Chishuru, London: ‘Utterly brilliant’ — restaurant review

Occasionally you visit a restaurant that, if it doesn’t completely rewire your head, at least causes you to question one or two of your preconceptions. If you think back to the really top-notch creative places you’ve been in the past few years, you’ll know they are offering the highest quality of ingredients in innovative new combinations. At least that’s the idea. But if you think a little harder . . . sure, the foie and the caviar and the Wagyu and the truffle were all reassuringly expensive, but was any of it really new? Were any of the combinations surprising? Or was the chef playing through a canon of ingredients, a songbook of classics with the innovations mainly coming in texture or presentation?

As PRs are fond of telling me: “Chef’s technique will challenge your perceptions and change the way you think about chicken forever.” But it’s still chicken, right? Even the recent frenzy of fermenting everything only opens one other dimension. (Please, Christ, don’t let anyone try to ferment a chicken.)

I guess we’re our own worst enemies. We eat regularly from a massively broadened international larder and if we’re looking for novelty, chefs have few places left to go except the MasterChef toolbox: deconstruction, fiddling with texture or dreaming up “narrative”.

So I suppose Adejoké Bakare had a head start at her restaurant, Chishuru, which specialises in food from west Africa. There are things here that really will be new to most diners, in combinations that are therefore going to be different by default. And that might be enough, if you’re a bold food adventurer who wants to notch up a new cuisine, except that Bakare, it turns out, has a combined creativity and subtlety that would mark her as a phenomenal talent cooking in any idiom, anywhere in the world.

Chishuru is a buzzing little spot just north of Oxford Street. What’s lovely, though, is aside from a quietly modern aesthetic, it’s got something else. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it felt like sitting in one of the old-style, Italian-owned Soho coffee shops. It’s hard to pin it down, but it has a hospitable warmth that has almost vanished in the West End. Lunch was a set menu. Not my favourite operating procedure, but I somehow felt comfortable putting myself in these people’s hands. And I couldn’t believe they wanted to feed me for £35.

Sinasir is a little pancake made with fermented rice, so it has a risen core and a chewy fried crust. It was topped with a mixture deep with maitake and chestnut mushrooms, sprinkled with slices of pickled chilli and dusted with “grains of paradise”, the seeds of aframomum melegueta ground into something that resembles pepper only in the same way that charcoal briquettes resemble emerald-cut diamonds. Ekoki, served alongside, is an elegant little “financier” of airy cornbread, with a thick smear of fresh coconut cream and dressed with a squiggle of date and tamarind sauce. There was a dust of candied chilli too.

You see, it’s not just the calm simplicity of the plating, nor just the “exotic” new ingredients, it’s how that whole damn paragraph reads. The combination of bosky with sweet. The way the colours complement each other. The perfect bijou, two-bite size and, above all, the fact you’re salivating just from the description. This is the self-same “challenging of bourgeois preconceptions” fine dining boys can only have neurotic fever dreams about.

You can pay a supplement and get a quail. Which seems worth it, considering that by this point I’d have peeled off my own face to get at anything this woman wants to cook.

Apparently, in west Africa they cook small birds for a very long time in black sesame, but here, they said, they’re trying to do “something a little more refined”. So the quail came split, fried a second ago, with a dollop of deep yellow chilli sauce and another made of black sesame paste. The sesame had an almost unplaceable accent of tahini, but so deep in there that it was like trying to identify a single ingredient in a Mexican mole. The yellow chilli sauce? Of course, there are chillies in west African cuisine. There are chillies in many of the courses here, but all of them totally different and each perfectly attenuated to the dish. Can you imagine “tuned heat”? Try.

Look. You needed to know all that, but it means I’m going to run out of space before I can tell you about ukwa, a dry stew of breadfruit seeds, and yassa, half a charcoal-grilled guinea fowl with an incredible onion and lemon sauce. You’re just going to have try it yourself. But first, I have to tell you about the dessert.

It was a very good peanut and ginger cookie on a neat quenelle of chai-flavoured ice cream . . . and I didn’t like it. And that was the really amazing thing. Because, though I’m sure there’s a cracking back-story, the strongly Indian flavours of chai created discord. At the same time, in an instant, it recast all the other courses as a planned and unified whole. The chai flavour felt wrong but also threw everything else into beautiful perspective. I almost wish I hadn’t sworn never to use the phrase “flavour profile”, but there it was. Unique, assured, confident . . . utterly brilliant.

There’s a dreadful truth about food neophilia. Flavours and techniques are like relationships. Once you’ve discovered them and burnt through, you can’t ever go back and do it again. It’s a self-limiting quest. What I love about Bakare is that her talent transcends our search for novelty and that, in a cook, is beyond price. Since this review was written, Chishuru has been awarded its first Michelin star. It’s hard to think of a chef who more richly deserves it.

Follow Tim @TimHayward and email him at tim.hayward@ft.com

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