With a hopper station, curry trolley and open flames, this Sri Lankan spot’s one to watch

For seven years, Sri Lankan chef Gayan Pieris has been expanding Victoria’s understanding of the food of his homeland at hatted Mornington Peninsula wine-diner Many Little, where he serves more than just the cuisine’s familiar pan rolls and hoppers. Pieris has even bigger ambitions for his second restaurant.

The 160-seat Agnii, which opens today at Chapel Street’s Windsor end, has been 18 months in the making.

“The issue is that not too long ago most [Sri Lankan] restaurants here were buffets, and it was branded as a ‘cheaper’ option,” says Pieris.

The tide is well and truly turning, with openings such as Dutch Rules and Hopper Joint. But Pieris wants to change people’s perceptions “by introducing more technique and setting [Agnii] up as a new benchmark”.

Many Little is Victoria’s only hatted restaurant serving an entirely Sri Lankan menu. Could Agnii be the second?

Agnii means “fire” in Sanskrit, and that’s its superpower. “Woodfire cooking has become trendy, but I haven’t really seen much of it in Sri Lankan places,” says Pieris.

The restaurant’s defining feature is a flame-throwing open hearth built by Samuel Fraraccio, aka The Brick Chef, who won this year’s Good Food Guide Trailblazer award. Known as a dara lipa, the hearth is flanked by racks for hanging, drying and smoking fish, and kilns to house claypots.

“It’s still insane when I see it: my replication of my mum’s kitchen,” says Pieris, who grew up in a farming family in central Sri Lanka, where his parents were rice growers.

There’s an air of nostalgia to Pieris’ bath mula, or banana leaf-wrapped parcel of curry and rice. “That’s how I took my lunch to school as a kid,” he says. At Agnii, the parcels are heated over wood until steamy and unwrapped tableside, revealing half a dozen or so components: a meaty curry, a thick dahl, vegetable sides and a sweet-and-sour pickle.

For extra theatrics, all that (and more) can be dispensed via a curry trolley, which you might find loaded with regional specialities, perhaps a goat curry from Jaffna in the north. The kitchen has stations dedicated to hoppers, as well as dosa and kottu (chopped roti).

Let Pieris take the wheel with the chef’s menu or order a la carte from dishes broken down into sections like snacky small bites, “entree-ish” short eats and substantial share plates.

You could start with puttu, steamed cylinders of rice flour and coconut with added carrot and coriander. Kingfish heads are cured, the flesh picked out and mixed into a mousse with smoked eel, then piped into a flower-shaped kokis cracker. And then there are Pieris’ “patties”: succulent 16-spice lamb cutlets that are fried before being wrapped in pastry that’s brushed with curry leaf oil and cooked on the hearth.

For late-night bites, an abridged supper menu will run between 10pm and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays.

Cocktails are distinctly Sri Lankan, starring arrack, a spirit made from the fermented sap of coconut palm flowers. And the negroni is soured with goraka, a tamarind-like fruit.

The suave first-floor restaurant looks nothing like the Hoo Haa Bar it replaced, decked out in earthy tones and wooden features. A private dining room seats 40 people and a terrace area is being transformed into what Pieris describes as a “tropical spice garden”.

Open lunch Fri-Sun; dinner Tue-Sun

105 Chapel Street, Windsor, agnii.com.au