When chef and cookbook author Maria Bradford opened Shwen Shwen in June in Sevenoaks, Kent, she planted a flag for Sierra Leonean cuisine in the UK – in a market town where cassava, plantain, shito and palm oil aren’t common ingredients.
“I originally wanted to open in Peckham, but it was ridiculously expensive and I didn’t want to commute every day,” she tells Broadsheet. Instead, she decided to open closer to her home.
Bradford grew up cooking alongside her mother and grandmother in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and when she moved to the UK in her late teens to study, food remained an important connector. She began cooking more, for friends, then at supper clubs and private dinners, finally launching an online store – called Shwen Shwen – in 2017 selling hot sauces, marinades and spice blends. In 2023 she released a cookbook, Sweet Salone. Shwen Shwen is the Krio (lingua franca of Sierra Leone) term meaning “fancy” or “beautiful”.
“I’ve always used food as a gateway to telling stories about my heritage, culture, childhood and food,” she says. “The minute you say you’re from Sierra Leone, people will automatically assume you’re a refugee or talk about the war. I don’t want people to ask me awkward or uncomfortable questions or project these misconceptions that people have of Sierra Leone on me. I started cooking as a way to deviate people from that and have bigger conversations.”
At Shwen Shwen, Bradford brings flavours often found in home kitchens into a restaurant context. “There’s a fusion element with the small plates, but it’s not the small plates we’re used to. I refuse to make anything small and tiny,” she says, laughing. “In West African cultures, we feed people like there’s no tomorrow.”
There are dishes such as goat’s cheese with beetroot, fonio (a West African grain) and egusi (seeds) granola; beef short-rib with groundnut and coconut; banana leaf-wrapped seabass; and moringa mille-feuille. While in the last few years perceptions of West African cooking have started to shift in the UK thanks to fine-dining restaurants like Akoko and Chishuru, much of that growth in awareness has concentrated on Nigerian, Ghanian and Senegalese cuisines.
“There’s a misconception that West African food is all the same – very homely, big gatherings, open fire and jollof rice,” Bradford – who initially resisted putting jollof rice on her menu – says. “But Sierra Leone has its own flavour profile, its own stories, its own rhythms.”
Those rhythms run through everything from the food to the restaurant’s design: it has a warm, earthy palette with pops of yellow that echo the colours of Sierra Leone’s soil, and patterned lampshades designed by a Sierra Leonean artist and inspired by traditional textures. Bradford wants Sierra Leonean cuisine to be treated with the same respect and care as any Western cuisine.
“I want people to understand that Africa is not a country,” says Bradford. “It’s a continent, and different people do different things.”
Shwen Shwen
1–2 Well Court, Bank Street, Sevenoaks TN13 1UN
0173 2496930
Hours:
Wed 5.30pm–10.30pm
Thu, Fri & Sat midday–3pm, 5pm–10.30pm
Sun midday–4pm
