- Written by: Chefluencer Editorial Team
Lury would be easy to mislabel. Call it Sri Lankan-inspired British cooking and you lose the plot before the first course. Jack Lury’s Hastings restaurant is built around the Burgher kitchen: a food culture born from Sri Lanka’s colonial crossings, domestic rituals, and the complicated inheritance of families who belonged to more than one world at once.
The Burghers are a minority community in Sri Lanka, descended largely from Portuguese, Dutch and British settlers who intermarried with local Sri Lankan communities over several centuries. Their cooking developed its own habits: roasts, relishes, breads, preserves, vinegar, spice, arrack, cinnamon, black tea, and the kind of domestic adaptations that rarely survive neatly on a restaurant menu. European technique met Sri Lankan ingredients long before chefs started using “hybrid” as a decorative word for indecision.
At Lury, that history is the engine. The restaurant opened in March 2025 on Cambridge Road in Hastings New Town, the debut project from husband-and-wife team Jack Lury and Issy Cianchi. It serves ten guests per service, with one sitting at dinner and a Saturday lunch. Jack cooks alone. The menu changes every few weeks. A small restaurant can use scale as theatre; Lury uses it as pressure. Ten guests leave little room for blur, repetition or swagger.
The Long Route to Hastings
Jack’s connection to Sri Lanka runs through his family. His grandparents belonged to the Burgher community; his mother spent her childhood there. The menu draws on repeated trips to Sri Lanka throughout his life, along with the flavours, ingredients and kitchen habits carried through his own family history. A handful of ingredients come directly from Sri Lanka, including cinnamon, arrack, black tea and beer. British produce carries much of the menu, but the seasoning belongs to another map.
His professional route was broad rather than neatly branded. He gained early experience in high-end kitchens, including stages at one- and two-Michelin-star restaurants in London and around the UK, then moved through catering, street food, private cheffing and events. He cooked for private households in Mayfair and South Kensington, worked on high-profile corporate events, and had regular work with Sotheby’s. Later, he spent several years as a pastry chef at a private members’ club in Notting Hill before developing Lury through pop-ups.
That is not the usual chef mythology: no single master, no heroic apprenticeship, no clean march towards a named restaurant. The cooking sounds shaped by accumulation: pastry discipline, private-chef adaptability, fine-dining technique, family memory, and the practical nerve required to cook alone for ten people without turning the evening into a display of strain.
Black Pork, Fondant Potato, Arrack
The menu offers the clearest argument. Recent dishes include Lion’s Mane Mushroom Broth with curry leaf oil, Milk Bun stuffed with black pork curry and cardamom butter, Confit egg yolk with seeni sambol, oyster mushrooms and lime foam, Poached Halibut with spiced fondant potato, asparagus sauce and crushed cashew pesto, and Blood orange cake with citrus, poached rhubarb, buttermilk and cardamom ice cream.
Black pork curry in a milk bun could easily become a gimmick: soft bread, loud filling, instant applause. The dish sounds more interesting because of the cardamom butter, which suggests not fusion but tuning. Seeni sambol with confit egg yolk and oyster mushrooms brings sweetness, acidity and depth into a format that still belongs to a tasting menu. Halibut with fondant potato, asparagus sauce and cashew pesto is the kind of dish that risks collapsing under its own passport stamps. The promise is in the control: European structure, Sri Lankan-Burgher flavour, and enough technique to stop the plate becoming a travel brochure.
This is where Lury separates itself from the lazier version of “heritage cooking.” There is no value in heritage if it only supplies adjectives. It earns its place when it changes the decisions on the plate: the fat used, the sweetness allowed, the acidity sharpened, the spice restrained, the old ingredient given a new job without being made unrecognisable.
The wine list stays compact, with selections from Europe and England, including orange and sparkling options available by the glass or bottle. The single cocktail is an Arrack Old Fashioned, built around Sri Lanka’s coconut-palm spirit. Here, arrack is more than a novelty pour: it carries the warmth, spice and faint tropical sweetness that sit naturally beside cinnamon, black tea, curry leaf and the Burgher references running through the menu.
