The Modern Menu: Dom Fernando on reinventing Sri Lankan cooking at his restaurant Paradise in Soho, plus a recipe for turmeric dhal
Dom: “My grandmother was the best cook I’ve ever known. She was phenomenal. You think a chicken curry is a chicken curry, but everyone does it differently and hers was always my favourite. I didn’t even like Sri Lankan food when I went there for the first time aged 11, but I always polished off my grandmother’s chicken curry at home.
“We went to Sri Lanka every summer as a family, to see our relatives. As I got older, around 13 or 14, I started to appreciate the flavours more and would go to hawker centres with my parents, whereas I would have once preferred to eat a sandwich from the hotel.
“I’d developed my palette around Asian food, especially Indian and Sri Lankan, and then I went to work in hotels in Dubai and Singapore. The scenes in both those cities took my interest in food to a whole new level, especially Singapore where there are amazingly talented chefs and there’s a real mixing pot of different Asian cuisines.
“I missed the arts and culture scene in London, though, and so I came back from my years working abroad. I’d reached a point in my career where I wanted to do something for myself, so I decided to start a restaurant.
“I met chef Charith through a mutual friend and we started doing pop-ups together. It was a great proof of concept and, after 10 months, we started looking for a permanent space.
“Soho always felt like home. My aunt, my parents and my grandparents are responsible for my love of food and, growing up, we’d always come here if we were eating out, to Chinatown or Soho, or the original Pizza Express around the corner…. it was such a treat.
“When working on the food for Paradise, I thought back to my grandmother’s cooking. She made very simple, comforting Sri Lankan or Asian food, using the simplest of ingredients. That was my foundation, but when I lived abroad, I saw how chefs and restaurateurs were taking the fundamentals of good home cooking to new levels.
“So, we set out to create a menu that is rooted in tradition but that would really amplify Sri Lankan flavours in new ways and take cues from different cultures that have influenced the country, from The Malays, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the South-Indians and the British – all of whom have played a big part on Sri Lankan food. Temper, for example, is fried spices that go on top of dhals and comes from the Portuguese word for frying.
“It’s been really enlightening for us to challenge the kitchen team by saying, Okay, we know what we know, how do we elevate it? How do we modernise it? How do we use the best of, not only other ingredients from South India and from Malaysia, but how do we use British ingredients in our food as well, to bring out those flavours and offer something different?
“It’s been a learning curve as well, to see what’s out there, to see who’s growing down in Cornwall, to see what seafood is coming from within the British Isles or visiting small-batch farmers where we get our meat from.
“It’s very much about experimentation for us and that’s what’s exciting about it. And we’re not just cooking a standard curry. We’ve got a bitter gourd salad on the menu, served with heirloom tomatoes and shiso leaf from Flourish Farm in Cambridge, fresh Bombay onions and a little bit of umbalakada, or dried fish from the Maldives, which is very traditionally Sri Lankan. It’s a Sri Lankan vegetable and seasoning with Japanese herbs grown in the UK, and heirloom British tomatoes all working together in a dish, which I love.
“We’ve taken all the bartenders and floor staff to Sri Lanka as I wanted our whole team to live and breathe the country: the produce, culture, hospitality – all of it. When they’re saying to you, ‘You should go for the dahl but you should have it with the egg hopper, because that’s how it’s traditionally eaten in Sri Lanka,’ they know it first-hand.
“I wanted to create an experience with the menu in which people felt as though they were somewhere else during their meal and I wanted to do the same with the design as well. But I didn’t want to go down the route of a themed design, or being cliché.
“Instead, I wanted it to be stripped back and based on the aesthetic of tropical brutalism. Sri Lanka’s full of tropical modernism that all stems from the architect Geoffrey Bawa. As Sri Lanka’s most prolific architect, I want to take elements of his work and fuse them with things I’d seen in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Bali, and bring that to Soho.
“The concrete mimics the bistros found in Galle and Colombo, and the booths replicate train station seating in Bentota. The floor is made of individual slate tiles bought from Sri Lanka, and they give a lovely brutalist finish – they haven’t had too much wear, but over time you’ll notice the patina build up.
“I had the stools custom made by Dan Preston in Haggerston. I said to him, ‘I want them to feel as though they could be in a terrace in Colombo, quite dimly lit, but still quite cool, maybe with some shadows coming down from candles on top of the countertop.’ Because that’s what I want from Paradise: for people to feel as though they’re transported to a different place, even if it is just for a couple of hours. I think we all need some of that right now.”
250g red lentils, rinsed, drained
1 onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
½ tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp Sri Lankan curry powder
6 fresh curry leaves
1 long green chilli, sliced
1 cinnamon quill
500ml coconut milk
60ml coconut cream
80ml olive oil
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 cinnamon quill
1 large onion, finely chopped
4 garlic cloves, sliced
5 fresh curry leaves
1 tsp dried chilli flakes
Coriander leaves, to serve
Base: Place all the ingredients except the coconut cream in a saucepan with 250 ml water and bring to the boil. Reduce heat to medium and cook, covered, for 25 minutes, or until lentils are tender and broken down; add more water if necessary and season with salt.
For the temper topping: To cook the temper for the dhal, heat the olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Then add the remaining ingredients and cook, stirring occasionally, for around seven minutes, or until onions are soft and browned. Remove from the heat and set aside until the lentils are ready.
Stir the temper into the lentils, then add the coconut cream, stirring to combine. Top with fresh coriander and serve with rice.
RELATED ON THE MODERN HOUSE
Four at the Fore: London’s most innovative creatives on pushing things forward
The art of festive tablescaping, with Kasia Borowiecka
Peckham-based SAGE Flowers’ guide to floristry at home in spring – from creating arrangements to making sustainable choices
Chefs at Home: Bocca di Lupo founder Jacob Kenedy on the joys of seasonal cooking at his home in Angel, plus a recipe for artichoke malloreddus
The Modern Menu: three recipes for langoustines from Adam Riley’s beach-front fish shack in Tynemouth
Chefs at Home: Moro restaurant founders Sam and Sam Clark on the pleasures of home cooking, plus a recipe for leek and yoghurt soup
The Modern Menu: Pamela Yung’s recipe for mozzarella in carrozza – a fried cheese sandwich – at Flor in Borough Market
The Modern Menu: chef Merlin Labron-Johnson cooks hay baked chicken and vegetable gratin at Osip in Bruton, Somerset
The Modern Menu: recipes for outdoor summer eating from Iain and Matthew Pennington at The Ethicurean in Bristol
The Modern Menu: a recipe for coley and mussels from Andrew and Ben Radford at family-run Timberyard in Edinburgh