Kottuville’s US-style food truck hits the streets

By David Ebert

Food trucks have become a bit of a phenomenon in the United States, with an estimated 15 to 20,000 of them offering up a choice of quick on-the-go street food and even gourmet meals all around the country. It’s an exciting dining concept that is, if you could excuse the pun, going places.

It was only a matter of time one felt, when someone would finally catch on here and it’s proven to be a hit so far. ‘Kottuville,’ the city’s first fast-food truck that cooks up and serves Sri Lanka’s all-time favourite late night street food, the famous kottu rotti in a mouth-watering array of variants.

So if you’ve never had a ‘brockwurst kottu’ or another one of their specialty kottus but maybe this time mixed with another local legend, hot butter cuttlefish, keep an eye out on their Facebook page to know just where to go.

Kottuville promises to be just where it is needed; outside the office blocks or even parked outside your favourite nightspot to tempt you with a little pre-bedtime snack. And that is what I’m beginning to love about the concept; that there is a good possibility that it may come to where you most probably will be on any given day or night out.

Two of the brains behind the idea are CEO Sanjeewa Weerasinghe and CFO Deshraam Ramachandran, who decided to give up their day jobs to make the food truck concept a reality in Sri Lanka.

“To tell you the truth, this idea didn’t start with the truck but with the kottu and we wanted to make a brand out of it. The initial idea was to start a restaurant first of all but then as we went on we got some ideas from some friends as well and we decided to start with a truck like you’d get in New York or Los Angeles,” stated Sanjeewa.

According to the duo, they decided on the kottu because of its firm standing as a standard favourite and well as its versatility in how easy it is for the recipe to be played around with different ingredients to create more exotic flavours that suit a varied palate.

“There’s so much you can do with kottu. For example we give our dishes a Chinese flavour like our hot butter cuttlefish kottu, or a Western twist with the brockwurst kottu and even Indian, like our paneer kottu for vegetarians.  You could do whatever you want because the possibilities are endless with a dish like this,” Deshraam added.

The recipes are home-grown they revealed; experimented with countless times among friends to get just the right mix for just the right kottu.

“We did get a little help from our friends but at the end of the day it’s all our doing but we’ve probably spent a couple of months in the kitchen experimenting, trying out different flavours, handing out samples to friends and family and it will be a continuing process until we are satisfied with what we want the final product to be,” added Deshraam.

In addition, they explained that once the signature Kottuville taste has been finalised, they would then be in a position to standardise their product and assure their diners a taste and quality that doesn’t vary. In a business such as this, location is everything and deciding on where to strategically position your food truck would be half of the battle fought.

“These days we are now testing out locations and will be starting regular operations from the first week of April. We’ve targeted specific places like the Navam Mawatha, Orion City and near CH&FC; mostly places where the hip younger crowd are. It’s a work-in-progress at the moment and we will test the locations and depending on which places have the best demand, we will be doing our schedule as we go,” explained Sanjeewa.

The duo also revealed plans to use social media such as Facebook to get customer feedback using even online polls to decide where best to park the trucks on a busy day.  “It’s basically about wherever the customer wants us to be, we would be there. That’s the advantage with the truck; we are mobile so we can be anywhere you want us to be,” Deshraam added.

Kottuville plans to increase the number of trucks very soon, now that their experiment has paid off, so I personally am keeping my eyes peeled for a lunchtime or maybe dinner hot butter cuttlefish kottu.