The World’s Only Sri Lankan Tasting Menu is in London

[fire crackling] [rhythmical music]

Sri Lankan food is probably best traditionally known

as different sort of curries, pulses, dosa.

At Paradise, we aim to take this to the next level

by elevating, progressing certain elements of our cuisine.

To my knowledge, we are the only restaurant right now

in the world doing a Sri Lankan tasting menu.

We opened and we had three national reviews,

one after another, and we had a queue of a hundred people

outside our door.

As the chef and owner of Paradise,

and the emotion I really wanna give guests

is that they leave the restaurant wanting to book a flight

to Sri Lanka next.

Hey guys, I'm Dom Fernando.

I'm the owner and chef here at Paradise in Soho

in Central London with a big bunch of pandan leaves

that I bought fresh from Sri Lanka.

Got a lot of prep to do today.

It's going in.

Morning Mama.

So Mama here is my Roti chef.

He's one of the OG members here at Paradise.

He's been with me since we opened.

A lot of our food takes sort of colonial influences

from the South Indians, the Malays,

the Dutch, and the Portuguese.

So Roti is something that definitely came to us

from the South Indians.

He's the guy when it comes to roti.

All right, let's head down to the kitchen.

Morning guys.

We've got our team, a very small team.

This is Pranab, who's my head chef.

We're going to be prepping the Kimbula Banis.

Banis for us in Sri Lanka is like a croissant basically,

very similar to this.

So we have it as part of sort of a tea time snack.

It's a savory take on a sweet dish

and something that only we do.

This dish is inspired by my dad's love of cheese toasties.

He'd always have sort of cheese

and mango chutney sandwiches,

but done with the Sri Lankan sant of green chili custard.

So first of all, we're gonna start cutting

our bar croissants, lengthwise.

What we do is we bake them and then we leave them

to sort of go a little bit stale, 24 to 48 hours.

That's because when we make the custard

and then when we set it, we want the croissants

to be able to soak in as much

of that savory green chili custard as possible.

We are gonna pour in some whole milk fest,

some double cream as well.

So we really want to achieve that consistency

of a thick custard, which is why we use both milk

and double cream as well as egg yolks.

We're also gonna add in some rocket chilies.

They have a very distinct sort of heat and flavor

and adding in a little bit of salt.

We don't have the luxury of having an open planned kitchen

because the restaurant is so small.

It has its challenges but also has its blessings as well

because you're so close to each other,

you can see what's going on,

especially when you're on the past,

you are almost like a conductor of service.

They couldn't be any more than four of us here.

At one point in time, five and a half years ago,

I was in a corporate job.

I used to be an accountant back in the day

and spent many years in corporate as well,

but always had a love of cooking.

We sort of leave the custard for about sort of 10,

12 minutes before we add in our coconut milk powder

and then we whisk everything up.

We can't achieve the same effect as using coconut milk.

It doesn't give us the same end texture.

It gives it a much richer coconut flavor as well,

which is what makes the Banis unique.

So right now we're waiting for the custard to thicken up

before we can pour it all over the croissants.

In terms of research and development for our menu,

I work very closely with Pranab.

We think about nostalgic or childhood memories

or dishes in Sri Lanka that we come across

whenever we're traveling, we see the sort

of traditional version of it

and then we think, okay, how can we remodel a dish?

How can we build in British ingredients?

So it takes us sort of up to a month.

I'm in Sri Lanka right now every two weeks,

just really looking at what new suppliers we can work with,

what new ingredients as well.

And I've learned so much over the last five years

that I've spent going there thinking about

how we can really refine and reelevate Sri Lanka's cuisine

on the world stage.

We'll use all of these croissants now.

We'll kind of flatten it.

So similar to making a bread and butter pudding

as you would do at home with bread.

Kind of flatten it to make sure you can get

as many croissants as we can.

We're trying to achieve as many layers

as possible in the end product with the Banis.

We're gonna start to pour over the custard.

