One of the first things I see on arrival at Paradise Cove is a wet paint sign: crude, all-caps scrawl tacked onto the glass of a door edged in freshly daubed canary-yellow emulsion. This is not unusual. Restaurant critics, like visiting royals, tend to live out their days in rooms haunted by the whiff of hurriedly applied Dulux.
But at this Battersea spot, that wet paint sign feels symbolic of a broader recent history of premature closure and perpetual renewal. Originally founded in 2020 as Sugarcane, Tarell ‘Chef Tee’ Mcintosh’s Caribbean-inspired restaurant is perhaps best known for the hard luck trials it has had to endure in the intervening years. This is the place that launched a successful crowdfund after a 2022 burglary left Mcintosh with just £34, and also the place that had to shut two outlets last year after a ruinous legal dispute over its original name.
But here Chef Tee is again. Back in a new location. Armed with a gently recalibrated roster of Caribbean crowdpleasers. And hoping against hope that the third time will, finally, prove to be the charm.
Its mere existence already feels like a defiant win. Paradise Cove 3.0 sits in a corner site, opposite the vacant shell of its original home, along a stretch of Wandsworth Road that is a short walk and a veritable world away from the money-hosed silliness of the Nine Elms sky-pool. Self-built on a shoestring budget, it’s a scrappy, DIY sunburst of a space: blue and yellow accents, toilet cubicles constructed from salvaged chipboard, and a plasma screen playing Bob Marley videos on a loop. If, like me, you grew up in a house where the scent of rice hung in the air and the telly was only ever off if there was a power cut, then you will feel very at home.
That hugging domesticity could be found in the jerk chicken too. Comprising vigorously browned legs of seemingly unbarbecued bird, it nonetheless had fall-apart succulence, a rising swell of clove-scented heat, and a strange, seductive savour that, I think, comes from a dousing of soy sauce. A pale orange clump of coleslaw, dandruffed in coconut, was a useful, muffling foil. And then the vegan ital curry was, frankly, extraordinary: chickpeas, sweet potato, peppers and more, coaxed to compliant softness, and cloaked in a scotch bonnet-laced wonder of a rough-hewn, elegantly complex stew.
But after that, there were some head-scratchers. Jerk-spiced rice offered little but blunt, unleavened chilli heat. Spicy cucumber salad, meanwhile, needed more counterpunching acidity and fewer swamping fistfuls of bagged baby spinach.
We staggered out, primed to fail a breathalyser but profoundly warmed by what we had experienced
A spirited eccentricity is clearly part of what has made Chef Tee such a popular and valued figure in his community and beyond. There are not many restaurants where volumes of the chef-patron’s self-published musings are handed out to diners while they wait. However, Paradise Cove’s exuberant experimentation did occasionally cause me to yearn for a little of the sure-footedness and clarity of, say, a spot like Brixton’s Fish, Wings & Tings. Case in point: a wedge of ravishingly moist ginger cake that, for reasons unknown, was drenched in enough rum to fell a horse.
Still, we staggered out, primed to fail a breathalyser but profoundly warmed by what we had experienced. Some of Paradise Cove’s food undoubtedly needs refining. Yet this is one of those instances when imperfect execution shouldn’t be seen as a discouragement. Go for that spectacular curry. Go for one of those exceptional cakes (which are available without the added booze). And, above all, go to remind yourself that the very best of this city lives not in corporate sheen but in the toil, talent and tenacity of real Londoners.
