawns served with salad and chips
TOTAL: 3000 Rupees (Approx. US$23)

Restaurant address:Jungle Beach, Sri Lanka

for exact locations of all reviewed restaurants, take a look at our map.

Just in case you were wondering how big these things were...