Happy birthday to us! It’s YAMU’s 8th birthday!
A Little Bit Of History
YAMU was founded in a time when YouTube cooking, food reviewing and Influencer culture in Sri Lanka wasn’t popular. Initially, it was a small team of 3 (Indi Samarajiva, Janith Leanage and Savan Wijewardene) operating from Indi’s apartment in Dehiwala, and later on, Shruthi Mathews and Inosh Perera joined.
The history states that they had to move their operations to Indi’s father’s place for a while, because one day, Indi’s place started to smell so bad due to “”something dead.”” Anyway, after moving around for another few months, they decided that it’s time to stop working from home, and get an actual office.
As a result of that, YAMU got its own place in 2014 – down Duplication Road, on the top floor of Venga Tower, commonly known as Spring & Summer Building in Bambalapitiya. It’s up four flights of stairs and has no elevator. Sounds awful, I know, but for some reason, it worked.
We were there for 4 years. Back then, YAMU was under the protection of a good boi called “”Merc,”” who later had to retire as the landlord didn’t like him.
As the team grows, YAMU managed to expand from a website to an app to a magazine to a video-based content channel – YAMU TV. We also did food delivery for a while back then.
With the initiation of PickMe Food in 2018, we’ve been under the wing of PickMe and function from our office space inside PickMe HQ in Nugegoda.
What Are We Up To?
Endless amounts of food, many silly little videos, and lots of fun, really!
Jokes aside, we’re quite serious at what we do. We work hard every day to produce good content and keep ourselves updated.
The whole team is always on the grapevine of info about what’s hot, what’s new, and what you can do in this city of Colombo, while trying to expand our reach to areas outside of Colombo, whenever we can.
The city has been sprouting with many new ventures at a rapid pace in the past few years and we’ve been privileged to watch it grow. The home-based cooking scene is at a whole new level now, because it’s not just about cupcakes, brownies or cookies anymore. We’ve come across a lot of unique products like homemade hummus, chutneys, baklava, burgers, dumplings, lamprais, froyo and many other interesting stuff.
Every corner of the town has a new cafe now, and some streets (like Stafford Avenue) have become coffee-streets due to the sheer number of cafes it houses.
And look at the Colombo city skyline! It has been gushing with many new rooftop bars and new skyscrapers like One Galle Face and Colombo City Centre, and we’ve enjoyed experiencing them first hand and producing content about them.
Thousands of content-hungry (and food-hungry) readers visit our website every month, and we follow a number of policies and give a lot of thought to make our reviews unbiased, honest, and accurate for them. Our restaurant database grows by the day, and we’re closing in on 5000 reviews as we speak! Woot woot!
Food is YAMU’s main focus, but to mix it up, we have a peek at local lifestyle aspect every once in a while. We have talked about many interesting, diverse set of topics like Sri Lankan makeup hacks and baking tips, while providing a guide to good, bad and kakki bathrooms in Colombo, and have discussed important issues like street harassment, cosmetics & animal testing, promoting eco-friendliness, university ragging and supporting local businesses amid COVID-19 etc.
On the other hand, we never hesitate to rise to the occasion. The most recent example is the COVID-19 lockdown period, where we were actively focused on bringing information about grocery delivery, ways to celebrate avurudu, vesak and food delivery – in and out of Colombo.
The video arm of YAMU, YAMU TV, has been busy with recipe videos, discussing controversial issues, providing information, experimenting and entertaining – from eating 6 kinds of burgers in one go to making a meal for $1 and so much more!
We also had a live web series (which is sadly now discontinued), Thank God It’s Fri-Yay.
At the moment, we’ve put a pin on our own recipe videos as we’re restocking our fridge and getting our kitchen refurnished after the lockdown. We’ll be back at it very soon, so stay tuned!
So, What’s Next?
More reviews and simply, more creative and entertaining content! Our recipe videos will be back very soon, and hopefully, the next print of the magazine too, and we’re super excited!
The last 8 years wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the people who helped in shaping up YAMU to what it is today. That includes every single person who passed through YAMU, contributed in creating content and handling other operations, the brands we’ve worked with, all the good restaurants, the new places in and out of Colombo, and more importantly, our beloved audience who have read and watched our content while choosing YAMU as your friend in the city.
A massive thank you to all of you, and we hope you’d stick with us in the years to come! Cheers!
