New passion: Jimi Famurewa’s love of African restaurants has grown in adulthood
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)I do not have to tell you, I would hope, that this is something of a golden age for African-influenced restaurants in London. Tatale is lighting up tastebuds at the Africa Centre. Chishuru’s Joké Bakare engenders the kind of awed, compliant devotion that cult leaders dream of. Ikoyi, furnished with a second Michelin star this year, is about to move into illustrious, larger digs on The Strand. And this is to say nothing of the quieter success stories — the forthcoming expansion of Whitechapel Somali institution Al Kahf, say, or the fact that Nigerian chain Enish has opened both a West End outpost and a 24-hour Camberwell branch — that barely flicker on the food world radar but signify booming fortunes nonetheless.
The broad picture is a positive one, then. Which in turn means that, as a British-Nigerian who writes about restaurants for a living, this should feel like a moment of profound personal vindication; an era where the food culture I grew up with is finally getting the mainstream recognition it deserves. And that is partly true, in the case of the actual food (the jollof rice, fried plantain and robustly spiced stews that formed the home-cooked repertoire of my childhood). But when it comes to African restaurants specifically, I have a slightly shameful confession: my family and I basically never went to them. In fact, that may be too mild. Among the few places we ever went out to eat, it seemed to be the broad category that we actively avoided the most.
