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Few things bring a flood of good luck wishes, congratulatory gifts and muttered prayers to the god of high footfall like the opening of a new restaurant. But of all the supportive messages that Ravinder Bhogal has received in the fortnight or so since the launch of Cafe Jikoni – the much-anticipated smart-casual sibling to her and husband Nadeem Lalani Nanjuwany’s acclaimed Marylebone restaurant, slotted into the base of Stratford’s all-new V&A East – it is the one that came from a vicar friend that is perhaps her favourite.
“He’s based at the church in Marylebone, a regular at Jikoni and someone who actually blessed [mine and Nadeem’s] marriage,” says the chef. “And in the letter, he said: ‘And Ravinder, finally, I just want to say, how very clever of you to attach a museum to your new restaurant.’ That just cracked me up.”
The reality underpinning the vicar's joke was there for all to behold this past Friday. Mid-afternoon sunlight gushed in from the Olympic Park into Cafe Jikoni’s bright, gently modernist 120-cover space, softened by stacks of patterned fabrics and specially commissioned portraits of local female chefs. The room thrummed with noise, movement and a demographically diverse horde of jostling bodies: students at MacBooks, new parents wheeling prams, retirees clinking blushing glasses of rosé. It is a lot – an overlayed mix of workspace, restaurant, bar, and post-exhibition cake and tea pitstop. But, as Bhogal notes, when it comes to a food business within a cultural institution, being many things to many people is precisely the point. “Our opening weekend 10,000 people walked through the museum and I think we did about 2500 covers,” she says, as we chat in the sweltering sunshine outside Cafe Jikoni. “Getting our head around that scale has been the challenge. How do you go from a 30- to 50-cover restaurant in Marylebone to somewhere that is all about volume, without compromising on quality?”
That is very much the question. What is the secret to a truly great museum cafe or restaurant? And why do restaurateurs like Bhogal and Lalani Nanjuwany still regard them as an operational nut worth cracking?
Well, to get a better sense of the genre we only need look at the London spots that have and haven’t made it work. Yes, establishments like Lasdun and Forza Wine – within the National Theatre, but a short amble away from the Hayward Gallery – have prospered with a winning combination of interesting, well-executed food, aesthetic distinctiveness and rapid, high-volume service. True, there are other progressive spots like the Tate Modern’s listening bar-inflected Corner and Crispin at Studio Voltaire. But there are some illustrious, much-missed names littering the graveyard of fallen gallery operations. Rochelle Canteen at The ICA; Molly’s (and its peerless chips) at The Museum of the Home. While there were other likely culprits in each case – namely, Covid – their demise shows that the boon of a well-trafficked museum location, with lots of conflicting demands, and a lengthy tenancy (Bhogal and Lalani Nanjuwany have signed on with V&A East for at least 10 years) can very quickly become a double-edged sword. The trick, really, is to both understand the assignment and transcend it.
The Garden Cafe might be the current exemplar of this approach. Launched in 2017 by head chef George Ryle, and taken over last year by the immensely talented Provencal-inspired chef Alex Jackson, this hyper-seasonal St John-coded space beside Lambeth’s Garden Museum has emerged as one of the capital’s more quietly impressive and consistent kitchens. On a recent weekday lunch, crowds of well-heeled, faintly Bohemian aesthetes spilled out from its minimalist pavilion space into the dappled shade of a courtyard terrace. That day’s menu yielded chicken terrine with coronation dressing, expertly grilled mackerel, white beans, agretti and peas with the briny double thwack of a caper-studded tapenade, plus crème fraiche panna cotta with rhubarb.
However, it’s fair to say that the Garden Cafe traffics in a style of forcefully simple modern European cooking and hospitality that is not exactly unfamiliar. What would unexpected flavours and fresher global influences do to the London gallery cafe equation? As it turns out, this lightbulb ping – first felt when Bhogal and Lalani Nanjuwany made meals for frontline workers during the pandemic – was the basis for Cafe Jikoni. “We just thought: public institutions are some of the most international places in the world,” Bhogal says. “And yet, when you go to the canteen they're not representative of the people who work there or the people using them. So what would a Jikoni version of museum hospitality look like?”
In practice, what it resembles is a typically polyglot, borderless blur of influences from South Asia, North Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and beyond. Chubby yuzu and pandan iced fingers, primed with fresh strawberries. A deliriously crumbly handmade chicken, ginger and almond pie, inlaid with toasted seeds and vaguely redolent of a Moroccan pastilla. An £8 macaroni dhal, borne on a tide of warm, gentle spice, that practically reaches up and grips you into a soft embrace. The dishes at Cafe Jikoni may be among Bhogal’s most sharply defined and elegantly effective, and they serve as a reminder that the hallmark of a great gallery restaurant is the surprise of something that is far better than it needs to be.
“I think of myself as an immigrant coming to this country [from Kenya] at seven years old and coming from a very orthodox family where my life goals were set out for me,” she says, looking up towards the V&A East sign. “‘These are your parameters. You will cook for your husband and children and that's all you will do.’ So to think that I'm now running this place with my team is a real point of pride for me.” Now, Bhogal is feeding thousands of museum visitors as if they were members of her extended family. And also, perhaps, putting a more positive, unapologetic spin on the idea of playing to the gallery.
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