Paradise Grey restaurant
Paradise found
High in Higgovale, there's a restaurant that goes st raight to your head.
Chef Jason never cooks the same thing twice. But that's not the only reason we were at Paradise Grey.
With the golden chimes of palm wine music from '60s Sierra Leone, Paradise Grey is a refuge for the offbeat and the calm insane. It's in the lush Cape Town suburb of Higgovale with pictureperfect eco-glam treehouses nesting and cooing in the safe green hills of yogic-bliss.
But there's nothing suburban about Paradise Grey's eccentric twosome: silverbearded Jamaican host Alan and young chef Jason, a softly spoken suburban American refugee from Pennsylvania who has been travelling since he was 12. They offer a strictly first-name-basis alternative to poncy silver service in their homely Cape Dutch house at 50 Constantia Road.
But you can't just pitch, you can't call either; you have to book online at Paradisegrey. yolasite.com and you won't find it listed in any eating out guide, because it's new, it's today, and there's only one table. Take your own wine or drink theirs.
We mailed Chef Jason a list of wine we were bringing, firstly two bottles of a wine full of secrets, the Bouchard Finlayson Blanc de Mer 2008. "Dirty secrets?'' asked Amstel. "No, Amstel, very clean."
We also had two bottles of Dornier Chenin Blanc 2009 that we'd been given, and two bottles of seriously yummy fresh blackberry juice with zing: Allée Bleue Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2006. Plus a bottle of Pink Port from De Krans which Chef Jason praised as a "wonderful elixir, not too sweet. It doesn't go to your head; it goes to your heart".
The Bouchard Finlayson with the smoked snoek, spring onion and cream cheese on thinly sliced cucumber coins was a mixed marriage in the 1950s - dangerously good. It was followed by smoked trout with caramelised walnuts over leafy greens. But we figured the Oh Dear Dud Dornier would make better cooking wine so we stuck with the Bouchard for the tropical Jamaican salad with Alan's refreshing grapefruit vinaigrette. Like exotic loot, this salad. Pirates would swordfight luminous man-eating Venus flytraps to claim it.
For the pan-fried chicken with an orange glaze, crimson red raisins and sundried tomatoes with roasted baby brinjals, thinly sliced baby marrows, crusted butternut and potato with cashews and pecans, we hit the Allée Bleue, while pudding was a heavenly strawberry soup that sang in soprano with our well-chilled and summery De Krans Pink Port. Each dish was a comfort and delight of tangy, tropical fresh flavours, leaving us with that loved-up afterglow. "What's the first thing you ever cooked for a bunch of people?" I asked.
"The hottest Jamaican pumpkin soup in the world - so hot the pepper burst! But before we ate it, 15 of us shared a fat joint, like a 50-cent coin, in an apartment in West Amsterdam where they grew hydroponics in their attic. It was passed round the table once. We were all silent for half an hour. And then we ate my super-hot Jamaican soup, all rushing on weed." Alan laughs at the memory.
"We like to offer memorable, personal dinners. We can even arrange a Congolese band." He admits to enjoying eating out but laments having to pay for restaurant décor and bragging rights of "I was at so and so last night"...
"And all that oyster foam stuff, and always pomegranates or the meat massaged by Thai therapists. The celebrity chef culture is getting obscene, quite cannibalistic, like you're eating the chef not the food, like you're eating Gordon Ramsay. We don't feel like we're eating Chef Jason."
Jason laughs: "Well, that's good as I'm a little thin. Although I do have flavour..."
