Larry Jayasekara's Leap from Cleaning Bins to Coconut Roti in Mayfair

There was a time when Larry Jayasekara ate coconut roti because he had been surfing for hours and didn’t have much money. It was cheap, dense, made him thirsty enough to drink plenty of water and, crucially, kept him full. Decades later, the Sri Lankan-born chef would serve his version with caviar.

“Wow, what a journey,” he said in Cairo, contemplating the distance between the two.

Jayasekara, chef-patron and co-founder of The Cocochine in Mayfair, arrived at Scalini Egypt for Cairo Food Week 2026 with a menu that made rather good use of that distance. Hosted alongside Scalini Head Chef Mohamed Alaa at Palm Central, the dinner brought the increasingly Sri Lankan-inflected cooking of his London restaurant into an Italian kitchen in West Cairo.

The ingredients had travelled too. From the estates that supply The Cocochine came sika deer, aged for 14 to 16 days before reaching Cairo. Jayasekara roasted its bones and knuckles into stock, finishing the jus with 100% bitter chocolate to counter the sweetness of quince and the leanness of the venison. Blue crab, meanwhile, became Sri Lankan crab curry—a thread back to the food of his childhood.

But the coconut roti carried the autobiography. Fresh coconut and flour were mixed in equal measure; where water would traditionally be used, Jayasekara added coconut water to push the flavour further. Then came caviar, not, as he put it, simply because “I’m eating caviar, it’s a luxury,” but because it had a purpose on the plate.

It is an unusually neat encapsulation of Jayasekara’s career. The boy who grew up by the sea in Sri Lanka went on to work through some of Europe’s most exacting kitchens, including those of Michel Bras, Raymond Blanc and Gordon Ramsay, eventually becoming head chef at Pétrus before opening The Cocochine in 2024. Today, the Mayfair restaurant’s cooking draws closely on produce from Rowler Estate and Scotland’s Tanera Mòr while increasingly looking back towards Jayasekara’s Sri Lankan roots.

At Scalini, those two histories could occupy the same plate. Coconut roti was still coconut roti—the food of long surfing days and limited money. It had simply travelled far enough to acquire some caviar along the way.