It's gonna soak into those stale croissants

and get it evenly distributed

and just pressing everything down now to make sure we get it

as flat as we can.

He's just stabbing it right now.

So he is letting all the custard just go right down

into sort of the bottom layers.

[Woman] So you're a dishwasher too.

You gotta do everything when you have your own restaurant.

So now we're just putting on the baking paper,

we're weighting everything down

so that it is gonna bake evenly and it's gonna make sure

that we achieve a set height as well.

Oh, it's pretty heavy, isn't it?

Chef Money needs to gimme a hand with this.

Perfect.

All right, so we're gonna leave that to bake now

for the next hour or so at 175 degrees centigrade.

And in the meantime, we're gonna start prepping

for our next dish, which is our Lobster Kiri-Hodi.

This is our dry store right here.

It's where we keep all of our spices

that we bring from Sri Lanka.

Pretty fresh Sri Lankan cardamom

that we've got super dark green in color.

Gonna grab the cardamom and fenugreek

is what we're gonna use to make our Kiri-Hodi.

Kiri-Hodi for us is a light coconut milk based gravy.

So it's like a really smooth light curry

that we generally have with white fish or with potatoes.

It's meant to sort of contrast the spicier items

that we eat.

So the first thing, what we're gonna do is we're gonna toast

our spices.

We've got some fresh Sri Lankan cinnamon

that comes to us from Hikkaduwa.

Down on the south coast of Sri Lanka,

we've got some cardamon in here as well and some pedigree.

To sort of bring out the flavor and all of the spices,

we toast them or roast them

and then put them into our curries.

My grandmother was the person that taught me how to cook

first of all, aged 18 before I went to university.

She's like, Oh, you know you need to, you need to be able

to cook and to extend Sri Lankan hospitality

to all of your classmates.

Definitely only for like six people.

Six people maximum.

Now we're gonna cook our lobster.

Our lobster comes to us from either Scotland

or from the south coast of England.

It's always native lobster.

Gonna crush it, break everything down.

You say you got lobster shells,

a little bit of meat in here as well.

We're allowing all the flavor of every part of the lobster

that we've got to come out.

Pretty tough, bad boys this is.

Pranab secret technique for breaking down lobster.

We're just gonna kind of break it into

as many pieces as possible.

You see all the juices.

It's gonna give this curry super sort

of lobster rich flavor.

This is the fun part.

Definitely fun.

We want to minimize waste as much as possible

so using lobster shells is really important.

We can bring out a lot of flavor.

Now we're gonna deglaze it by adding in

some of our Paradise Riesling.

We make it specifically for Paradise

with a winery called Steve Althoff.

It's one of the oldest wineries in the world.

We actually pair it upstairs with our food.

It goes with the Kiri-Hodi course

and we also use it in our dishes as well.

You can get that rich smell of the Riesling.

It's starting to burn off all the alcohol, smells great.

It's time for us to now put in our lemongrass.

Adding in some curry leaves,

probably the best in the world, even if I say so myself.

That's what honestly makes a difference

in the Sri Lankan food.

Our curry leaves, they grow wildly like literally everywhere

in people's gardens.

They grow to be quite big as well in terms of size

and then you can sort of just tear them open

and you can smell how aromatic they are.

They're just very, very powerful.

For me, it smells like home and it adds

like something specifically Sri Lankan into a dish.

Then adding in that rampe

which is that pandan leaf we saw earlier.

So pandan leaf is native to Sri Lanka

and to some areas of southeast Asia like Thailand,

and it adds just like amazing sort of light,

sort of vanilla aromatics into our food.

Yesterday's bunch, I just brought in my luggage actually.

Generally, we ship things via suppliers every single week.

But because I was coming back from Sri Lanka yesterday,

I bought it straight in fresh.

Then we're adding in some chopped up green chili

and some lime leaf as well.

Gonna add in my aromats, all of our water

that's gonna make our base stock.

