Stroll down the Old Kent Road and you’re just as likely to be hit with the intoxicating smell of slowly cooking jollof rice and the sweet, savoury scent of caramelising plantains as you are the salty fug of deep-fried fish and golden chips. One thing I’ve always admired about South London is that it’s just as easy to get jollof rice as it is to get a sausage roll. As a Mancunian-born Nigerian-Jamaican, proximity to all the foods of my childhood has given me a sense of home away from home in a city that can swallow you whole with its anonymity.
It’s no longer solely my little corner south of the river that you can visit for delicious Nigerian, Sierra Leonean or Ghanaian dishes, however. Buzzy openings like Ikoyi and Stork in central London have piqued the appetite for West African cuisine in the capital. Recent Michelin-star recipients Aji Akokomi at Akoko and Adjoké Bakare at Chishuru (the latter of whom is the first Black woman in the UK to be awarded a star) illustrate an industry-wide appreciation for the technicality of dishes hailing from the region. Meanwhile, new openings like the rambunctious Shakara in Marylebone demonstrate how interest in West African food is growing.
When I arrived in this city in the Autumn of 2015, it had its staples: Lolak’s Little Lagos enclave on Choumert Road just off Peckham Rye; the first Enish on Lewisham High Road; and 805 on Old Kent Road. While these casual cafes and local restaurants were firm favourites among those in the know, brother-and-sister duo Emeka and Ifeyinwa Frederick recognised a gap in the market for restaurants reformatting hearty West African cuisine into smartly presented small plates.
Chuku's founders Emeka and Ifeyinwa Frederick
The initial focus for Chuku’s, which now has a permanent home in Tottenham, was on presentation, service quality, and ambience, aiming to appeal to a broad customer base. This manifested in the creation of a tapas-style menu to encourage conversation. “Sharing really breaks down barriers and fosters an inclusive environment,” Emeka remarks on the decision to opt for smaller, convivial dishes. The way they present old classics has been remixed because “people eat with their eyes first” and “optics can sometimes be a barrier to entry” for those who are unfamiliar, he explains. Their bestseller is a unique twist on egusi stew – traditionally a mix of blended melon seeds, a hearty sauce, bitter leaves and meat or fish – deconstructed as a vegan tricolour bowl that separates and celebrates each ingredient.
“The concept of soup and swallow, which is some form of starch, is a strong pillar in African food culture,” Emeka explains. “We want anyone to feel like they’ve had a little visit to Nigeria by creating an experience that resonates with those who often go to Nigeria or just those who are interested in the nation’s rich history and culture.”
As a culture writer, I’ve spent years charting the domination of African art, food, fashion and language in British pop culture. This is largely down to three reasons. Firstly, an uptick in Nigerians coming to the UK post-2019 has led to an increase in people seeking out opportunities to find ways to share their culture within London. Secondly, music from the region has seen soaring popularity in recent years – Afrobeats listenership has grown by 1,200% on Spotify since 2017, while Nigerian artist Burna Boy closed out Glastonbury last year with a performance that took the Pyramid Stage by storm.
Thirdly, a number of people are travelling from Britain to West Africa, thanks to government visa initiatives like Ghana’s ‘year of return’ that made travel and relocation easier, alongside popular holidaying trends among the diaspora like the yearly pilgrimage to West Africa dubbed ‘Detty December’ where Black Brits and African Americans party in the motherland “together” to reconnect to their roots.
The word shakara means to show off
With such a reverence for West African culture on the rise in the UK, it’s no wonder this has transmigrated to food, too. And a wave of chefs and restaurateurs are ready and waiting to seize this moment. The name of Marylebone’s Shakara encapsulates it all succinctly. “The word shakara means to show off,” Osa Bazu, one of the founders who has six other locations in Nigeria, tells me. The restaurant’s design is reminiscent of coral beads worn for special occasions in his culture. “If someone is dressed elegantly, you’d say ‘Why are you doing shakara?’ The best students in class who know the answer to every question? That guy likes to do shakara too much. It’s Nigerian flashiness.”
The kitchen, led by MasterChef: The Professionals semi-finalist Victor Okunowo, serves up peppered goat, smoked marrow croquettes, lobster pasta in the region’s favourite peppersoup, and a tomahawk steak marinated in fiery yaji spice (a blend of ground peanuts, chilli, ginger, garlic and onion powders, sometimes with fermented locust beans or bouillon cubes), drenched in chimichurri and a jus made from uda, the African cousin to nutmeg and cinnamon, with a deep musky aroma.
Ikoyi was one of the first fine-dining kitchens to generate a buzz around West African spices for unfamiliar palates. However, the Hong Kong-born head chef Jeremy Chan previously told me, “I’m not trying to take over anyone’s dish or make it better.” Rather, he’s taken the building blocks of several culinary cultures to create his own hybrid fine-dining cuisine. Perhaps because there’s so much emotion in the comfort of food, particularly for colonised communities, there is a reason chefs would be hesitant to claim Michelin is the arbiter of what good African food is, having only awarded a few to African restaurants in Britain in its history. I set out to write this piece on the proliferation of restaurants serving ‘elevated’ West African cuisine. However, increasingly I found myself querying the use of the term at all.
