At Chishuru, Adejoké Bakare Is Cooking West African Cuisine on Her Own Terms

In February 2024, Adejoké Bakare became the first Black female chef in the U.K.—and only the second in the world—to receive a Michelin star. She remembers the moment clearly, mostly because she wasn’t expecting the accolade. Bakare, known as Joké, had debuted her first restaurant, Chishuru, in Brixton in 2020. It started as an under-the-radar pop-up and gained momentum, eventually relocating to a larger, more centrally located space in Fitzrovia in the fall of 2023. 

She and her team had been invited to the Michelin Awards, but she assumed it was just a courtesy. “Honestly, can you believe how naïve I was?” she says, speaking to Observer in June. “I got there, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is nice.’ The ceremony was done in such a way where they didn’t call me until they had called everybody on the stage to get their picture taken. They went, ‘Oh, before we do that, one last thing.’ It wasn’t until my name was called before I knew we were even in the running for anything.”

Bakare shouldn’t have been surprised. Since its opening, Chishuru has been widely praised for its unique approach to West African cuisine, which showcases both Bakare’s affection for ingredients and recipes from the region and her ability to translate them for a new audience. Chishuru’s tasting menu—reasonably priced at £105 for dinner and £55 for lunch—takes diners on a journey of traditional dishes like moi moi, mbongo tchobi and pepper soup, each presented with refined elegance. Much of it draws on Bakare’s own upbringing in Nigeria, where she lived until she was 28. 

Despite an early love of food, Bakare wasn’t encouraged to pursue a career in hospitality. “It wasn’t a done thing,” she recalls. “Anything within the service industry was looked at as not what you should do if you come from a certain background. My mom wanted me to go and get a pharmaceutical degree, so that’s where I started.”

Bakare got a biomedical degree in Nigeria and intended to get a second degree in pharmaceuticals. But she had no interest in the subject. Once she moved to London, where several members of her family were already living, Bakare realized she had the freedom to choose something else. “I could say no, and I could do my own thing,” she says. “And so that’s what I did: I said no. I wanted to try to find what I wanted to do. I wanted to discover that part of me that was dying to feed people.”

She started throwing dinner parties while working for a property management company. “I decided I’d get people to come in and bring friends and we’d have evenings where we’d just sit together and people could try another approach to Nigerian food,” she says. “And it was a hit.”

In 2019, Bakare entered a cooking competition on a whim, participating in the amateur category. The prize was a three-month pop-up, rent-free, in a small Brixton restaurant space. “A friend of mine saw the ad and passed it on, and I thought, ‘This might be interesting,’” Bakare remembers. “Very reluctantly, I put in my application. It was due at midnight, and I think I got it in around 11:58 p.m. I was really surprised when I got the call,” she laughs. “And the rest is history.” 

Bakare won, but wasn’t able to claim her prize until after the coronavirus pandemic hit. Her pop-up opened in September 2020 with a skeletal crew of three. She was the only person in the kitchen cooking. She quickly realized that her dishes were best experienced with a set menu, because many diners needed guidance when it came to enjoying a less familiar cuisine.

“I realized the people who were coming did not have any clue about Nigerian food and they didn’t know how to eat it,” she says. “After a few months, I created a set menu that worked almost like holding people’s hands through the meal. One of our early customers was the actor Will Poulter—he came a couple of times. The first time he came, he tried two things and got another one, then another one. He finally said, ‘Can I have everything?’ By the time he came back, we had changed the menu, and he was really chuffed.”

Chishuru was so successful that it stayed open longer than its intended pop-up schedule. The menu evolved as Bakare further developed the dishes, although she’s never defined the restaurant as Nigerian. Her cooking draws on her upbringing in Nigeria, but also on her time living in Ghana and her knowledge of West African culinary traditions. 

“Our food transcends the lines on the map,” she says. “There are some dishes you’d find in Benin that you’d also find in Nigeria—it’s just cooked slightly differently, or there’s an addition of something or a removal of another thing. So it’s hard for me to say if I’m making a Nigerian egusi, because even in Nigeria, there are different ways to make egusi,” she explains of the popular style of soup.

Bakare uses British produce, meat and fish, but acquiring the necessary African ingredients tends to be very challenging. She goes to specialist grocers all around London, from Brixton to Dalston to Peckham to Dagenham, which requires a lot of coordination. Sometimes she receives ingredients that aren’t the best quality. “Some of the herbs are an issue because we want them really fresh,” she notes. “And sometimes I want fruit from Nigeria for a one-off dessert, and it’s difficult because it’s so inconsistent.”

