Spice of life: This restaurant brings Sri Lankan street food to the Pioneer Valley

Editor’s note: This story is part of an occasional series, “Breaking Bread,” which explores the crossroads of food, culture and business in the Pioneer Valley. We welcome suggestions on restaurants to cover. Email ideas to nsampath@repub.com

CHICOPEE — It’s a Friday just after 10 a.m. and Dee Fernando is getting her day started. She wears a green shirt with the name of her restaurant in orange: Island Spice.

“Hi,” she says with a smile from behind the counter. “What would you like to eat?”

If you’ve driven Center Street in Chicopee, you’ve passed the Sri Lankan eatery, whose windows are painted with the country’s flag, a palm tree with coconuts and flowers. Inside hang traditional artworks, while religious music from the South Asian island plays on a TV.

Dee’s husband, Welisarage “Kirul” Fernando, dreamed of bringing tastes of their home country to Chicopee, but wasn’t sure if Sri Lankan food would sell back in the early 2000s. “He had to make sure he was making enough of a profit to raise his four kids,” said Kawinthi Busha, the oldest of the couple’s three daughters.

Kirul Fernando had a knack for entrepreneurship, owning other businesses in the area from 1999 to 2022, Busha said. In high school, she helped her father at one of his restaurants, a pizza joint in Chicopee. He and Dee opened Island Spice in October 2023 after operating a food truck for a year.

“It was almost like a love language for my dad — being able to feed people and bring the community together,” said Malinthi Fernando, the couple’s middle daughter.

But just three months later, in January 2024, Kirul was hospitalized after a surgery and died that August at age 63. His death was the second loss the family faced in two years. In 2023, the couple lost their oldest child and only son, Kaween Fernando. He was 36.

Both her son and her husband shared a love of cooking and creating unique recipes. The loss of Kirul and Kaween has taken a toll on the family, but keeping the restaurant open is Dee’s way of remembering them.

The Fernandos lived in Sri Lanka, a tropical country of 22 million people, until the late 1980s. Many of the recipes Island Spice offers were passed down over generations, or created by Dee or Kirul, who once worked as a cook on an international ship.

“He taught me so much about working in a kitchen,” Dee said, as she cracked an egg on a stovetop, and added carrots, diced ginger and garlic and green onions. She used two “choppers” to blend the ingredients, their metal edges clanging with each tap.

“On the streets in Sri Lanka, this sounds like music,” she said.

On the grill: chicken kottu, a savory street food dish.

Vegetables and an egg sizzle on the stovetop. Coconut milk bubbles in a wok-like dish, thrown-in spices adding color. She plops in chicken.

As Dee plates the food, she mixes the vegetables, egg and chicken curry together with a chopped up roti — an unleavened disc of bread shared among several global cuisines, including in East African, South Asian and Caribbean cultures.

It’s Busha’s favorite homemade meal. “It’s so comforting and reminds me of trips to Sri Lanka with my cousins,” she said.

Here in Chicopee, some of the combo platters are fondly named after Sri Lankan places. The “174 Peralanda,” a dish that comes with chicken curry, tempered potato and eggplant moju (a pickled and spiced vegetable side), is particularly meaningful to Dee — and was to Kirul.

It’s the address the couple shared after they got married. “My husband grew up in that house,” Dee said. It was the home passed down to him through the family.

Other dishes carry the names of cities, like “The Colombo” and “The Jaffna,” as well as “The Sigiriya,” an ancient rock fortress in the center of the country.

Family’s migration

In the early ‘90s, Dee and her son, Kaween, crossed oceans to meet Kirul in New York City, where he was working. As the years went on, the family added three daughters: Busha, Malinthi and their youngest, Dinithi Fernando.

In 1999, the Fernandos moved to Chicopee. Dee still lives in the house she and her husband purchased that year. Kirul ran Six Corners Pizza in Springfield, which was open for 12 years, and Slicery in Chicopee.

“My parents were holding onto the hope of making an impression with Sri Lankan food in Chicopee,” said Busha.

The Fernandos took the plunge in 2022, starting the food truck as a hobby, after being encouraged by their friends. There were challenges in the beginning, Dee said. “It was hard to explain Sri Lankan food to people who didn’t know what it was,” Dee said. Her daughters suggested using social media to display their vibrant dishes, including street food, fusion foods like curry fries and island tacos, and snacks.

Malinthi now runs the restaurant’s Facebook page, which has over 1,000 followers, and its Instagram account.

The early success of the food truck helped the Fernandos land their spot at 32 Center St., said Steve Huntley, executive director of Valley Opportunity Council, an anti-poverty organization in Hampden County.

