Bathiya & Santhush Partner With Soho Hospitality to bring Charcoal Tandoor Fire Grill to Colombo

Charcoal Tandoor Fire Grill, the acclaimed Bangkok dining concept by Soho Hospitality, is set to open its doors in Colombo with legendary Sri Lankan musical duo Bathiya Jayakody and Santhush Weeraman, alongside Mevan Gunatilleke, confirmed as co-owners.

Rising to the 50th floor of Capitol TwinPeaks on Union Place, home to Colombo’s tallest sky bridge, standing 600 feet above the city, the restaurant represents one of the most high-profile celebrity-backed dining investments in Sri Lanka’s history and signals a new chapter for the capital’s premium dining landscape.

For Bathiya and Santhush, the investment is a deliberate homecoming, a reversal of a career spent exporting Sri Lankan creativity to the world. Having spent three decades building Sri Lankan music into a globally recognised product, the duo saw in Charcoal a natural extension of that same outward-looking ambition, now turned inward.

“For three decades we’ve worked to make Sri Lankan music a global product,” said Santhush Weeraman. “Hospitality is part of the entertainment landscape. We’ve always taken our culture to the world, now we wanted to bring the world’s best back home.”

Bathiya Jayakody described the partnership as one built on a shared pursuit of excellence. “What drew us to Rohit and to Charcoal was the same obsession with craft that drives everything we do in music, the relentless pursuit of getting every detail right. Sri Lankans deserve to experience that level of excellence at home, and we are proud to be part of making that happen.”

Founded in Bangkok in 2014, Charcoal has built its reputation by reinterpreting North Indian tandoor traditions and the richness of Mughlai cuisine through a contemporary, design-led lens; live fire cooking, slow techniques and carefully layered spice profiles creating an experience that is bold yet refined.

In Colombo, that experience will unfold against one of the city’s most dramatic backdrops, 600 feet above Union Place. The venue also addresses a gap that co-owner Mevan Gunatilleke, Deputy Group CEO and Director of Sanken Group, has long observed: that Colombo’s higher-end dining has been almost entirely confined to hotel settings, leaving the city without a truly standalone, world-class restaurant destination. Charcoal is built to be exactly that.

For Rohit Sachdev, CEO and Founder of Soho Hospitality, the B&S partnership is what makes this opening truly resonate. “Charcoal is our highest-rated concept, our guests recommend it before they even leave the table. That’s what we’re bringing to Colombo.”

He noted that, “Having Bathiya and Santhush as partners means this isn’t just a Bangkok restaurant opening in Sri Lanka, it becomes Sri Lanka’s own. They understand this audience. They’ve spent their lives surprising and delighting them. That’s exactly what Charcoal does too.”

The Colombo debut arrives amid growing international attention on the brand. Condé Nast Traveller India recently described the restaurant’s arrival as “a sensory voyage — following the spice trail from the Middle East to India, and now, across the Indian Ocean to Sri Lanka.” Charcoal has also been featured in Wallpaper* and The Boston Globe, and received an Asia Pacific Property Award for leisure interiors in Thailand.

Source: Adaderana