La Langousterie is a beachside restaurant in Mount Lavinia that’s pretty difficult to find. It’s not the most sophisticated spot as far as ambience goes, but they offer a varied menu and some decent seafood dishes.
Ambience & Service
Mount Lavinia beach has a ton of restaurants, and at this point we’ve covered most of them, but we were quite surprised to find that we’d missed La Langousterie. It’s actually hidden away beyond the major stretch of restaurants at the far end close to Mount Lavinia Hotel. It’s a pretty simple space with wooden furniture and multicoloured table cloths. The location itself is a bit tedious to get to, but since it’s far from the rest of the restaurants, you get to enjoy your meal in privacy.
The waiters were friendly but very inattentive since they were chatting amongst themselves, making us have to wave and flail to get them to look our way. The service time was also not that great (since we were the only ones there) with the food taking around twenty minutes to get the table.
The Food
While the restaurant itself may not look like much, the menu is actually quite varied and offers a good selection of both seafood and meat dishes. Portions are on the larger side and the prices are not too bad, unless you opt to go for the namesake langoustine (lobster) dishes. In general though, managing under Rs. 1000 is quite possible.
For our seafood option we tried out the cuttlefish à la creme (Rs. 800), which is pan-fried cuttlefish cooked in a creamy, garlic infused white sauce. This is served with a generous portion of mashed potatoes which while a bit lumpy, was still quite tasty. The cuttlefish were fine but this dish all about that white sauce with the flavour of garlic coming through very well. It was a bit low on seasoning but nothing a bit of salt couldn’t help.
We also had the grilled pork chops (Rs. 730). This one was decent but we found that the gravy on the pork chops were far too salty, which is a shame since meat itself was cooked quite well. Conversely, the fries that came with it were had next to no salt. So we ended up trying to balance it out by using the gravy as a sauce for the fries.
For dessert we had the banana flambe (Rs. 400), which was more like bananas in rum syrup as oppose to a proper flambe (with the flames and what not). That being said, this actually had quite an interesting flavour, but this is definitely an acquired taste.
Conclusion
La Langousterie isn’t really as fancy as it sounds, but the food is still okay. With its close proximity to the beach, we’d suggest sticking to their seafood offerings.
