The Dram Attic

The Sri Lankan beach bar, the first from the island ever to make The World’s 50 Best Bars list, has now been named the region’s finest for the way it looks after its guests. Jyoti Kumari speaks with co-founders Don Ranasinghe and Lahiru “Lalla” Perera.

Smoke & Bitters has won the Michter’s Art of Hospitality Award for Asia’s 50 Best Bars 2026, the latest accolade for a bar that has spent six years redrawing what a Sri Lankan drinking destination can be. It is the newest in a run of international recognition that few would have predicted for a venue this far off the map. In September 2025 it became the first bar from Sri Lanka ever to enter The World’s 50 Best Bars list, at No. 67; it sits at No. 14 on Asia’s 50 Best Bars 2025 and has been named Best Bar in Sri Lanka four years running.

What makes the hospitality prize distinct is how it is judged. There is no ranking formula behind it; instead, the 300-plus members of the Asia’s 50 Best Bars Academy are asked a single question: which venue gave them their finest hospitality experience of the year. It rewards warmth, attentiveness and atmosphere over drinks alone. As 50 Best’s Director of Content & Creative Emma Sleight puts it, the award “places particular emphasis on the guest journey and the emotional resonance of the experience.”

For Smoke & Bitters, that is the whole point. Best friends Don Ranasinghe and Lahiru Perera opened the bar in early 2020 on a beach in the deep south, hours from Colombo, with no plan to build a global destination. Ranasinghe had managed London’s 1,800-capacity KOKO; Perera had built the restaurant group Zephyr and trained at Ballymaloe. What they made together is fiercely local: everything cooked over wood fire, bitters and syrups made in-house, drinks built from indigenous produce on a tiki blueprint borrowed from Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic, then bent entirely to the island.

We spoke to Ranasinghe and Perera about staying remote, cooking over flame, and the one thing they will never change.

The Dram Attic (TDA): Smoke & Bitters opened not in a city but on a beach two and a half hours from Colombo, the kind of location most ambitious bars would avoid. Why set up away from where all the action is, and what did you understand about hospitality, and about being a destination, that most city bars might miss?

Smoke & Bitter (S&B): The south coast was simply where Lalla and I were living at the time, and it was the specific location that made the decision for us. We didn’t choose it because we thought Hiriketiya would become popular, or because we had a grand vision of a global destination bar. We found this incredible spot and felt it was exactly where we needed to begin.

We were never particularly ambitious in the conventional sense. Smoke & Bitters was the culmination of years spent in hospitality, learning from others and dreaming about building something of our own. It came out of our friendship and a shared desire to make a place that reflected who we were, without too many rules. We were still figuring out our own style of hospitality, and it didn’t have a definition then. Honestly, I don’t think it fully does now. We’re still learning every day.

What we’ve come to realise is that when people travel that far to visit you, hospitality takes on a different meaning. They’re not just coming for a drink or a meal; they’re giving you their time. That creates a responsibility to make them feel welcome, cared for and connected to where they are. Being removed from the city taught us that hospitality isn’t just what happens at the table or the bar; it’s the entire experience of being there.

TDA: This award is specifically for hospitality, and the experience at S&B leans towards relaxed rather than formal. How do you balance that, providing service people remember without being intrusive or too laid-back?

S&B: For us, hospitality has never been about formality. It’s about making people feel comfortable and genuinely welcome from the moment they arrive, at home immediately rather than in a venue with rules about how they’re supposed to behave.

The balance comes from being attentive without being intrusive. Great hospitality isn’t about constantly being present; it’s about understanding what people need and responding naturally. Some guests want to learn about every ingredient in their drink; others just want to sit back and enjoy the atmosphere. Our job is to read that and adapt.

We’re trying to create a place where there’s something for everyone and where people feel looked after in a way that feels effortless. If guests leave remembering how they felt rather than just what they ate or drank, we’ve probably done our job.

TDA: You’re the first bar in Sri Lanka to make The World’s 50 Best Bars list. What does that level of global attention do to a small, personal operation built on local warmth?

S&B: Honestly, it hasn’t changed much day to day, and we’re happy about that. We come to work with the same people, the same values and the same desire to improve that we had when we opened.

What it does do is remind us we’re part of a global conversation. It raises the standards we hold ourselves to, because we’re being seen by peers around the world. But the things that got us here haven’t changed. We’re still experimenting, still developing, still growing as a team.

The recognition is hugely meaningful, not just for us but for the wider food and bar community in Sri Lanka and for the village around us that has been part of this from the beginning. More than anything, it’s a source of pride. It doesn’t really change how we operate; it probably just makes us smile a lot more.

TDA: Tiki carries a complicated history of fantasy and of borrowing from other cultures. You draw on its early pioneers while building drinks entirely from Sri Lankan ingredients. How do you reconcile a borrowed global idiom with something this rooted in place?

S&B: The mid-century tiki and tropical movement was built on a fantasy of escapism, appropriating Pacific island culture, imagery and flavours for bars in LA or New York. But we are an island. When we looked at pioneers like Trader Vic and Don the Beachcomber, what drew us in wasn’t the fantasy or the aesthetics; it was the craft: the fact that they house-made almost all of their syrups, liqueurs and bitters.

When we started, our hand was forced by socio-economic realities and government import restrictions. We didn’t have access to what you need for a standard classic cocktail programme. If we wanted to do something new against the backdrop of what other bars in Sri Lanka were doing, we had to look at the island itself. So we took that early tropical blueprint, scratch-made ingredients and complex flavour layering, and applied it to our own backyard, using our own techniques and local ingredients. We weren’t really thinking about reconciling a global trend; it was the only avenue we had to move forward and represent Sri Lanka honestly.

