When lockdown hit London in March 2020, Amila Lokuge started a weekly Sri Lankan supper club delivery service. As a full-time pharmacist, it was a far cry from his day job. But, food is what he loves, and something about the timing felt right. Having catered for a handful of weddings in 2019, he was keen to scale the venture and see where it lead. “I ordered some takeaway boxes, spent a few hours on Canva making a logo and decided on my first product.” Amila got to work cooking and set up Mils’ Kitchen on Instagram. He then started to take more and more orders as they rolled in. “People really loved our Lamprais (banana leaf rice packet) so I decided to stick with that and change the curries inside it weekly.”
A few weeks in, Amila enlisted Shun Yamaguchi an old classmate to help him with dishes. Shun is a professional chef who wasn’t working at the time due to lockdown. Their collaboration soon morphed into Curry Cats. “We developed ideas together and got talking about starting a pop-up and this is pretty much how Curry Cats was born.”
Both Amila and Shun are third culture kids, having migrated to the UK when they were young. Amila, from Sri Lanka and Shun from Japan. When we spoke, each described the feeling of dissociation that comes from being an outsider in both your adopted and home countries.
The pair’s experiences of living, eating, and cooking between their global worlds plays out in Curry Cat’s fusion-style dishes. Flatbreads meets jackfruit curry. Ume-slaw meets slow-roasted mutton. The duo has created an evolving and shifting menu that gleefully cannot be categorised or easily defined. Or, as they term it: (un)traditional Asian street food.
We spoke for a while about London’s blended food scene. Establishing a food pop-up gives Curry Cats a degree of freedom to roam and set-up where they fancy. At a time when restaurants have been closed for extensive periods of time and with people encouraged to spend more time outdoors, it seems like the perfect setup. Not only do they have creative freedom in their food, Curry Cats has the freedom to choose their locale, too. In recent weeks, that has been outside To Be Consumed Wine, Leyton.
Want to get your paws on a jackfruit curry flatbread? Follow Curry Cats on IG for pop-up dates, menus, and more.