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Ask Joké Bakare to tell you about a formative food memory and it’s likely her mind will drift, like so much billowing smoke, to suya: the Nigerian delicacy of deeply marinated barbecued meat strafed with a ferociously hot, abominably moreish peanutty crumb. “Growing up in Kaduna (a city in northern Nigeria) our house wasn’t far from a suya shop,” says the chef and founder of trailblazing, Michelin-starred contemporary West African restaurant, Chishuru. “It was just a canopy, a bench, and piles of freshly butchered spiced meat drying on skewers – but by 6pm there’d already be a round ready to go and a big crowd of people waiting. When my dad was coming home after he’d been out, it was [part of the culture] that he’d never come back empty-handed.” She smiles at the memory. “The paper would be unfurled, you’d see this big, grilled bird in the middle and everyone would sit down to share.”
Perhaps unexpectedly, Bakare is hoping to bring this sense of Nigerian roadside conviviality to the Michelin-anointed outer reaches of Fitzrovia. As of last Wednesday, Chishuru has introduced Summer Suya Sessions: a limited-run offering that, once a week until the end of August, will see the restaurant shift from its usual tasting menu approach to a hyper-affordable, a la carte celebration of West Africa’s interlinked, underrepresented grilling traditions.
Even setting aside the low dish prices that have been at the forefront of how the series has been marketed – there is, suddenly, the opportunity to eat Michelin-starred grilled bavette for £7 – it is a fascinating pivot for a restaurant that has made its name with a scrupulously refined, unapologetically complex and fine dining-coded exploration of West African foodways. Especially in the context of a landscape where London interpretations of suya (pronounced “soo-ya”) haven’t always been able to match the exhilarating, smoke-wreathed hit of versions found in, say, a ramshackle stall in Lagos. So what prompted the shift? Where do Chishuru’s new dishes rank in the city’s broader pantheon of suya? And might this be a breakthrough moment for a mode of addictively spiced barbecue that has been threatening to catch light in the capital for the past few years?
Let’s start with that first question. Dishes spiced with yaji – the brick-orange peanut, chilli and ginger blend that is the foundation of suya – have been part of Chishuru’s repertoire since the intra-lockdown days at its original Brixton site. Yet this current array of dishes was initially conceived for a different project entirely: a spin-off live fire concept (in a central London site) that fell through at the 11th hour. “It kind of went pear-shaped,” says Bakare now, joining me at one of Chishuru’s tables amid the Fela Kuti-soundtracked bustle of a mid-week service. “We wanted to bring African grill [culture] to the forefront, but I think for us it might have been a lucky escape, just because of the space and the fact that, in Impala and Kid [Meedu Saad and Sertaç Dirik’s projects], two other open grill concepts would have opened.”
The Summer Suya Sessions, then, are Bakare and her team’s way of making lemonade from the lemons of those hurriedly shelved plans. Beyond offering a value-forward on-ramp to experiencing the restaurant (“Everyone is doing different things to make [their offering] more accessible and bring a different demographic in,” she says) the new dishes are about reflecting a rich heritage of regional, outdoor cooking that doesn’t stop and start with suya. In practise, this means whole John Dory, heat-bubbled and butter-soft from the grill, painted in a profoundly herbal scent-leaf germolata; it means blackened lengths of bolé (grilled plantain) aboard a gently funky fish sauce; pillowy, spring onion-laced piles of the fermented rice flatbread known as sinasir; and a smoky Barnsley chop, slow-griddled to a soft, coquettish blush, and enlivened by mustard and onions deliquesced into a fragrant, sweet relish.
But, of course, beef suya is the headline item and here it arrives as metal skewers of thinly hammered, pepper-basted bavette, blackened and seething from the heat of the grill, and further startled by thinly sliced raw onions and a dusting of the stridently hot, Wotsit-hued yaji that Bakare imports from a hush-hush supplier in Nigeria. “A good yaji is about the dried pepper, the kuli-kuli [a fried, roasted peanut paste] and all those different spices that you’d get a specific spice person to blend for you in Nigeria,” she explains. “It’s not the same as what you find in shops in the UK.”
That disparity brings us to the some of the inconsistencies of London’s suya scene. Yes, there are some places that have synthesised a decent approximation of proper suya’s lavishly charred, deeply marinated and dangerously addictive appeal – Bakare rates Suya Academy (which has outposts in Plumstead and Holloway Road) and I’m particularly fond of Suuyar’s OG Peckham stand, Akara’s yaji-flecked grill section, plus Felix Kebab & Grill, a Ghanaian-inspired hole-in-the-wall on the Old Kent Road. But even a half-decent yaji’s baseline of narcotic deliciousness means that what is often billed as “suya” on the capital’s menus is gristly, stewed meat carpeted in a bluntly hot, shop-bought powder. It means, in other words, suya spots in the diaspora have learned that they can prosper without really having to try.
“In London, a lot of people fall into the [West African] food business as a necessity and a way to make money,” says Bakare. “You’ve got a captive audience and it scratches an itch for people, so you don’t have to push yourself. That means it’s not consistent and so you get really bad suya.”
Chishuru’s new barbecue series is an attempt to redress this balance – and perhaps nudge suya towards jerk-level prominence – one vividly seasoned, creative grill dish at a time. And it may yet pave the way for a revived version of that long-marinating open fire concept which, Bakare says, is “still something I’m thinking about”. Until then, there are just a handful of weeks left to enjoy this eye-catching, commendably accessible overhaul of one of the city’s most singular Michelin-starred restaurants. Keep a cold drink at hand. Don’t be scared to use your fingers. And think of it, perhaps, as a hot, summer fling that may well develop into something more serious.
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