Chishuru

Chishuru translates West African home cooking into a tasting-menu format without smoothing off the parts that make it distinctive — a genuinely rare thing to find done well in London, and rarer still to see recognised at the level Adejoké Bakare’s kitchen has been.

The instinct with a lot of “world cuisine” fine dining is to file down the ingredients and techniques that a European palate might find unfamiliar; Chishuru does the opposite, and the result is a menu that tastes specific rather than generalised. This review of the Great Titchfield Street kitchen is written on the strength of that specificity, not the novelty of the premise.

The Room

An intimate Fitzrovia dining room, quietly confident rather than showy — there’s no attempt here to theme the space around the food’s origins with the usual props and patterned textiles a lesser restaurant might reach for. Instead the room is understated, almost neutral, which puts the entire weight of the evening onto the plates arriving at the table.

Service is warm without being overly rehearsed, and the pacing between courses gives you time to actually register what you’ve just eaten before the next thing arrives. Tables are spaced generously enough for a proper conversation, and the small scale of the room means the kitchen is cooking for a genuinely limited number of covers each night rather than trying to scale a tasting menu to a larger volume the way some newer openings have attempted.

What to Order

The ekuru — black-eyed-pea fritters, delicately spiced and considerably lighter than the description suggests — is the dish most people mention first afterward, and it’s a genuinely clever way to open a tasting menu: familiar in form, unfamiliar in flavour. The yassa that follows later in the menu is built on a marinade and sauce that’s been reduced and balanced with real patience; nothing about it reads as a quick approximation of a home recipe.

Both dishes lean on expertly judged sauces and spicing rather than novelty for its own sake, which is the through-line of the whole menu — this is technique in service of flavour, not flavour used to disguise a lack of technique.

The Drinks List

A tight, well-matched wine list, chosen specifically to work with genuinely unfamiliar flavour profiles rather than falling back on the usual “goes with everything” defaults a less considered pairing menu might offer. Staff are candid about which pairings are experimental and which are safer bets, which is useful given how far some of the flavours sit from a standard European tasting menu.

What You Will Pay

The tasting menu runs around £85–110 per person, which sits comfortably within the range for a Michelin-starred London tasting menu, and arguably undersells what’s actually on the plate given how distinctive the cooking is relative to anything else at a similar price point.

Wine pairings, where offered, add a meaningful amount to the bill but are worth considering given how unfamiliar some of the flavour combinations are to a standard European palate — a well-chosen pairing does real work here in making sense of a dish rather than simply accompanying it.

The Verdict

Come with an open menu and no fixed expectations — this isn’t a “West African-inspired” gesture bolted onto a conventional tasting-menu structure, it’s the real thing, executed at Michelin level, and it rewards a diner willing to let the kitchen lead rather than looking for familiar reference points on every plate. Trust the pacing and don’t rush the earlier courses trying to guess where the menu is heading.

What’s Being Said

There is genuinely nothing else quite like this in London — that alone makes the booking worth prioritising, but the reason to actually go back is that the cooking holds up on repeat visits, once the initial surprise of the format has worn off and you’re simply judging the food on its own terms.

A menu this distinctive could easily coast on novelty for a year or two; this one has kept improving instead, which is the better sign of the two. The Michelin star followed the cooking here, not the other way round, and that ordering matters — the full five-star rating tracks the same sequence.