A Tale of Two Suya Shops
Jonathan Nunn reviews the best and worst of London suya. Photography by Michaël Protin.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Jonathan Nunn.
Issue 1 of our magazine is now back in stock and you can order through our website here. If you would like to stock it at your shop or restaurant, please order via our distributor Antenne Books by emailing maxine@antennebooks.com and mia@antennebooks.com
If, like me, you are obsessed with the finer points of barbecued meat, then you and your companions may have recently discussed the declining quality of London suya. Not that there was ever a golden age. British-Nigerians have been discussing the sorry state of our suya for decades and comparing the standard with Lagos in a way that mirrors how some people talk about the almost-mystical qualities of fish and chips north of Sheffield (‘It’s the sea air!’ ‘It just tastes better’). Suya – thinly-cut meat, barbecued once to doneness, blasted again to crisp it and then dusted in a spicy, aromatic powder called yaji – has the same reviving qualities on the tongue that a 12-volt battery and jumper cables do to a broken-down car. More than any other Nigerian food, suya has cross-over appeal, travelling from the Hausa north to the south, from Lagos to other Nigerian cities, which now includes London. But something can get lost. Restaurant critic Jimi Famurewa once detailed a newspaper-wrapped package of Lagosian suya being smuggled into the country by a relative, the message being that Nigerian suya, even after two airport checks, a trip on the Piccadilly Line and reheated in the microwave, was better than whatever the jokers in London were serving up.
Still, there were pockets of hope: in the 1990s, there was the Kanu-frequented Obalende Suya in Peckham, one of the only suya shops in the world which had a Wikipedia page, and, later on, Aliyu Dantsoho’s Alhaji Suya, the first Hausa-owned suya spot in London. Then, just before the pandemic, a new restaurant called Ikoyi put Iberico suya on one of its early menus, right in the heart of St James’s. When the Queen’s son Tom Parker-Bowles reviewed Tiwa n Tiwa in Peckham, it looked as though we might be in for a new era of serious barbecue, suddenly supported by the highest echelons of Clubland. But today, Obalende is closed, its Wikipedia page deleted. Alhaji Suya burnt down and reopened without a live fire grill; its suya does the job but is a pale imitation of its original self. Parker-Bowles went to Nigeria and made a suya potato cottage pie. The demure sweetbread suya on two-Michelin-starred Ikoyi’s new £350 tasting menu is delicious, but would answer a suya craving as adequately as thinly-sliced wagyu steak would satisfy a drunk man in search of a doner kebab. London is more obsessed with suya than ever, but lately I’ve been hard-pressed to tell anyone where to actually go. It’s a shame because there’s a whole continent of difference between good and great suya: good suya can form habits, but great suya changes behaviour permanently.
Wanting to definitively answer the question of where does great suya in London in 2025, I decided to do my own research; one strand took me on a c2c train as far as estuary Essex (and therefore is functionally useless to this review) while another led me ten minutes from my home to the new location of Suuyar in Peckham. If you know the name Suuyar, then you will have almost certainly visited its street food stall on the corner of Choumert Road and Rye Lane, where Kolawole Ajayi – a showman whose tagline ‘the most popular Nigerian-born, male chef you can watch on YouTube’ begs more questions than it can answer – hands out tasters and live vlogs serving customers on his wildly successful TikTok account. The sudden appearance of a bricks-and-mortar Suuyar at the tip of Peckham Rye has been a source of local intrigue for months: could a new kitchen allow Suuyar to claim the undisputed belt?