Paradise is in Soho

It’s an austere room, in a clean, atmospheric and angular way, sculpted out of dark stone, illuminated by soft amber light and a massive window that faces out towards a massage parlour, the now (mostly) polished heart of seedy old Soho. 

Re-opened after an extensive refurbishment last year, Paradise is the chef Dom Fernando’s vision of refined Sri Lankan cooking. It’s a tasting menu concept without any of the pomp and excessive tweezers usually associated with the format. Great food, an interesting room to eat it in, and a founder with a plan. 

“I actually started out as an accountant,” says Fernando, who spent time working for big hotels in Dubai and Singapore. “I came back to London after being away for 10 years. I grew up cooking in a big Sri Lankan family, so opening my own restaurant had always been a dream in the back of my mind.”

The usual headaches with landlords eventually led to a small building on Rupert St. “I’d walk into meetings and they’d say, ‘“Let me get this straight. You haven't had a restaurant before? And you’ve got no funding?’ And it was exactly that. That was 2018, so it’s been a bit of a journey to get to this point. I sold my flat, put everything into it, and we eventually opened in 2019.”

Having done his research, Fernando found that Sri Lankan cooking wasn’t particularly well-served in a global city like London. There were a few commercial chains, the odd small place passing off South Indian cooking as Sri Lankan, and a handful of great, small family-run places on the city’s outskirts. 

“I saw what was happening with Thai cooking around that time,” says Fernando, pouring us a glass of Austrian natural wine as the late-afternoon office crowd start their migration to the pub after work. “There was Kiln and Smoking Goat, and I thought there was gap, especially considering the depth and quality of the cooking.”

While not a trained chef, Fernando grew up in a household where everyone cooked. “My grandmother was the matriarch of the family and all of my childhood memories are centred around the kitchen table and someone cooking.”

Fernando wanted his restaurant to feel like stepping into the motherland. The concrete walls are inspired by the work of Geoffrey Bawa, one of the leaders of the tropical modernist movement. “He had this philosophy of bringing the outside in,” says Fernando. “I wanted to have lighting that reflects, as if you’re sitting on a terrace in Colombo. Our water glasses are repurposed Lion beer bottles. It’s been fun to dream up all of these little touches, which might not be immediately obvious, but have been carefully thought about.”

The cooking had to be great, too. A small island with a rich culinary history, Sri Lankan food pulls from Indian, Malay, Dutch, Portuguese and Indonesian influences. “It’s very coconut based,” says Fernando, “but regionally our food can vary as well in terms of spice levels and flavours. Down near the coast it's quite mellow and aromatic, while the north is north is going to be a bit more fiery, a bit more spicy.”

“I think we've always wanted to keep authenticity at the heart of everything we do. So, in terms of our spice levels and our flavours and our ingredients, we stay true to all of those things. But I guess where Paradise differs is that I really wanted to modernise how it's presented, how we cook it. Sri Lankan food has traditionally been a cuisine that hasn't really been progressed. We're still, to an extent, stuck in the rice and curry era. 

“One thing we really wanted to do was try and kind of progress that, reimagine it, move away from that, but still keep the authenticity.”