Nihonbashi, literally translating to “Japan Bridge”, was created by Chef Dharshan Munidasa in 1995 to be a culinary bridge between Sri Lanka and Japan, bringing Japanese cuisine and culture to the island.
For 29 years Nihonbashi has been plating up pure and real Japanese cuisine, becoming the forefront of the 'washoku wave' in the country. Washoku is a philosophy, where one is aware of their natural environment. At Nihonbashi we take great pride in sourcing most of our ingredients locally, reserving imports for those exceptional ingredients not found in Sri Lanka. We are proud to be one of the few restaurants in the world buying whole tuna, as they are caught in the oceans around the island.
To create Nihonbashi at Port City Colombo, we employed the same philosophy as a chef would walk the shoreline and farms in search of ingredients, Chef Dharshan walked the quarries and bamboo forests to reverse engineer this "Japanese design by DNA" restaurant. We handpicked stone boulders, quartz sand, bamboo, local timber with great care, to create this space that celebrates " - Wa" (the same "Wa" found in washoku and wagyu, meaning Japanese). This space is an ode to Japanese design, Japanese philosophy and to the beauty of perfect imperfections: Wabi-Sabi.
