At Superfreak’s Night Service, Sri Lankan Short Eats Are Getting The Aperitivo Treatment

Gayathiri Manoharan is, transparently, a bit of a unicorn. Event producer, cook, food and table stylist, photographer, brand strategist and all-round creative force, I consider myself quite lucky that I can also call her a friend.

And if you're a Marrickville local, it goes without saying that she's woven tightly into the fabric of the community. You'll often spot her posing out the front of Date Night Studio (and occasionally peddling behind the counter), tucking into a pastry at Shadow Baking, or posted up at Angus, the site of her most recent menu collaboration, where she introduced a limited run of South Asian flavours to their brunch offering, earlier this year.

Today, we're meeting at Primary Coffee (her pick, obviously) to discuss her next venture: a four-week menu takeover at Superfreak for their recently launched Night Service, in collaboration with Ryan Menner of The Oyster Stand.

Image credit: Supplied

It's noisy, in the way most Inner West cafes tend to be. There's a constant hum of chatter, the occasional scrape of the coffee grinder, and our conversation is peppered with pauses as the cafe descends into darkness beneath the deafening growl of a plane passing overhead (another Inner West signature).

We're cross-legged in our chairs as though we're sitting in someone's living room, laughing as we pass the microphone on her wired headphones back and forth, attempting to dull the rise and fall of the room ticking along around us.

Most collaborations come about quite naturally for Gaya, through conversations with friends or inspiration drawn from a particular venue. This one is no different. 

"Ryan and I have been catching up every week for a while now, talking about all things food—his oyster business, my food business and everything in between," she explains.

"During one of our conversations, he mentioned that he was starting Friday night service at Superfreak at the end of September. I thought it sounded so exciting and told him I'd love to be part of something like that."

"I'm always thinking about different ingredients and food, so when a collaboration comes along, I usually already have ideas in mind."

Image credit: Alex Carlyle | Supplied

This time, the inspiration comes from her Sri Lankan Tamil heritage, a throughline connecting Ryan's speciality in oysters with her own evolving relationship with her homeland.

After a short break spent working on other projects, it feels like the only kind of menu Gaya could take on next. One that's deeply personal, expressive and grounded in her culture.

"I think food connects you to your culture in different ways at different stages of your life. Now that I'm in my early 30s, my appreciation for my Tamil Sri Lankan heritage is stronger than ever", Gaya tells me.

"Food has become a way for me to connect with my ancestors, my people and my homeland, which I've always had quite a complicated relationship with. It doesn't really have the same language barriers, and in that sense, it's universal."

Showcasing these ingredients, flavours and dishes is something she's incredibly passionate about, even when it means rethinking the way she's always approached food. In this case, that meant interpreting Sri Lankan cooking through the lens of aperitivo culture, the concept underpinning Superfreak's Night Service.

Image credit: Alex Carlyle | Supplied

"In some ways, it meant less pressure, but it also meant going against everything I knew," Gaya shares.

"Obviously, as a Sri Lankan, or as an ethnic person, food is generally the more, the better. It's big portions and big servings. It's carb-heavy, it's meat-heavy. Trying to take that approach and reduce it down to these tiny, delicate portions that would pair nicely with a drink was a challenge."

She goes on to say that the challenge was also an exciting one. Dishes that would work as smaller bites immediately came to mind, and once she started thinking along those lines, the approach felt quite natural.

As it turns out, the two food cultures have more in common than you might initially expect. Gaya points to the Sri Lankan tradition of "short eats", or "shorties", as she affectionately calls them. These small, savoury snacks are commonly served when friends or family drop by, sometimes unexpectedly.

"You might have chicken rolls, which are a bit like Chiko Rolls, but filled with spiced chicken curry and potato, wrapped and coated in breadcrumbs. Or little samosas, these triangular pastries with different fillings," she explains.

"When I started thinking about aperitivo hour, it felt like a natural connection. How could I take the idea of short eats and make them even smaller, something you could enjoy with a drink?"

The result is a tight, four-dish offering accompanied by a rambutan Martini and tamarind sour. At the centre of it all are Ryan's oysters, dressed with a rotating selection of toppings: tamarind mignonette, rambutan and mint, and coconut sambal.

