Clear talent: Victor Okunowo
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)Every chef has their own idea about what makes a restaurant tick, but there’s one that’s stuck with me particularly. “Let me tell you something, yes?” Marco Pierre White said to me, as we stood smoking shoulder-by-shoulder. “In restaurants, atmosphere is what’s generated by the people. The environment is what you create. The most important thing” — here the artful tapping of ash, the sudden turn of the head — “is the lighting.”
I mention this not because I want you to (mistakenly) assume Marco and I are mates — although, of course, I do want you to think that — but because it had never made much sense until I walked into Isibani, a new west African spot in Knightsbridge, which has the same sort of illumination as the frankly bleak offices in which this article was cobbled together. The light in Isibani is as grey as sick skin. The banquettes, a shade of blue normally reserved exclusively for crayons, don’t help. It is a disorienting, disconcerting introduction. Knightsbridge may be many things — flashy, full of hookers — but the sheen of luxury tends to be laid on a little thicker than this. And usually there is no shortage of dimmer switches.