Shakara
Dhiral Vaghadia
Chishuru, which started out in a tiny unit in Brixton Market in 2020 and was named Time Out’s Restaurant of the Year in 2022, crowdfunded a move to Fitzrovia in September 2023. Its cult following quickly led to a Michelin star in this new location, where the food is a celebration of traditional flavours missing from Western foods: iru, fermented or dried crayfish, calabash nutmeg, grains of selim and grains of paradise.
Her plates are not an attempt to rewrite West African foods or assert that they need to be radically improved, but to show what she does with ancestral ingredients in her own home. Since she became the first Black woman to win a Michelin star in the UK, I had been wanting to interview Adejoké Bakare, however, I was consistently rebuffed by her PR manager. Her publicist did tell me, however, that she isn’t keen on the word ‘elevated’ to describe how she cooks her food.
This sentiment is not entirely shared by fellow Michelin-recipient Aji Akokomi, the culinary director of Fitzrovia’s Akoko and Borough’s more laid-back Akara. “I don’t see issues with words like elevated. It wasn’t refined. Let’s be quite honest,” he says frankly of the dishes he grew up eating. Of Michelin-quality plates that are based on quintessential meals, he notes how technique, quality, presentation, accuracy and creative experimentation are more important than just taste.
“If you look at a Michelin British restaurant, of course, it’s totally different from what an English person would eat at home,” he adds, noting he could make egusi stew like his mother or aunty, but the restaurant might take these flavours and explore them as an ice cream or a purée instead, experimenting with this traditional dish in new ways.
So, if the terminology is disputed, then what exactly is happening with West African food in London? Well, this week, my family and I celebrated some professional news with dinner at Stork, an Afro-fusion dining experience just a stone’s throw away from Prada’s central London flagship store; something that would have been impossible a decade ago. Elevation might not be the right word, but to have a restaurant like Stork opening in such a glossy corner of London shows that West African food is swiftly moving into the mainstream.
There weren’t any African restaurants that I could take bougie friends to
From Ifeyinwa at Chuku’s perspective, this is all a part of what happens to cuisines when they become part of the country’s social fabric. She compares it to our familiarity with Indian dishes in the UK. “The average person probably has an Indian takeaway near them that they like, then they’ve got a curry house where they might not get much service, but the food will bang. Then maybe there’s a restaurant that they would go to with their mates for a proper meal out or a birthday – a Dishoom or Kricket. Then there’s a tier above that which isn’t affordable for many without a particular lifestyle or is saved for really special occasions,” she says. Ifeyinwa thinks that for a very long time, West African cuisine has only had two initial categories, and now we’re starting to see the third come into play. Aji at Akoko reminisces that years ago, “there weren’t any African restaurants that I could take bougie friends to”.
Now, Chuku’s hosts graduations, wedding receptions, people who’ve never touched a grain of jollof and countless first dates (particularly for couples who are Nigerian and another nationality). “There’s been at least three Chuku’s babies,” Ifeyinwa laughs. It’s not coincidental that many couples come with a clear view of introducing people they love to their culture. The siblings say that’s why the menu is so descriptive, with information about the elements of, and communities behind, famous dishes. Hence, the eatery is an educational experience, providing answers customers might be too intimidated to ask elsewhere.
With 300 different ethnic groups and 200 million people in Nigeria alone, these restaurants are also an entry point into dishes and ingredients that some people with expert knowledge on one corner of the cuisine, who are less familiar with food from other parts of the country, may never have tried themselves. In an interview with Vittles, Bakare speaks of her Yoruba and Igbo heritage and how the influence of the Hausa people she was raised among is present in her dishes.
Chuku’s similarly weaves narratives around the home of particular dishes into its menu. “We highlight that suya is a much-loved dish across Nigeria, but we tell a narrative around the Hausa and Fulani community and where it is from in northern Nigeria, for example,” Emeka explains. The menu recounts a tale of the duo’s travels around that part of the country.
Longhorn beef with jollof rice
John Carey
The future for now looks bright. With the newly opened Shakara, Bazu hopes to bring more fun to the space, enlisting resident DJs and live musicians to get a glimpse of Nigerian lounge culture in the city. “It’s a celebration every time we eat,” he says. While the demand is high, Akokomi says it’s been hectic navigating the new clientele drawn in by the restaurant’s Michelin star and also the general pressures of hospitality (“I need good staff to be able to expand, but I end up firing them because they’re so lazy,” he laughs). Bakare has previously said that West African food will have truly arrived when there’s “space for us to be rubbish as well”.
However, given the quality of the restaurants popping up – the curation of incredibly experiential menus, beautiful plates of food, and vibrant atmospheres – we are nowhere near mediocrity. If, according to Bakare’s definition, this means West African cuisine has not arrived, then so be it, but it’s certainly in the best shape it’s been in decades, everywhere from Streatham to Soho.