Image credit: Alex Carlyle | Supplied

The latter is something of a recurring character in Gaya's cooking, appearing across her menus and pop-ups. We wholeheartedly agree that it should become her signature.

"I absolutely love oysters. If a restaurant has them on the menu, I'm almost always ordering them," she tells me.

"So when Ryan asked if I wanted to create a couple of toppings, I immediately said, 'Hell yeah.'"

Each dressing draws on ingredients closely tied to her memories of Sri Lanka, particularly the north, where farmland and fresh produce are central to the region's food culture.

For Gaya, the coconut sambal brings back one particularly vivid childhood memory, this time from Colombo.

At four or five years old, she would collect a couple of coins from her mum and run down to buy fresh bread from a man selling it out of the back of a little tuk-tuk. She recalls about how “the bread would be piping hot, crunchy on the outside and incredibly soft on the inside.”

On the way home, she’d hollow out one end of the loaf and eat the soft centre, returning to her mum with what remained. Her mum never minded, happy to let her enjoy it.

“But my favourite part was how we’d eat the bread at home. We’d slice it up and have it with the coconut sambal. It’s spicy, tangy, and you can eat it with just about anything.”

Image credit: Supplied

Then there's rambutan, a tropical fruit similar to a lychee, with bright red, spiky skin and a sweet flesh that Gaya describes as having a little more bite.

"Rambutans were everywhere in Sri Lanka, and I absolutely loved them growing up," she reminisces.

"For a long time, I couldn't find many of these ingredients in Sydney. But living in Marrickville, close to so many South Asian grocers, I've recently been able to rediscover a lot of them. So being able to put something like that on a menu here, and introduce it to people who might never have tried it, is really exciting."

Beyond the oysters, another dish brings together Gaya's childhood and the life she's built in Sydney.

Her take on Paruthithurai vadai is inspired by a flat, crispy street-food snack from the area around Paruthithurai, where she and her parents grew up. Interestingly, its connection to her childhood only became clear after she'd already developed the dish.

"What's funny is that I came up with the idea for this dish a few weeks ago, maybe even a month ago, without really knowing where it had come from," Gaya remarks.

"I remember thinking, is this even a Sri Lankan thing? But something about it felt so familiar to me. When I visited my parents last week, I mentioned it to my mum, and she explained that it's actually a street food from the Jeffna region, where we were born."

Image credit: Alex Carlyle | Supplied

The result is a crispy, crunchy chip flecked with spices and curry leaves. At Night Service, it's served with creme fraiche, pickled onion and anchovy, bringing a distinctly European influence to a dish rooted in her upbringing.

"It's this combination of what a European summer might feel like with the flavours of Sri Lanka," she explains.

"I love that it brings together my upbringing and the life I've built here. It feels like a really personal expression of both."

What's perhaps most surprising is that Gaya only started cooking Sri Lankan food herself around three years ago, a fact that's difficult to fathom when sitting down to experience one of her menus.

"I thought everyone had good food at home, and then I grew up and realised, no, my mum's an amazing cook," she laughs.

"And with that came also the challenge where I didn't try to cook Sri Lankan food for so long. I think I was really afraid that I wasn't going to get it right."

What began as cooking for herself gradually became cooking for friends, then for the wider community. Along the way, food has become a means of reconnecting with her parents, navigating complicated feelings about her homeland and sharing her culture on her own terms.

Image credit: Supplied

There's a certain vulnerability in the way Gaya talks about this journey, but also a growing confidence in the role she wants her food to play. For her, introducing people to unfamiliar ingredients is about more than expanding their palates. It's an opportunity to start conversations that might not otherwise happen.

"Whether you like a certain cuisine or not, no one can really get offended by that, because it's just a preference. It's just your taste buds that don't like it," Gaya attests.

"So I think in a way, as much as everything has its political stance, food can sometimes be very much a middle ground, or a median of sorts. It's insane for me to say that, because I think everything's political."

By the time our interview wraps, the cafe has quietened down, and we've covered a lot of ground for a conversation that started started with oyster toppings. And after listening to her speak so fondly about the people, places and flavours that have shaped her, it's hard not to want to experience a little of it for yourself. I certainly do.

Table at Gaya's and The Oyster Stand will take over Superfreak's Night Service every Friday from 30 October to 20 November. I'll see you there.

Main image credit: Alex Carlyle | Supplied