Paradise Chow creating a world — and cuisine — they love

Most food trucks aren’t inspired by a beer, but it’s not hard to guess which beverage Birmingham’s newest food truck, Paradise Chow, is modeled after. 

If you’ve ever seen a can of TrimTab Brewing Company’s popular Paradise Now beer, the design similarities are uncanny.

Paradise Chow co-owner Marsha Mims said the Paradise Chow island-themed food truck is painted emerald with bright green palm leaves and is meant to go along with one of the TrimTab mantras, “create a world you love,” painted on the side of the truck. 

Paradise Chow had a soft opening Oct. 30 and recently celebrated its grand opening in February at the TrimTab brewery lot, where it has been serving tiki-style cuisine from 5-9:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, and from 5-11:30 p.m. Friday through Saturday at TrimTab.

Though Paradise Chow is not affiliated with TrimTab in any official capacity, Marsha Mims said she and her husband Phillip, the other co-owner, developed a close relationship over the years with TrimTab owners Harris and Cheri Stewart. Mims said Harris was the one who came up with the food truck name. 

“With the [Paradise Now] Raspberry Berliner Weisse, I mean, that beer is just incredible, and over the past couple of summers, people have just fallen in love with it,” Marsha Mims said. “So when we decided to open a food truck, we kind of collaborated and they were like, ‘you have a free place to put it every day of the week if you’d like,’ so we did.”

The Mims also co-own Marty’s PM in Southside, and because the restaurant is open all night, its kitchen is unused during the day, Martha Mims said, so they decided to use it to design a new food concept.   

She said the menu for Paradise Now was developed over the course of a month by the two head chefs of Paradise Chow, J.P. Hutchinson and Noah Clark. Each day, they would experiment and cook tiki-styled menu options in the Marty’s PM kitchen, drawing partly on Clark’s island food expertise from living in Hawaii. 

“We came through so many really great things that I would like to put on the menu for specials in the future, like fish tacos and some different skewers of things,” Marsha Mims said. 

Martha Mims said they chose to be picky and only choose specially-curated menu items. “So we picked eight or nine items, and we really just wanted to blow those out of the park. That way, people get a great experience every time,” she said. 

It was also important, she said, to offer delicious vegetarian options. Current meatless options include the Spicy Papaya Salad with tofu, which can be served hot or mild; the Burmese Green Beans, which are blistered green beans in garlic soy glaze sesame seeds and furikake rice; and the Furikake Rice bowl, a menu item that includes tofu rice, mixed peppers, scallions, sesame seeds and a soft egg. 

“Most people, when they do tofu, they do a soy tofu, but our chickpea tofu is sort of this soft pillow-y little extra bit,” Marsha Mims said. “It’s actually got little pearls of soy sauce on top of it so when you bite into it, it bursts in your mouth and mixes with the rice and everything. It’s so good.”

As meat options, the rice bowl can also be served with teriyaki salmon, and the papaya salad can be served with grilled shrimp. She said the Kahlua Pork Sandwich is based on a traditional Hawaiian pork sandwich.

“I know we eat a lot of pork in Alabama, but this is something that’s very different,” Marsha Mims said, adding that the dish has been popular since their opening.

Paradise Chow also serves the Pork Belly BLT, which is “made to taste really fresh,” she said, with Jamaican jerk pork belly, tomato, arugula and mayo. 

Recently, Marsha Mims said, they’ve expanded the menu to add Rikki Tikki Fries and Gochujang wings, which have been a big hit. The wings are Korean-styled and pair well with the rest of the tiki-styled food, she said. 

Because TrimTab releases new beers on a monthly basis, Marsha Mims hopes to begin offering specials that will pair with those beverages, and eventually offer a beer-pairing aspect to every item on the menu. The food truck will also be offering new menu items for TrimTab’s four-year anniversary party, coming up April 13-14.

“We are happy to be serving Birmingham. This is our lifestyle — we love hospitality, and we love serving people, so it works with us that we’ve created this relationship with Cheri and Harris, and we are so lucky that we get to pair with them and have something that is so great for all of us,” Marsha Mims said.

Paradise Chow will be at some farmers markets this summer and is available for catering and other events. Tuesday and Thursday after Trim Tab closes, Paradise Chow also heads over to Innisfree Irish Pub at 10 p.m.

Learn more at paradisechow.com.

Correction: Martha Mims has been changed to Marsha Mims.