- Joké Bakare once ran a fish-and-chip cart as a student in Nigeria.
- After moving to the UK and working in property, she pursued her dream of opening a restaurant.
- Bakare runs Chishuru and just became the UK’s first Black female Michelin-starred chef.
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This as-told-to essay is based on an interview with the founder and chef of Chishuru, Joké Bakare, about pursuing her dream of opening a restaurant. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I had always dreamed of opening my own restaurant one day.
When I was studying biological sciences at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Kaduna, northern Nigeria, I ran a fish-and-chip cart in my spare time.
But when I moved to the UK 25 years ago, life got in the way, and I ended up working in property management.
In 2018, I started running several supper clubs in my spare time. As I started getting back into my passion, I could not shake the desire to have my own premises, but I had no idea how to get into the industry.
A year later, some friends spotted a competition run by Brixton Village in south London — they were offering the winner a three-month pop-up restaurant.
They convinced me to enter, and to my amazement, I won!
Early days in Brixton Village
Chishuru didn’t open until September 2020 because COVID-19 got in the way.
But soon after opening, the well-known food and restaurant critic Jay Rayner of The Observer came in and kindly gave us a rave review. Brixton Village then asked me to make the pop-up restaurant permanent.
In some ways, the Brixton restaurant was straightforward — it was a small site with just 18 covers inside and 14 outside.
But running a small independent restaurant means you have to become an expert in everything from grease traps and licensing to supplier management. I did everything myself at first.
The challenges came, ironically, with the reviews and recognition we were lucky enough to get — customers were arriving with sky-high expectations that we struggled to meet in a tiny site with wobbly tables and no toilets.
So I took on a general manager to run front-of-house operations and asked my friend Matt Paice to be my business partner in May 2021. He helped with everything from day-to-day operations to finance to strategy to wine.
Chishuru owners Matt Paice and Adejoké Bakare
Harriet Langford
The restaurant’s success continued and in April 2022, Time Out named Chishuru as London’s best restaurant.
But it was clear we had outgrown the site. So, after running a few more pop-up restaurants around London, we settled on our Fitzrovia space in central London last September.
Michelin visits
We figured the Michelin Guide was interested in us in the Brixton days because they’d visited anonymously and tweeted some photos afterward. An anonymous visit happened again last autumn at the new site.
Chishuru’s Fitzrovia site includes
Harriet Langford
Then, two weeks before the Michelin Guide ceremony, an invite turned up in our inboxes. We thought perhaps it could be a Bib Gourmand — the prize for “good food at a reasonable price.”
But they’d already announced that list a week before. So we went into the ceremony not really knowing why we were there.
They announced 17 new stars for restaurants across the UK and made it sound like that was the whole list.
But then the event host said “we have one more star to give … it’s a chef and she’s cooking…” and I didn’t hear any more words after that because I knew it was me. I was stunned into silence.
A few weeks later, it honestly still hasn’t sunk in.
Matt, my business partner, pointed out that I would be the first Black female Michelin-starred chef in the UK and only the second in the world. That really resonated.
I’ve had literally thousands of messages from all over the world and a personal letter of congratulations from the mayor of London. To get a “well done” card from the legendary three-star French restaurant Mirazur was especially touching.
We’ve had to turn down dozens of media requests from TV and radio broadcasters. I’d love to do more, but we have a restaurant to operate here!
Cook from your heart
The food I serve at Chishuru is the food of my heritage and that will never not be exciting to me.
It’s the food that my grandmother might have cooked but with a London restaurant spin.
Chishuru
Harriet Langford
One of the joys of Chishuru is introducing West African recipes, ingredients and combinations to customers who may well have never encountered them before.
Ingredients such as uziza, a West African black pepper; uda, a smokey spice; or sauces such as egusi, made from wild watermelon seeds, are bread and butter to me but are rarely seen on London restaurant tables. We have the advantage of offering something no one else does.
I’d love to see more West African chefs come together to share knowledge — perhaps a collective of us. But for now, the advice I give young female chefs with a dream like mine is to cook from your heart and believe in yourself.
Finally doing the job I’ve always wanted makes me feel fulfilled. It’s honestly that simple. If you want to do it, do it — nobody is putting obstacles in your way, only you.
