Review (again): Paradise, Soho

I reviewed Paradise a few years ago when we first went and enjoyed our best Sri Lankan meal in London to date. We’ve been back a few times since, whenever we’re longing for punchy whole-hearted spice and cool cocktails. So this isn’t a full review, I just wanted to highlight that they’ve now switched focus to a tasting menu taking a very modern spin on Sri Lankan cooking. It feels like a push to differentiate themselves from the cluster of excellent trad Sri Lankan options now available: Kolamba, Rambutan, Hoppers and probably more I’m not aware of.

And I loved it. Lovely snacks packed full of spice, like the crisp roll of beef tartare with smokey garlicky flavours. Or a crispy caramelised pastry cube filled with a gently chilli custard, topped with a blob of fiercely moreish date and lime chutney. Our next starter was wattalappam – it turns out every culture has an equivalent to the Japanese chawanmushi if you look hard enough. This one infused with crab flavours, topped with fruit and sea buckthorn it was a little sweet for me, but very good.

Fish was pollock, in a beautifully rounded and full-flavoured kiri-hodi curry, spiky with mustard seed and enriched with Riesling. Coconut and apple sambol was a great relish. We had actually decided to have one of the meat tasting menu and one of the veg tasting menu, and here on the fish course we actually decided the clever slice of slender asparagus spears set in courgette mousse was even better than the pollock – a truly first class piece of invention, loved it.

The main course was slices of beautiful pink lamb saddle, served with another sterling curry, this time dark and earthy with black garlic. The sheer diversity of curries in Sri Lankan cooking is one of the wonders of the cuisine. The turmeric and saffron dahl was also superb (I freely admit to loving good Sri Lankan dahls over all others). A fierce lunu-miris relish made with rhubarb, some sticky aubergine moju and an almost flaky buttery roti rounded out the service. Dessert was a “mini magnum” of sweet mango sorbet in a white chocolate shell, all good fun and tasty but would have looked and eaten better plated as a normal pud.

This review is, I guess, as much a paean to Sri Lankan cuisine as anything else. If pressed, I might have to name it my favourite cuisine. But Paradise is taking it in modern and exciting directions, and if they keep the price around the £65 per person mark (this menu was less than a month old when we visited) it will be one of the best value tasting menus in London.