The organization spent $1.35 million on 26-32 Center St., and has been working to convert what was once a “problem property” into a thriving part of the downtown. “Island Spice was a prime choice to revitalize the center,” said Huntley. “They were successful and already had a following.”

Dee employs four people at the restaurant. She is unsure if she’ll expand beyond Chicopee and the food truck yet, but she is trying to grow the menu.

“I want to apply for a liquor license so that we can offer Sri Lankan beer and wine,” she said. “I also have ideas about desserts I want to add to the food truck menu.”

The island is known for its boozy beverages, including lagers and stouts. Lion Brewers, the most popular beer company in Sri Lanka, was founded in 1881.

Back at the restaurant, Dee tells one of her employees to start heating up oil. She sautées curry in a curved pan, pouring in coconut milk from a large can and adding a blend of spices.

For this meal, Fernando is making something she concocted during a family dinner with her kids — curry fries.

The ingredients come from a South Asian grocery store in Connecticut. She makes her own spice mix from scratch, blending cardamom, coriander, red chili powder and turmeric.

“We make all of our sauces from scratch and they are our creations,” she said.

As she cooks, Dee talks about the misconception that Sri Lankan and Indian food are the same. There are commonalities in the cultures, including one language — Tamil. But there are differences, too.

“We don’t use any dairy in our food,” she said. “Coconuts are the base of most, if not all, of our dishes.”

Busha said the cuisine takes a lot of influence from nature. The island boasts a sprawling coastline (which inspires seafood creations), rolling hills and tea bushes. Its verdant landscape offers native fruits, like rambutan, guava and wood-apple. “Sri Lankan food is an experience,” said Busha.

There are far fewer Sri Lankans in Massachusetts compared to continental Asian ethnic groups, like Indians, Chinese and Cambodians. Dee believes Island Spice is the only eatery offering Sri Lankan food in the region.

Still, the population of island natives moving to the commonwealth ballooned between 2013 and 2023, according to Census data, jumping 116% from roughly 1,300 people to almost 3,000.

Eddie Alwis, president of the Sri Lankan Association of New England, said being around other Sri Lankans helped him overcome hardships as a young person. His organization includes people from different Sri Lankan religious and ethnic groups.

“I describe myself as multicultural,” he said. He was born in Colombo and went to college in Australia before settling in Massachusetts.

Alwis was reminded to celebrate his culture when he met other Sri Lankans in Massachusetts. “I am committed to making sure young people feel seen, supported and connected by showing them more of their Sri Lankan heritage,” he said.

It’s something Busha, Dee’s oldest daughter, grappled with growing up in Chicopee.

“I wanted to fit in and melt into American culture, but my family was very culturally defined,” she said. Now, “(I’m) owning my culture, embracing it and giving it the honor it deserves.”

Food truck foray

On a recent weekend, Dee and her employees drove up to Amherst College in the food truck. It was the third year she had been invited to a festival celebrating global cuisines. The college quad was decorated with flags from around the world.

The Island Spice food truck parked next to a tent where employees spooned out potato curry with white rice and chicken kottu.

“We made over 1,000 plates of food for this event,” Dee Fernando told me. The aroma of coconut curry and chicken filled the air.

Sydney Smith, a senior at the college, grabbed a tray of the potato curry. “I heard from someone else that this tastes like a Jamaican dish,” the Caribbean-American student said. It wasn’t her first time sampling Sri Lankan cuisine, but she was surprised by the similarity of the flavors.

Sri Lankan restaurateurs are making waves around the world. Last year, the island reeled in millions of tourists.

“(They) orchestrated an unparalleled culinary masterpiece that was nothing short of breathtaking,” according to an online review for the Ministry of Crab, a high-end restaurant in Colombo. The reviewer encourages patrons to try the prawn curry, garlic rice, pol sambal (a coconut relish), and the restaurant’s coconut crème brûlée.

Last year, Kotuwa, a Sri Lankan restaurant in Singapore, received a Bib Gourmand, a designation by the Michelin star guide, for its high-end curries offered reasonable costs.

Thousands of miles away in London, many restaurants let patrons get a fix of the spicy, savory and flavorful cuisine, from upscale restaurants, like Kolamba and Rambutan, to fast casual eateries, like Kottu House.

And, here in the United States, Sri Lankan restaurants are making their way to the main stage in New York and Los Angeles.

“People tell me they visit my beautiful country and miss the food,” said Dee. “We bring those flavors here so that they can visit anytime.”

Island Spice is open from Wednesdays to Sundays from 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. and open until 9 p.m. in the summertime.

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