The Look of Lury
Issy Cianchi’s role gives Lury its second authorship. After studying 3D design, she worked in set design for film and television, trained as a leather worker and designer for a fashion label, and then moved into social media and marketing. At Lury, that background appears in the objects, surfaces and pace of the place, rather than in a shouty design concept.
The restaurant occupies the ground floor of a converted Edwardian house. Exposed brickwork is softened by Sri Lankan fabric wall-hangings commissioned for Lury. Natural materials, bespoke joinery and an earth-toned palette keep the setting warm without tipping into the beige coma currently passing for good taste in too many small restaurants. Napkins and aprons are custom-made in Sri Lanka, alongside plateware and cutlery. Hastings appears through subtle coastal references, rather than the usual punishment of nets, shells, and distressed wood. Britain has suffered enough decorative driftwood.
At the rear, Lury hosts a rotating artist-in-residence, with work available for guests to view and purchase. In a weaker restaurant, that could feel like a retail corner with aspirations. Here, it belongs to the wider construction: a restaurant assembled through food, cloth, craft, family memory and the handmade object.
The Burgher Kitchen Comes Out of the Footnotes
Sri Lankan food in Britain is still too often compressed into a few familiar signals: hoppers, coconut, chilli, curry leaves, sambols, lamprais when the gods are kind, and a general expectation of warmth and abundance. Burgher cooking complicates that picture. It carries Portuguese, Dutch and British traces alongside Sri Lankan ingredients and domestic practice. It includes roasts, cutlets, preserves, cakes, relishes, spices, breads and arrack. It grew in households shaped by empire, migration, intermarriage and adaptation, which is a much messier and more interesting story than the usual restaurant shorthand of “roots.”
Jack Lury is not presenting that inheritance as a historical exhibit. He is cooking from it. The difference is crucial. A museum approach would pin the dishes to an explanation. Lury’s better instinct is to let the food move: black pork inside a milk bun, curry leaf through mushroom broth, seeni sambol beside egg yolk, cardamom against citrus and rhubarb.
The restaurant’s most interesting work may be the way it refuses purity. Burgher food itself resists purity. It comes from contact, interruption, borrowing, survival, and the private intelligence of home cooks who made something coherent from conflicting inheritances. Lury takes that unstable history and gives it the discipline of a tasting menu.
Hastings, Without the Postcard
Hastings is not incidental, but it should not be over-romanticised either. The town has long attracted artists, independents, London escapees, eccentrics and people who prefer edges to polish. A ten-seat Burgher tasting menu makes more sense there than it might first appear. The place has enough character to absorb an odd restaurant without turning it into a novelty.
Lury joins a broader shift in British dining away from the safest centres of attention. Some of the country’s sharper restaurants now operate outside the usual circuits, with smaller teams, stranger stories and less appetite for the standard growth script. The risk is obvious. A tiny restaurant can become precious very quickly. A heritage-led menu can start explaining itself into exhaustion. A chef cooking alone can become the story instead of the food.
Lury’s task is to avoid all three traps.
For now, the premise has teeth. A British-Sri Lankan chef in Hastings is using Burgher food history as a living kitchen language, not a sentimental backdrop. His wife has built the visual world around craft, restraint and Sri Lankan-made objects. The scale forces concentration. The best dishes, at least on paper, suggest a restaurant interested in tension rather than comfort: black pork and milk bun, arrack and old fashioned, fondant potato and cashew, Hastings and Sri Lanka.
Restaurants have been built on far weaker foundations than memory, spice and a well-aimed cocktail.
Practicalities
Lury
8 Cambridge Road, Hastings, TN34 1DJ
Thursday to Saturday dinner, 7pm
Saturday lunch, 12.30pm
Tasting menu: £84
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