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

At her Michelin-starred Fitzrovia restaurant, Bakare turns Nigerian memory and West African culinary traditions into a tasting menu that feels both deeply personal and entirely new.

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. 

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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........

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