Run to Paradice – or at least this spirited Northbridge dining room

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In 1995, the American rapper Coolio released “Gangsta’s Paradise”: a song that
propelled the Los Angeles MC to global stardom while also greenlighting hip-hop’s eventual ascent into the mainstream.

It’s a track you might hear being bumped at Peasant’s Paradice, a raw, unvarnished dining room on Brisbane Street that’s an easy stroll from all the sights and sounds of greater Northbridge yet also kind of away from it all, too.

For eaters that find joy in cooking that booms with spice and vitality and original thinking and an insouciance that comes across as quiet confidence rather than arrogance, Peasant’s has all the makings of – like the name suggests – a happy place.

The person behind Peasant’s is Dwight Alexander, a Zimbabwean-born chef that
made his way from Africa to Australia via New Zealand and many a restaurant gig.

Since landing in P-Town, our man has amassed quite the mixtape of hospitality
experience and his CV includes everything from high-volume pubs (The Garden,
Leederville) and spirited Asian cooking (Beaufort Street’s Dainty Dowager) to forays into coffee and Tex-Mex.

After spending his whole career serving other people’s food, Alexander felt it was
time that he started looking into his own family album for tales to tell and things to cook. So in 2018, he and Justin West – a Burmese-Indian chef that he worked with at Lot Twenty – held the first Peasant’s pop-up at Bivouac.

On the menu: grilled chicken livers sharpened with peri-peri, biryani rice, spiced silverbeet, plus other dishes and flavours reflecting the duo’s shared migrant stories and interest in offal, unglamorous veg and other “peasant” ingredients seldom shown love by the public.

The pair decided Peasant’s deserved an address of its own and, in 2020, set up shop in Northbridge where they took over a former cafe that had, sadly, fallen victim to COVID shutdowns. As that period of history showed us all, a lot can
change in a year.

Which of course means that even more can happen in the space of four years, not
least in a fast-moving industry like this hospitality caper. In the curious case of
Peasant’s, the biggest of these changes was the (amicable) departure of West.

As a result, Alexander – then working as Peasant’s restaurant manager – now
had to look after the kitchen as well as the sparse dining room. (Peasant’s and its
raffle of mismatched furniture, I don’t think it’s unkind to say, looks like it was fitted out to a budget). Thankfully, record covers, basketball knick-knacks and pink pipe wall fixtures give the space personality, as does the uptempo playlist featuring hip-hop, baile funk, reggaeton and other genres associated with African, American and – indeed – African-American music scenes.)

Whereas Peasant’s previous food offering mirrored the diverse playlist – see
experiments with fried chicken and special events including Cajun-inspired crab boils – Alexander has tightened the menu’s focus and now serves what he describes as modern African cooking: food that is based on dishes gleaned from countries all over the African continent, but modified in the interests of accessibility, availability of ingredients and, most crucially, deliciousness.

Take the brilliant South African Cape Malay beef curry ($24): a dish synonymous
with South Africa’s Malay community who are the descendants of the Indonesian
slaves brought to South Africa during colonial rule. In Cape Town, you can enjoy this rich warming stew prickly with pepper, cardamom and other spices in many: topped with egg in the dish known as bobotie, say, or wrapped in roti bread to make the kebab-like salomie.

At Peasant’s, the curry arrives pooled in a hillock of thick hummus stained grey by blending the chickpeas together with cumin and coriander seeds. Pomegranate seeds, currants and chopped parsley are artfully scattered over
the lot while half-crescents of fluffy white bread – stripey and charry from the char grill – are on-hand for clean-up duties. It’s an essential order.

Toast is also served with the fish rillettes ($24), a dish riffing on the version cooked by Mama Alexander. True, the headliner (pickled fish stained yellow by turmeric, diced into pieces and mixed with potato) wasn’t the lush, French-rillettes that Must Wine Bar introduced us to, but they’re still a bright, vinegary wonder of surf meeting turf.