Cassava, for instance, appears on the menu in various forms, including raw, dehydrated and fermented. “We can get cassava now from our veg suppliers because we’ve asked for it, but when it comes to the fermented cassava, we can’t get it from them,” Bakare says. “We have to get from our other dealers. And how long they’ve had it for will affect the taste.”

Ultimately, though, this just pushes Bakare and her team to be more creative. Sometimes she discovers a British replacement for an African ingredient, like swapping celeriac for taro. The chef’s flavors are immediately familiar to diners with an African background, even if the presentation is unconventional. Her moi moi, a standout dish on Chishuru’s menu, is an interpretation of the hearty Nigerian steamed bean pudding, served with cured Irish brown trout, confit egg yolk and shitto. In the past, she’s presented it with duck liver. 

“Nigerians are very direct, like ‘We will judge and let you know at the end of the meal,’” Bakare says. “There was this woman who was very emotional. She went, ‘I didn’t believe our food could look this good, but still taste like what I ate growing up.’ For me, that encapsulated everything we’ve been trying to do.”

The current Chishuru space is larger than the original in Brixton. The restaurant moved to expand its seating, but also to take advantage of the lunch crowd in central London. It spreads the tables over two floors, exuding an inviting, warm vibe augmented by the open kitchen and friendly servers. The tasting menu requires each guest to select their main course, a choice I found almost impossible to make. The server made it for me, delivering both mbongo tchobi and efo riro to the table. The mbongo tchobi, which originates from Cameroon, is an especially compelling dish, as its rich sauce gets its black color from burnt tree bark. 

“That’s become a signature for us,” Bakare says. “How many restaurants do you go to and they say, ‘the soup is black?’ It epitomizes everything that we do, which is dishes that are complex but look simple. It is packed full of ingredients and sauces and spices and herbs, but when you taste it, everything comes together, and it’s very mellow. I think that’s us, in a way.”

When Chishuru won its Michelin star, Bakare not only became the first Black female chef in the U.K. to earn the award, but also the first Black female chef in the world with her own Michelin-starred restaurant. She understands the significance, but says that in Nigeria you’re encouraged to feel humble rather than proud. “I wouldn’t say I’m good at it,” she explains of cooking. “I would say I love it and that shows in what I do.”

Still, there’s been a real impact. African cuisine has become trendier across London in recent years, and Bakare feels it’s important that it can be celebrated regionally rather than as a singular thing. “It’s more nuanced than jollof rice now,” Bakare says. “I get a lot of messages from young female chefs, but also just chefs from Nigeria reaching out and going, ‘I’m so proud of what you’ve done and because of this I’m going to do this.’ I see a lot of young people doing pop-ups and being really creative in how the food is presented and how the food is talked about.”

She adds, “London is the best place to try anything new. London had always been open, but now there’s much more curiosity from guests who come here and then who go, ‘Okay, we’ve tried this version, we want to try a mom and pop shop version.’”

Bakare knows exactly where to find that. She says most of the authentic West African food comes from takeaways. She suggests Mama Calabar Nigerian Restaurant in Hendon and Tasty African Food, which has numerous locations across London. For her, dining at Chishuru is an opportunity for a guest to expand their interest in something new. “People then feel like, ‘I’ve crossed this hurdle and I can push myself to try something else,’” she notes. “I think that’s how human nature is.” 

Going forward, Bakare hopes to continue telling the story of West African food in new ways. She visits Nigeria regularly and can see how much the culinary scene there has changed since she left, with more global flavors and ingredients infiltrating the cooking. It’s not the food she grew up eating. 

“My cooking is like a time capsule,” Bakare says. “I’m doing things in the old way. And that’s the immigrants’ way: we are locked in our experiences when we were growing up. But the people we left behind are trying new things, like adding soy sauce in stews and rice. So we’re trying to get as many stories from older people as we can to bring it together and try to codify what West African food is really about.”

Even though Bakare’s mom hoped she would become a pharmacist, she now celebrates Bakare as a chef. In fact, she takes credit for the career shift. “The thing with African parents is it’s always been intended,” Bakare says. “If you hadn’t been pushed you wouldn’t have known what you wanted. She’s like, ‘You’re welcome.’”

But, of course, it doesn’t really matter who is to thank for Bakare’s impact on the London dining scene as long as she is here and still cooking.