About DC Restaurant Openings
A guide to the newest places to eat and drink.
Was the incongruous Sri Lankan restaurant that existed for a few years in a staid Chevy Chase DC neighborhood in the 2010s just an apparition? It felt that way until we saw a familiar name—Banana Leaf—pop up on Google Maps in Manassas earlier this year.
This new suburban incarnation was a dream deferred for owner Danushka Jayawardena, who immigrated to the US at age 17 from Chilaw, Sri Lanka. Jayawardena remembers visiting his friend Raj Perera’s restaurant—the original Banana Leaf—in New York City and marveling at how excited American diners had been to try Sri Lankan specialties.
“I said, ‘I want to open a restaurant in DC, because this is the capital,’ ” Jayawardena recalls. “I want my home country’s food in the capital.”
The Sri Lankan ambassador attended the 2014 grand opening of Jayawardena and Perera’s outpost on Connecticut Avenue. Jayawardena blames its closure three years later on a lack of parking. But he remained motivated by a pride in Sri Lankan cooking and hoped to reopen.
It took almost a decade, during which Jayawardena worked in a Falls Church post office while searching for an affordable space. Banana Leaf’s new Manassas home is roomy and filled with symbols of Sri Lankan pride, such as photos of the famous Sigiriya rock fortress and a menu emblazoned with “We Are Sri Lankan” in a huge font.
Ask a server what to order and they’ll invariably point you to the lamprais. When the banana-leaf packet arrives, extract the toothpicks that hold it together, and be careful of the hot steam billowing from the meal hidden inside: a neat mound of yellow rice topped with—in counterclockwise order—a delicately curried protein of your choice, a fish croquette, candy-sweet fried eggplant, coconut-cashew curry, a tangy onion relish, fried shards of ash plantain, and, sometimes, a funky dried-fish-and-coconut condiment.
The distinctive starches are fun vehicles for curry, too. Pittu are crumbly, cylindrical steamed rice-and-coconut cakes. String hoppers—thin mats of rice-flour noodles—look like little doilies. And kotthu is a flavorful stir-fry of shredded paratha (griddled flatbread), in the spirit of matzo brei or Ethiopian fit-fit.
Then there’s the ambul thial, a sophisticated and somewhat intimidating preparation of tuna cooked to the point of dessication along with black pepper, garlic, and goraka (also known as Garcinia cambogia, a tart tropical fruit once dubiously promoted by Dr. Oz as a weight-loss secret). The flavor is intense, and you’re unlikely to find it anywhere else in the region.
As far as we can tell, Banana Leaf is the only Sri Lankan restaurant in the Washington area, creating challenges for Jayawardena. Every month, he drives to a cluster of Sri Lankan grocery stores on Staten Island to source ingredients. But after eight years with no outlet, the restaurateur is excited to entrench and expand his business. He’s planning to secure an import license for Sri Lankan fish and crab, and soon he’ll open another location in Wheaton. Banana Leaf, he hopes, is back for good.
This article appears in the January 2026 issue of Washingtonian.
Ike Allen covers politics, food, culture, and transportation in DC and writes the monthly Hidden Eats column for the magazine. He grew up in DC.
