Shwen Shwen

The Times

Jay Rayner sampled the delights of Sierra Leonean cooking at the first permanent restaurant from cookery writer and supper-club host Maria Bradford, where he was introduced to unfamiliar ingredients such as the yanghanyanghan pod, bush onion, ‘grains of paradise’, kankankan and shito oil, supplied by shops in Peckham and “her obliging mum back in Freetown”.

“For those of us long aware of Bradford’s work, this is the restaurant we’ve been waiting for,” Jay said. The dishes he tried were interesting, “deeply savoury” and very much more than just a novelty.

“I would go back to Shwen Shwen solely for Bradford’s flaky, golden flat bread, a little like a paratha, sliced thickly with honey and the warmth of fermented chilli.”

Jay Rayner - 2025-07-13

The Observer

Jimi Famurewa hailed a “gastronomically ambitious Afro-fusion restaurant in this Gail’s-coded market town”, where Sierra Leone-born chef Maria Bradford has “pretty much minted a new culinary language” and created a “celebration of culture” through her “dazzling skill and sheer force of personality”.

Jimi’s lunch opened with a series of snacks, “each one an intricate spring-loaded revelation”: cubes of lamb belly with a piquant tomato salsa; deboned mega-nuggets of stuffed chicken wing with hot sauce and a blue-cheese crema; yam croquette with shreds of leek and pancetta; cassava chips “dusted in a housemade version of kankankan – the fittingly kicky, hot-sweet marinade that is a close cousin of Nigerian suya spice”. There followed a blowtorched fillet of mackerel with plantain purée; griddled spatchcock poussin with “nutty, mouth-coating spiced palm butter sauce”; grill-blackened king prawns with a bracing lemongrass gel; and “puffed-rice bone marrow – a ragged caveman luge of intensely charred, bottom-of-the-pan socarrat – alongside a buttery span of fermented chilli-honey flatbread”.

“Go to Shwen Shwen because the food is unforgettably delicious,” Jimi urged. “Go because it is also surprisingly affordable. And especially go because, at a time when loose gangs of ‘patriots’ deliberately seek to undermine multiculturalism, this is exactly the kind of enterprise that those of us who are dismayed and unsettled should be supporting.”

Jimi Famurewa - 2025-09-28