Chishuru

High quality cooking

Chishuru's long, narrow dining room looks like a lot of contemporary London restaurants – on the stark side of comfortable, with bare tables, wood floors and an open kitchen – but with a more intimate feel to the warm-toned, low-lit dining space in the basement. Here, Adejoké (Joké) Bakaré’s vibrant cooking draws on the rich culinary culture of Nigeria. The £50 four-course lunch menu is appealing, with praiseworthy dishes ranging from a deep-fried fermented rice cake topped with stir-fried chanterelles and chestnut mushroom purée, all strewn with grains of paradise (which provided a delectable spicy kick) to an ekoki corn cake topped with a little coconut cream and served with a piquant date and tamarind sauce and some candied chilli – starchy foods being the mainstay of Nigerian cuisine. Come for dinner and the five-course set menu is priced at £75, with the option to add extra dishes at a supplement. If ingredients are unfamiliar, unfortunately explanations aren't always the clearest, but the moi moi (steamed bean pudding) with lamb broth-cooked tomato, shrimp shito and salted egg sauce, was a highlight at our meal; we also enjoyed the kick from the little bowl of 'peppersoup', which came with pickled oyster mushroom, compressed beetroot, apple and uziza leaf. On the downside, delicious and tender slices of pink mutton cutlet with a coffee and yaji dressing, creamy peanut, udu and uziza sauce and sides of ginger fried rice, fried plantain and (too bitter) endive with preserved lemon, lacked cohesion. However, soursop ice cream and burnt marshmallow, served with a soft moringa biscuit, clementine, pomelo and grapefruit with Timur pepper made a refreshing finish. Service is charming and efficient, and there is a good selection of European wines by the bottle and glass, all chosen to go with the food.

Nigerian-born chef Adejoké Bakare opened her West African restaurant Chishuru in Brixton Village’s Market Row in 2020 after winning a competition, with the small site winning critical acclaim and routinely being fully booked. Believing that her restaurant would thrive in a larger, more central London location, Bakare closed the original restaurant late in 2022, reopening it with business partner Matt Paice in Fitzrovia the following year. Her belief in her restaurant and in people’s desire to try her food was well founded as Chishuru 2.0, as it is affectionately know, has been even more of a smash hit than its predecessor. So much so, the Great Titchfield Street restaurant even caught the eye of Michelin’s inspectors, who awarded it a star a mere few months later. Chishuru’s success can be attributed to a number of things. First, its food, which has brought new flavours to central London. Bakare’s cooking is inventive and interesting, with dishes on the regularly changing menu that might include ingredients such as cassava, hogget, plantain, and egúsí, the seeds of the white-seeded melon that Bakare incorporates into an ice cream. The intimate feel and warmth of the restaurant itself, that has many of the trappings of a fine dining restaurant - a multi-course set menu of sometimes intricate dishes - is another factor. Chishuru is a homely, unpretentious neighbourhood restaurant that is as inviting as the food itself. Then there’s Bakare herself. As a champion of her homeland’s cooking she stands alone; as a chef her infectious personality shines through onto her dishes.