Sambol, East Street: 'I will now be taking payment in mutton rolls'
A lovely gambol through spice and all things nice
Well, would you look at that — Christmas is almost upon us! Is The Bristol Sauce going to be pausing over the festive period? Absolutely not. Well we might take a small break from publishing on 24th, but we will be back on 28th with a new review. There’s no rest for the wicked, wicked food critic. A final reminder that you can gift great food writing and unparalleled local restaurant insight to your loved one for a whole year by giving them a subscription to The Bristol Sauce. It’ll put a great big smile on my face too. Until next time — merry Christmas! Love from Meg x
I have decided that South Bristol’s East Street, one of the city’s oldest and most eclectic roads, is best described in limerick:
Welcome to East Street Bedmo.
An afternoon here is quite rando.
Escape from a room, sell your heirlooms,
And round off with a curry at Sambol.
You’re welcome, East Street marketing campaigns. I will take payment in mutton rolls.
And it’s funny to think that just 300 years ago, where now stands betting shops and Wetherspoons, was once the rural Somerset village of Bedminster, named so for the Christian baptisms (Beydd is Celtic for baptism) that happened in the Malago river.
As archaeologists discovered earlier this year, that Georgian community relied on a water mill to grind the villagers’ flour just a few steps behind where now stands Bristol’s newest Sri Lankan restaurant. Those villagers would have never seen a grain of rice before, let alone imagine it could form flour and be transformed into the featherlight, bowl-shaped hoppers that define this South Asian cuisine.
Fast forward to 2025 and the UK’s appetite for curried foods has exploded beyond chicken korma. Sri Lankan restaurants have been increasing in number and popularity and the cuisine finally declared trendy by Romesh Ranganathan in The Guardian in 2020.
In Bristol, we still just about have the convivial hubbub of Cheltenham-born chain The Coconut Tree after the company went into administration a month ago, and the metropolitan cool of Nadu to name just a couple of Sri Lankan offerings. But while The Coconut Tree serves dhal and kotthu in a street-style atmosphere with a side of hoarse voice and buzzing ear (from the loudspeakers - don’t worry these are not side effects of turmeric), Sambol is more poised, yet still holding onto cosiness.
To call it a grown up TCT would be doing a disservice to the facets that define it as very much its own venture. And the fact that since mass-expansion across the country, TCT is now pretty subpar.
Dishes are transported from kitchen to table via rattan basket, and create a rainbow of sauces and sides before us. Soft chicken thigh swims in its own spicy marinade, a savoury soup in which oil droplets and sweet red onions bob gently.
Black pork belly is a signature dry Sri Lankan curry, laden with roasted spices and accompanied by pickled cucumber, but it’s the gamey smoked goat curry crowned with a dollop of sweet-sour date lime chutney that takes first place. A mouthful of this, a taste of that is the way to dine at Sambol, where the neon yellow coconut squash curry offers a creamy contrast to dark meaty flavours, and a juicy tropical achcharu (fruit pickle) topped with chilli salt makes an exquisite match with classic mutton rolls encased in crispy deep fried pastry.
The team behind Sambol, Ceylon & Beyond, seem to have transposed their well-loved street food seamlessly into this new permanent home in Bedminster — which will gladden existing fans — and though it sometimes self-brands as Sri Lankan fusion, the menu is about as authentic as it gets: hoppers, kothu, Negombo prawn curry and all.
Watching the South Bristol world go by whilst tucking into one of many curries and pickles is a treat, especially when every ten minutes we witness someone squashing a disgruntled, wintered face against the glass front to see what kind of feasting is going on behind the red-tiled facade. We’re still on East Street, Toto.
Apparently Sambol will be the renovating the kitchen in early January — so time your visit wisely. I land back in Bristol with a sharp slap to the senses when I reemerge onto the December pavement and immediately take to SkyScanner in search of cheap flights to Colombo.
All words and photos by Caitlin Johnson-Bowring, edited by Meg Houghton-Gilmour
Sambol, 61 East St, Bedminster, BS3 4HB
The Bristol Sauce is an AI free publication — all our work is written and edited by humans.
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Fantastic write-up on Sri Lankan flavors beyond the korma-industrial complex. The detail about hoppers being made from rice flour connects nicely to that Bedminster mill history, kinda wild how food tech evolves on the same spot. That smoked goat curry with date lime chutney sounds unreal, the sweet-sour contrast with gamey meat is one of those flavour marriages that just works. Been seeinga lot more Sri Lankan spots gaining traction lately and this sounds like the kind of plac ethat earns it.
There does seem to be a slow moving march towards Sri Lankan food these days, and I’m here for it.