Chishuru restaurant review: exquisite African food in London
More restaurants seem to be handcuffing their clientele, taking away options and telling diners what they’re going to eat. This is absolutely not a bad thing. We make choices all of our lives, certainly all day long while we’re at work, so when I go to dinner, the last thing I want to do is think. At Chishuru, the modern African restaurant that has found a new home in Fitzrovia, there is one set menu that offers guests the chance to gallivant through the flavours of West Africa.
You only have to make one choice: which main to pick. The rest is decided for you and paraded out in colourful little displays piled up on colourful little plates. There’s an equally colourful story about how this restaurant came to be one of London’s warmest success stories. Chef Joké Bakare won the Brixton Kitchen competition in 2019 which led to her opening the first iteration of Chishuru in Brixton in 2020. The 32-cover site originally launched as a three-month pop-up but became a phenomenal success, but Bakare closed the restaurant last October, feeling she had “outgrown” the space. It had become Time Out’s Best Restaurant in London 2022 and Bakare was named one of the most influential women in food for 2022 by Code Hospitality.
The plaudits kept coming: She was listed as one of the top 100 restaurants in the UK in the National Restaurant Awards and pulled in rave reviews. Now on Great Titchfield Street, this iteration of the restaurant was crowdfunded by a group of passionate folk who wanted to see Bakare’s fine West African cooking reach bigger audiences. I had sat down in a cosy, convivial little premises, full of cutesy design touches. First out and marched over from the open kitchen metres away was Sinasir, a fluffy fermented rice cake with white crab meat and pumpkin and sorrel puree, a gentle textural dance made with great care.
It preceded a peppersoup broth that’ll be a hit now that the weather is getting cold, but it’s small enough to leave you wanting more. (Bakare changes the menu regularly but I hope she keeps this.) The broth has a gentle heat through eko spice against tender meat, kale and corn tofu. Could a warming broth ever be wrong? I have yet to find one that suggests it could be.
A bean cake with duck, duck egg sauce and a tomato crisp standing astutely on top as if to keep guard was a festival of flavour, flexing the restaurant’s fine dining credentials. For my main I had melt-in-mouth guineafowl with a piece of taro root, served with ehuru, a more pungent nutmeg, and on a bed of warming uzuza sauce, known on the African continent as a ‘hot leaf’. Give me five more.
We paired our dishes with cocktails, first the okra martini with brine and green chilli, then the double date, with gin, Venetian Select, Dubonnet, date syrup and uda pepper. This food is drastically underrepresented in London and Bakare’s diverse range of dishes offer a generous tour through the flavours of West Africa. It’s a breath of fresh air to taste the more unusual ingredients and be served the dishes with the authority of a menu with so little options to fuss over. A joy.
Book a table at Chishuru by visiting their website
Read more: Why Lucca in Tuscany is the cultural holiday you need to book
Read more: Hiroshi Sugimoto at the Hayward Gallery: Nothing is what it seems