Bangles of pickled celeriac offer crunch. A cooling Southern Indian-inspired
yoghurt ramped up with pineapple and Kashmiri chili provides an unexpected shock of richness and spice.

At a time when restaurants, menus and aesthetics are becoming increasingly homogenous and trend-driven, unique, singular venues such as Peasant’s are the sorts of places we need to be getting around.

As is standard operating procedure with chefs nowadays, Alexander constructs
dishes by using different elements to build flavour and create textures, not least
when it comes to vegetables. He’ll turn the Swahili coconut and red bean stew
maharague into a nutty, almost satay-like sauce to make char-grilled cabbage ($22) perfumed with heady yuzu sing. On the menu, derere (Zimbabwean okra soup) might be billed as one of the back-up singers supporting sweet and sour clouds of cauliflower fuzzy with the char of smoke ($19) but the soup’s denseness, richness and clear line of spice make it, for my money, the star of the show.

He’ll also leave it up to matchsticks of kapenta – a tiny dried freshwater sardine – to bring salt and crunch to the slow-cooked pumpkin leaves accompanying the cow’s foot stewed in tomato and garlic and served with the Zimbabwean white corneal known as sadza ($25): a compelling reason to find out when Peasant’s next monthly offal night is happening and to put it in your diary.

There’s also the house injera ($16) – the spongy, fermented flatbread synonymous with Ethiopian and Eritrean food – that you should check out: perhaps not for the crepe-like injera itself which is a little less sour or fluffy than the versions you might find at Lailbela Ethiopian Restaurant or Mirrabooka’s shuttered Injera House, but for the quality of the condiments Peasant’s injera is served with.

Doro wot – Ethiopia’s famous egg and chicken stew – is reimagined as quarters of hard-boiled egg dressed in a rich, fresh tomato stew. Crescents of crunchy pickled green mango fizz with the funky stank of fermentation. The silkiness of the eggplant dip that’s somewhere between baba ganoush and a dressing you might want to make very good potato salad with.

There is, safe to say, a lot happening on each plate and in the Peasant’s kitchen.

I love the make-up and value in the wine list too with the prices of everything (most wines are $14 by the glass with bottles at $65) in the same ballpark. Who doesn’t love the idea of drinking what you feel like rather than necessarily what you can afford? I also love that all the wines on the list are sold by the glass.

Dwight is also an enthusiastic, knowledgeable presence on the floor. On quieter nights, he’ll both serve and cook for guests while weekends see Jamaican chef Kevin Scott keep an eye on the kitchen.

Which brings me to the one thing that I don’t like about Peasant’s: how busy it is. Or should I be how busy it isn’t. Maybe it’s just me, but the two times I visited to write this review – one weekend lunch, one weekday dinner – I was one of a handful of tables.

While a quiet restaurant is good for my ADHD as well as being able to talk
food with an enthusiastic cook, it’s not so good for the long-term viability of a
business. At a time when restaurants, menus and aesthetics are becoming
increasingly homogenous and trend-driven, unique, singular venues such as
Peasant’s are the sorts of places we need to be getting around, protecting and
celebrating.

Considering the quality of the cooking you’re getting, the prices being charged are fair, while the $65 feed-me menu represents sharp value: another thumbs-up for this spirted inner-city diner.

While writing this piece, I got thinking about what it was about “Gangsta’s Paradise” that saw the single spend 11 weeks at the top of the Australian charts and turn Coolio into a household (or at least dancefloor) name. Sure, the tie-in with the movie Dangerous Minds contributed to the song’s success, but sharing a video clip with Michelle Pfieffer only gets an MC so far.

Rather, I think there are two key factors at play here. First, the earworm that is the Stevie Wonder song that the Coolio track owes so much to. (Who knew that those catchy orchestral strings from “Pastime Paradise” would resonate with so many?) And two, and most importantly: the fact that someone was telling their story – a story that many at the time weren’t all that familiar with – via an accessible medium that people could relate to.