Chishuru

Despite what Michael Bay films would have you believe, life is actually a pretty boring affair. If you’re anything like us, your average day consists of eating, working, sipping coffee, and promising yourself that you’ll finally quit Reddit. Those truly standout, memorable days are few and far between. Unless of course, your day includes a trip to Chishuru, a West African restaurant in Brixton Village with a groundnut soup that we now think about more than we think about Grumpy Cat. And we think about Grumpy Cat a lot.

The big impressions start with their small menu that reads like a poem entitled An Ode To Things You Must Try Right Now. The tender slow-cooked Ayamase goat shoulder, ekuru with a warming pumpkin seed pesto, and a cassava salad so fresh that it’s like being chatted up by a dashing piece of lime. As soon as you finish a starter snack of soft, fluffy waina you’ll already be reminiscing about the squash sauce. But then, before you know it, you’ll become entirely besotted with your main, a groundnut cauliflower situation with a spiced peanut butter sauce that is the texture party everyone should want an invite to.

That’s the thing, memories are designed to be shared. And Chishuru is a restaurant with meat so tender and spices so carefully balanced that you’ll be inviting all your favourite people here just so they can join you in muttering ‘I think I am in love with that peanut ice cream’ three weeks after finishing their dessert too. The cosy set-up adds to the charm, with a tiny open kitchen that creates the illusion that you’re sipping wine in a mate’s dining room. But trust us, no matter how white wine tipsy you get, this is a meal you’ll remember.

Food Rundown

photo credit: Giulia Verdinelli

Waina

These fluffy fermented rice balls are perfectly nice. But it turns out that when you dip something ‘perfectly nice’ into a tamarind peanut and squash sauce it becomes, well, perfect. A truly excellent way to kick off a meal here.

photo credit: Giulia Verdinelli

Ekuru

If you happen to work in PR and are reading this, please get in contact because we think that pumpkin seeds need an exceptional publicist. Dip this spongy number into the pumpkin seed pesto and you’ll start questioning why it doesn’t feature in every single meal you eat.

photo credit: Giulia Verdinelli

Groundnut Soup And Chargrilled Cauliflower In A Spiced Peanut Butter Sauce

We like to call this dish The Soup That Prompted 1000 Excited WhatsApps. We will not shut up about this dish, and frankly, we don’t want to. The cauliflower is lovely and charred, but it’s the peanut sauce that will have you singing Memory from Cats each and every time you think of it.

photo credit: Giulia Verdinelli

Cassava Fritters

Honestly, we would pay a DJ a serious amount of cash to sample the sound of people eating this for us to listen to all the time. Crunch, crunch, happy chewing noises, more crunch. For full disclosure, you should also know that if you put eight plates of this down in front of us, we would just keep on eating them until we were either asked to leave or pass out head first into the creamy coconut sauce.

photo credit: Giulia Verdinelli

Goat Ayamase

This might not be the dish for anyone that starts sweating after a single flaming hot Dorito. Our advice would be, grow up, embrace the holy whack of green peppers because otherwise you are missing out on one of the best pieces of meat we’ve eaten in forever.

photo credit: Giulia Verdinelli

Baobab Caramelised Mousse

We’ve made a lot of mistakes in life. Just ask our therapists. But we narrowly dodged the epic mistake of missing this dessert because we had the audacity to think we were ‘too full’. Shame on us, because this creamy, sweet mousse is a dessert you cannot miss.