I wrote in Brunch last weekend about the best meals I had eaten in India this year. This is a companion list, but it deals with the meals I ate outside the country. Also read | Rude Food by Vir Sanghvi: Pass the secret sauce

Dharshan Munidasa is Sri Lanka’s greatest chef with restaurants all over the world. And while I have eaten Dharshan’s food in many countries, nothing beats eating it in his own country when Dharshan himself is in the restaurant. I say ‘his own country’ but that’s complicated because Dharshan is half Japanese and, unusually for a chef who has not worked his way through the kitchens of Japan’s top restaurants, he is respected and honoured by the Japanese. Dharshan’s best-known restaurants are called Ministry of Crab, but my personal favourite is Nihonbashi in Colombo, which serves authentic Japanese food in plush surroundings.

A post shared by Nihonbashi By Dharshan (@nihonbashilk)

Palmyrah

What we call Sri Lankan food all over the world is mostly the cuisine of the majority Sinhala community. But as recent history reminds us there is an ethnically distinct Tamil community in the north. Indians tend to assume that Lankan Tamils eat the same food as Tamils in India. In fact, Lanka’s Tamils have a cuisine of their own. Each time I visit Colombo, I have at least one meal at Palmyrah, a Tamil restaurant in the basement of a locally-run hotel. It is always one of the best meals of the trip.

I first met the intense but taciturn Abhiraj Khatwani when he came to Delhi to help Dubai’s superstar chef Mohamad Orfali with his pop up. Abhiraj told me that Mohamad was partnering with him to open a Thai restaurant in Dubai. I was intrigued because Abhiraj is Indian, not Thai but it took only five minutes of conversation to work out how knowledgeable he was about Thai food.

A few months later I went to a preview of Manao as they chose to call the restaurant and came away super impressed. Clearly, I was not the only one to be impressed because it took only a few months for Michelin to give Manao a star and give Abhiraj the award for Young Chef of the Year. Abhiraj is careful to only call his food Thai-inspired but if you like Thai food, you will love Manao’s take on the flavours of Thailand.

Mohamad Orfali is a Dubai legend and the restaurant he runs with his two pastry maestro brothers is now legendary. Inspired by the cuisine of Syria the restaurant follows no rules riffing on global cuisines (the hamburger is justly........

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