Adejoke Bakare, of Chishuru, also became the first Black woman in the UK to be awarded a star only the second in the world and, in homage to the area of northern Nigeria in which she grew up, named the restaurant for a Hausa word meaning the silence that descends on the table when food arrives a clue to her culture's positively reverential approach to food.
Food is defined by its smoke, heat and intensely savoury umami flavours like the slow-cooking of onions, bell peppers, tomatoes and spices to form rich and concentrated bases for common dishes with almost infinite variations, the likes of jollof rice, egusi soup, groundnut stew, kebabs marinated in a spiced peanut sauce, and fufu, which Akokomi describes as an edible spoon, one of a few different pounded root vegetables used to scoop up soups and stews. Bakare fuses the styles of modern-day Nigeria's three regions the heat of Yoruba food, the complex spicing of Igbo dishes and the fire-cooking of the Hausa communities in the north.
Collection
[
|
...
]