It’s a hot Saturday afternoon and there’s a nice, warm aroma wafting from the Ceylan Crêperie stall at the Racecourse Good Market. The stall is abuzz with customers, each one staring in awe at Noemi’s crêpe-making skills.

First, she pours the batter onto the open crêpe pan (brought all the way from France!), and spreads the batter over and around the pan to ensure it stays round when it browns into a crêpe. When it starts to brown, she flips it over ensuring it’s crispy, and flips it over again. Then, she swiftly slices a few strawberries on a wooden cutting board and scoops them up with a knife and puts them onto the crêpe, proceeding to liberally squeeze thick chocolate sauce all over it, and then folding the crêpe and placing it on a paper plate for a waiting customer.

This is what Noemi’s Saturday looks like. She runs the Ceylan Crêperie stall single-handedly every Saturday from 10AM-6PM. Hailing from the Brittany region located in the Northwest of France, she tells me that the region is famed for crêpes, where the popular crispy dessert originates from. She’s been living in Sri Lanka for the past five months, and when she came here, she wanted to start something of her own that would give people in Colombo a little taste of the region she comes from. “That’s when I decided that I wanted to run a little stall selling warm, fresh and delicious crêpes with a variety of sweet toppings to choose from,” says Noemi who’s been running Ceylan Crêperie for three months now.

Delving into a crêpe she’s made for me with a liberal slathering of thick, light brown salted butter caramel sauce, I find that the crispy dessert paired with the salty but sweet caramel sauce is incredibly delicious and practically screams comfort food, because that’s exactly what it is. Noemi procures a jar of apple sauce and puts a spoonful of it onto my paper plate and suggests that I pair the two together. As if salted butter caramel wasn’t amazing enough, dipping bits and pieces of the crêpe into the apple sauce proved to be refreshing, light and something you’d expect to surface from your own kitchen – comfortingly tasty and homemade.

Other sweet toppings include honey, kithul syrup, chocolate, jam, and brown sugar in addition to pairings such as lemon and sugar, butter and sugar, strawberry and chocolate, banana and chocolate, strawberry and caramel, banana and caramel, apple sauce and cinnamon, and a chocolate and grated coconut. Savoury crêpes are new on the menu and fillings will change every week. Last week, the filling included gooey mozzarella cheese, mushrooms and tomatoes. Apart from the regular batter used to make the crêpes, Noemi also makes a dairy-free and gluten-free batter, which customers can request for when making an order. The salted butter caramel sauce is available for sale at the stall, which can be slathered on toast, waffles, or paired with ice cream.

Ceylan Crêperie operates every Saturday at the Racecourse Good Market from 10AM-6PM. For regular updates, do visit the page on Facebook.

Text and pics by Sarah Kellapatha