Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast.
Today’s episode is a conversation with someone who is very close to our hearts at Vittles: Joké Bakare, the chef behind the West African restaurant Chishuru. We first encountered Joké in 2020, when she sent Jonathan a pandemic care package of Nigerian condiments, which led to us publishing her first piece of food writing. We couldn’t have predicted what happened next. That year, Chishuru transformed from being a supper club into a restaurant inside Brixton Market, a delayed effect from winning a competition in 2019. During the course of a two and a half year period, Joké introduced many Londoners to many different styles of West African cooking, before moving the restaurant to Fitzrovia with her business partner, Matt Pace. The next year Chishuru won a Michelin star, making Joké the first Black female chef in the UK to hold a star — an accolade she never sought nor imagined receiving.
In the Vittles 99 guide to the best restaurants in London, Jonathan described the appeal of Joké’s cooking as ‘food in which you can feel the presence of the chef.’ Many others feel the same. Joké is self-taught and cooks in a very distinct way, with a modern and inclusive approach to the traditions around which she grew up and incorporating pan-African influences that stretch beyond Nigeria and West Africa. At the same time, the star has made her a figurehead for West African food in the U.K., turning Chishuru into a very different type of restaurant to the one she initially envisaged.
In this episode, we talked about the pressure of having a Michelin star, how it has changed Chishuru, her own particular culinary heritage, ‘pan-Africanism’, the move from Brixton to Fitzrovia, and the somewhat unlikely journey she’s taken to becoming one of the most respected chefs in London.
Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.
A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.
We thank you for listening, reading and supporting our work. We'll be back with another podcast in April when Adam will be talking about why ingredients matter with SongSoo Kim, head of sourcing and development at Super 8, the restaurant group behind Brat, Smoking Goat, Kiln and the new Impala in Soho. We’ll see you then.
Credits
The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.
Joké Bakare is the chef-owner of Chishuru.
Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.
The full Vittles masthead can be found here.
