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Attendance policies:
a) Three (3) no-shows without updating your RSVP (for standard meetups) and you will be banned from this meetup.
b) For any meetups in which food has been pre-ordered family-style, any no-shows may result in an immediate ban.
c) If you've RSVP'ed "YES" and changed your RSVP to "NO" within 3 hours before the event starts (Unless you have a REAL emergency), I will consider you as a "no-show".
Chicago is a wonderfully diverse city; each culture has its personality, language, customs, traditions, and cuisine. Each month we will explore various geographical regions by visiting restaurants deemed representative of the cuisines of those regions.
Each restaurant has been selected based on critical reviews, uniqueness, or Zagat or Michelin recommendations. Selections run the gamut from simple street food to 12-course meals fit for royalty. This means sometimes there will be dishes and dining practices that are very unfamiliar, but that's the fun of culinary exploration.
All meetups have been planned with the goal of enjoying a wonderful meal with wonderful company in mind. However, while meeting new people and reacquainting with old friends make the meal more enjoyable, the meal is, and always will be, the chief focus of each meetup. Please do not take up precious spots if you are not interested in the main attraction (like going to Garlic Fest if you don't like garlic in your food or a "meat-heavy" dinner and you're vegetarian).
If the presence of another member makes you uncomfortable, please let us know immediately so the offending member is removed and banned.
Banned members will not be reinstated. There is no period after which a banned member can re-apply to join.
Anyone who has been banned or has had their membership revoked and attempts to attend an event either by attending as another member's guest or without a proper RSVP may be asked to sit elsewhere if the event is held at a public venue or asked to leave if the meetup is a private event.
For more meetups, be sure to check out our sister groups: Chicagoland Culinary Explorers and Adventurous Eating. Chicagoland Culinary Explorers focuses on casual and fine dining restaurants in and around Chicago, while Adventurous Eating focuses on unusual culinary experiences.
Click here to learn more about ISCChicago.
Let's explore authentic cuisines together!
Upcoming events (1)
See all- Sri Lankan cuisine @ Cafe NovaCAFE NOVA, Chicago, IL$2.00
*NOTE: The $2 meetup fee is charged to pay for fees charged by Meetup.com. Payment can be made via Cashapp/PayPal/Zelle - I will PM you payment details upon RSVP.*
*NOTE: Cafe Nova does not take reservations.*
Menu: https://order.toasttab.com/online/cafe-nova-6431-north-sheridan-road
Table for 12 at Cafe Nova, a Sri Lankan restaurant in Rogers Park. The restaurant was profiled by the Chicago Reader. From The Chicago Reader:
"The first Sri Lankan Panda Express quietly opened in Rogers Park late last March.
That’s what Kiso Sivarasa and his partners hoped when they launched Café Nova on the ground floor of Loyola University’s Granada Center, just a few doors down from Subway and across Sheridan from Taco Bell and Potbelly.
“We want to grow into something that big,” he says. “Ten curries laid out in the front, and then you pick your rice, pick your protein.”
South Indian food has a small but solid presence in Chicago’s culinary landscape, but until now there’s been nothing to represent the food of its southeastern island neighbor. Sri Lanka’s food is more intensely seasoned, more coconut-reliant (if possible) than, say, Kerala food, due to its proximity to the coastal spice trade. Consequently it features a distinct Indonesian and Dutch influence.
You wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that by scanning Café Nova’s official menu, which features just six dishes that could be called uniquely Sri Lankan (though only four are labeled as such). There’s no permanent Panda-style buffet set up yet either, but on most Sundays, Sivarasa’s chef, Ravi Bopage, lays out a sprawling all-you-can-eat Sri Lankan spread featuring some dozen dishes, most of which he can make to order anytime—with enough advance notice.
Originally from the capital Colombo, Bopage has cooked all across the world over the past 25 years. He met Sivarasa in 2016 when they were both cooking at Devon Avenue’s late vegetarian South Indian Mysore Woodlands. Sivarasa, from northern Vavuniya, recently graduated from medical school in St. Vincent, where he was working the dosa station, while Bopage was the executive chef.
When they joined forces at Café Nova, they prominently featured the thin, crispy rice flour dosas, the crepes stuffed with a variety of toppings, and familiar northern Indian appetizers and main dishes like saag paneer and chicken tikka masala.
One item, however, jumped off the page. Kothu paratha is a variant of Sri Lanka’s most popular street food: a finely chopped and griddled mix of flatbread, cabbage, carrots, leeks, and scrambled eggs, served with a thick, smoldering bone-in chicken curry, flecked with mustard seed, redolent of Ceylon cinnamon. There’s also a chicken thigh curry, swimming with mustard leaves; and tomato-based tuna curry. The dal curry takes on a particularly Sri Lankan profile, with a heavy dose of turmeric, pandan and curry leaves, and mustard seeds, subject to a single sauté, indicative of the cuisine’s tendency to feature single rather than multiple masalas.
At first, that was it. The partners wanted to establish themselves with a broad selection of dishes to appeal to a diversity of Loyola students. But repeated requests for more Sri Lankan dishes led to the first Sunday buffet in late May, with dishes featuring harder-to-source ingredients, like Maldive fish chips: dried, cured, and shredded tuna flakes that contribute an oceanic umami flavor to potato and eggplant curries, the latter also containing the fibrous drumstick seedpods of the moringa tree, meant to be split open and dentally scraped like an artichoke leaf. There was chicken goraka, a deeply browned, almost gumbo-like curry, made with dried Garcinia cambogia fruit, or the Malabar tamarind, adding a bracing tartness. There was banana blossom fried rice, and a fiery cassava-spinach curry, mellowed with vegetal, vanilla-like pandan leaves. At the end of the long spread was a pan of chili-spiked coconut roti, alongside bowls of katta sambol, a fiery salted chili condiment deepened by Maldive fish chips.
When I returned a few weeks later for a late afternoon lunch, Sivarasa served a handful of these things, but also a sweet-and-sour carrot chili pickle, and vivid green shrimp curry with pandan and mustard leaves, the invertebrate analogue to the chicken mustard curry."