We're gonna let this boil throw another 40 minutes or so

to make a really rich stock base for our Kiri-Hodi.

Then we're going to blend it and add in coconut milk

and turmeric to finish off our curry.

But in the meantime, it's nearly one o'clock now

so we're gonna go upstairs, gonna have a look at how

we're doing in terms of performance for this week.

Managing the kitchen is one thing,

but looking at how the business performs is as important.

So I'm going to go and look at how many covers

were booked inside the restaurant.

So we had 30 covers last night, for example,

which shows us how profitable we could be.

I'm also gonna go into a separate system

and look at how much we spent on our food

and drink costs yesterday.

It's gonna help us to identify any changes that we need

to make in the next few days.

Where are we holding too much stock?

And then what I'll do is I'm the person

that will place orders for the next few days.

We move from having an ala carte menu where we had wastage

through to having a tasting menu and it's so much easier.

We can forecast on the day

and for the next few days in advance exactly

what we'll need.

It means that we're not spending money

where we don't need to,

and that's critical in the food business

where margins really are everything.

So we just received a national review from David Ellis

who's the restaurant critic at Standard.

It's a fantastic review.

I'm super chuffed with it, four out of five.

So now we'll try and plan for that.

We'll try and hopefully gather more pace

when it comes to bookings.

I'm just gonna open up one more slot at eight o'clock

so that we can take an extra couple of covers.

Live revenue management.

I definitely don't miss the accounting stuff from back

in the day, but it's definitely proved useful

in terms of running my own business.

This week is looking pretty strong.

I'm done with performance.

We're gonna go downstairs, check in on my kitchen team

and light the fire for service.

Right now, we haven't had our meat delivery in for the day,

so we are just going to give a quick call

to our meat supplier.

We never panic.

You never panic in restaurants.

Always gotta have everything under control.

He says, Hey Lyle, it's Dom.

When you get this message, can you give me a call back

just about our delivery?

Thanks, all right, bye.

We definitely need to have tough skin.

There is no doubt about that.

We will always get the meat today.

We always run up against time.

We've had deliveries in sort of 10 minutes before service,

but we always manage to sort our solution.

It's like go time, it's showtime,

it's like turning up to theater, et cetera.

No matter what gets in your way, you have to be ready.

Ready for action, ready for game time.

So we're back in it.

Got some cinnamon wood and mango wood that we bring

from Sri Lanka as well as some waste coconut husk.

We'll make sure that we use all the coconut

that we don't waste any at all.

When we smoke it, they're just gonna give everything

a slightly different flavor.

So our fire starter, oh, there we go.

So now sparks start to fly.

It's gonna really start that barbecue.

Generally in Sri Lanka, it's like native for us

to cook on wood.

There we go.

Starting to go.

We cook our prawns on this grill

and we also cook our sirloin steak.

The sirloin steak, we use X dairy steak, so X dairy cows.

They're normally sort of eight or nine years old.

We get them from just outside of London,

the Retired Dairy Cows.

So they're left out to pasture for like number of years.

So they build up the flavor through this

and the meat tastes fantastic and we roll it together,

we then cut it and we grill it on the barbecue.

So you can see the coconuts, the cinnamon wood

and the mango wood all starting to light up.

You're getting that aroma.

Basically, if we want to just let something sit

or if we want to sort of slow cook it,

we put it on the racks that are further up.

Still keeps it warm,

but it means it's not getting direct heat.

And we're gonna be prepping now for service time.

We're setting up the past right now,

myself, Pranab and Yarik, setting up all our condiments,

all our sources ready for when guests start to arrive

with us.

So we're in service for about four to five hours,

depending upon how busy we are in the restaurant.

My job is gonna be on the past for tonight.

That means expediting all the dishes,

plating up and then serving them personally to our guests.

All right guys, well it's nearly six o'clock,

which means it's game time for us, service time.

Thanks very much for following us around here at Paradise.

Come check us out sometime.