TDA: Building a menu around local produce like wood-apple, rambutan, mangosteen and indigenous bitters is as much a constraint as a flag to wave. Can you think of a time an ingredient pushed you somewhere you’d never have gone on your own? Does the limitation genuinely make you more inventive, or is that a romantic story we like to tell ourselves?

S&B: We’re not trying to wave any flags. Working this way is just a day-to-day evolution of our space. It’s never about centring a drink on one hero ingredient; it’s about understanding the ecosystem around it. The reality in Sri Lanka is that the highest-grade produce is usually grown for export, so what’s left in local markets isn’t always top-tier. Our challenge isn’t a conceptual constraint; it’s the physical hustle of hunting down the best possible version of an ingredient.

Because of that, the limitation absolutely makes us more inventive. You can’t order what you need online or expect city-supermarket consistency. You have to get in a car, drive to the farms and meet the people growing it. That journey always sparks a new idea or takes a drink somewhere we didn’t plan. So the romantic story isn’t a myth, but the romance isn’t in the marketing; it’s in our seasons. It’s the way the weather and the trees dictate how we eat, drink and live out here. That part is very real.

TDA: Cooking everything over traditional wood fire is a philosophy, but it’s also a daily reality in a working beachfront kitchen. What does fire give the food that nothing else can, and what does it cost you to stay loyal to it?

S&B: Wood fire gives the food a depth you can’t get any other way: charred, smoky elements and complex textures you simply can’t replicate with a gas dial or an electric oven. It lets us take humble local ingredients and let their natural flavours shine in a way that feels ancient and entirely fresh at once. Fire forces you to cook with instinct, patience and respect for the ingredients.

But staying loyal to it in a busy beachfront kitchen has a real daily cost. There are no shortcuts. It means managing intense heat in an already tropical environment, dealing with unpredictable airflow off the ocean, and waking up early every day to tend the embers and local wood before a single plate is prepped. It’s demanding, hot, exhausting work for the kitchen crew. But the moment we see people coming together around that fire and tasting the honesty in the food, every bit of that sweat is worth it.

TDA: Showcasing heritage can mean either preserving a tradition or arguing with it. Are you trying to honour Sri Lankan food and drink culture, or to push it somewhere new? Where do you think that culture is heading, and what’s your stake in where it lands?

S&B: It’s both. We’re trying to honour and preserve these traditions as much as push them forward. Take an ancient craft like toddy tapping: we use it, but present it within a contemporary bar culture. It’s about combining worlds and helping heritage stay relevant, which is a huge challenge everywhere today. For a long time people here were sometimes hesitant to fully embrace their identity through food and drink, out of a fear of being rejected or misunderstood globally. We’re showing that these traditions can coexist in a modern space without conflict.

As for where the culture is heading, we don’t pretend to know. That depends on the wider community of creators and the audiences supporting them. We don’t claim ownership over where it lands, but we know we’ve played a part in moving the needle. We’re deeply invested, because this culture is what drives and sustains our community. Our only real stake is trying to ensure that as it grows, it stays unsaturated, unique and wildly itself. It just needs to keep evolving so it never stands still.

TDA: At this level, hospitality is really the team rather than the founders. What do you look for in the people you hire, and do you believe warmth can be taught?

S&B: At any level of hospitality, it’s about the team, not us. When we hire, we look for genuine, decent people who want to learn and grow, before we look at any technical skill.

We don’t believe raw warmth can be taught; it has to be there at someone’s core. What we can do is show them its value, and build a working environment where the existing team already carries themselves that way, so when someone new walks in, they see it and naturally absorb it. Everything else about the job can be taught: the techniques, the specs, the steps of service. We train hard for all of it. But the foundational spirit is just who they are, and we’re lucky to have it.

TDA: As the recognition grows, so will the pressure to scale, replicate and smooth out the edges. What’s the one thing about Smoke & Bitters you would refuse to change?

S&B: An award like this makes you look inward and benchmark yourself against higher standards, but it also reinforces that we should keep doing exactly what we’ve been doing. Evolution is constant for us. We’re always refining operations, menus and service, and we’re not afraid of changing things behind the scenes to get better.

But what we will absolutely refuse to change is our anchor. Smoke & Bitters belongs in this specific coconut grove in Hiriketiya. We will never move it and we will not franchise the brand. The industry often expects you to take a milestone like this and immediately scale it, replicate it, smooth out the edges. But those edges, the sand, the open air, the wood smoke, the unpredictability of working with our environment, are exactly what give us our soul. You can’t copy-paste that somewhere else without losing the entire philosophy of what we built.

TDA: Thinking back to early 2020 when you opened, what were the two of you reacting against in the bar scene? What did you feel was missing that you set out to make, and do you think you achieved it?

S&B: We weren’t really reacting against anything. We just knew there was a massive opportunity to do something fresh, and we wanted to figure out what that looked like. We felt there was so much more that could be done to define a contemporary Sri Lankan bar scene, and we had a gut feeling we could do it. We didn’t entirely know how we’d pull it off back in 2020, but we knew we had to try.

As for whether we’ve achieved it, that’s not an answer that belongs to us, and this was never about self-validation. Achievement isn’t a fixed destination; it’s an ongoing process. For us it’s about waking up every day, continuing to push those boundaries and keeping our core beliefs at the centre of everything we do.

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