Akoko

Where Fitzrovia Meets West Africa

Berners Street sits at a quiet remove from the louder parts of Fitzrovia, and arriving at Akoko, the terracotta tones visible through the window signal something distinct from the neighbourhood's largely European fine dining norm. Inside, the dining room runs warm: earthy, unhurried, with well-spaced tables and a kitchen counter that offers a direct line of sight to the cooking. The atmosphere is neither hushed nor theatrical — it sits closer to the register of a serious restaurant that is confident in what it is doing, which, given the category it occupies, is appropriate.

London's fine dining tier has expanded considerably over the past decade, but its representation of African cuisines at the tasting-menu level has lagged well behind its coverage of Japanese, Nordic, and contemporary European cooking. Akoko entered that gap deliberately. When founder Aji Akokomi opened the Fitzrovia restaurant, the stated objective was to demonstrate that West African cuisine could hold its own in the fine dining context without being filtered through a European frame — a position that sounds obvious when stated plainly but was underrepresented in the capital's starred tier at the time.

The 2024 Michelin Star and What It Signals

The Michelin star awarded in 2024 placed Akoko in a selective peer group. Within London's constellation of starred restaurants, names such as CORE by Clare Smyth, Sketch, The Lecture Room and Library, The Ledbury, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, and Dinner by Heston Blumenthal all anchor themselves in European tradition or British ingredient-led cooking. Akoko's recognition is notable precisely because it arrives from a different culinary geography entirely. The star is a data point, but the more interesting editorial fact is that it arrived for a restaurant explicitly working outside the conventions that Michelin inspectors have historically rewarded most readily.

The kitchen has moved through a chef transition since that recognition. Head chef Ayo Adeyemi departed in November 2024 and was succeeded by Mutaro Balde, who brings Alain Ducasse training to the role. The combination of a West African flavour framework and a French fine dining technical background is not unusual in the London starred tier , comparable cross-tradition approaches appear at venues across the city , but at Akoko the direction of travel runs against the more common current, using French technique in service of West African flavour rather than the reverse.

The Tasting Menu: Structure and Flavour Logic

Current tasting menu runs at £125 per person, with a separate lunch format available at £55. Both price points sit in the range expected of Michelin-starred Fitzrovia restaurants, pricing against the European-led competition rather than positioning itself as a categorical outlier. The kitchen's approach pairs West African spicing and preparations with British sourced produce: the conceptual architecture is clear and consistent across the menu.

Earlier iterations of the menu documented in public record included waina (fermented rice pancake) with chicken liver and Senegalese yassa, a deep-fried oyster with Gambian red pepper relish, seared mackerel with Afro-Brazilian vatapa sauce and moi moi (steamed bean pudding), and monkfish with grilled maitake mushrooms and a fruity sosu kaani chilli sauce. A charcoal grill in the open kitchen provides a recurring smokiness, and the wine programme moves between Kent, Austria, South Africa, and elsewhere, with meaningful coverage by the glass. Critics have noted that the menu, under Adeyemi, occasionally leaned toward smoky flavours and smooth emulsions at the expense of broader range , a point worth holding in mind as Balde's version of the menu develops its own character.

One supplement of note: tatale (Ghanaian plantain pancakes) with goat cashew cream and Exmoor caviar at an additional £35. It is the kind of addition that signals the kitchen's confidence in the pairing logic of West African preparations with premium British produce.

The Room and the Counter

The sensory register of the dining room matters here, because it is doing work that the food alone cannot do. The terracotta palette reads as a deliberate choice: it situates the cooking in a visual context that refers to West African material culture without resorting to literalism. The space is neither a reproduction nor a neutral fine dining interior. It lands somewhere between the two, which appears to be the point.

The kitchen counter seats are worth requesting. The open kitchen gives the counter a direct sensory connection to the charcoal grill and the pace of service , smoke, heat, the movement of plating , that the main dining room approximates but does not match. Reviews consistently note the front-of-house team as friendly and knowledgeable, an attribute that matters more than usual at a restaurant asking diners to engage with preparations they may not recognise. Staff who can talk fluently about waina, yassa, or vatapa without condescension are an operational requirement, not a nicety.

Allow approximately two and a half hours for the full tasting menu experience. The kitchen is operating from Monday evening through Saturday, with lunch service running Wednesday through Saturday. Sundays are closed.

Where Akoko Sits in the London Fine Dining Conversation

London's tasting-menu tier rewards a kind of European-adjacent ambition: ingredients from the British Isles refined through French or Nordic techniques, or Japanese omakase formats given a local ingredient gloss. The restaurants that step outside that convention tend to occupy a narrower, more contested space. Akoko is in that space, alongside a small number of other London restaurants attempting to situate non-European culinary traditions at the leading price tier without subordinating them to European technique as a legitimising frame.

The comparison set for a reader assessing where to book extends beyond London. If the interest is in restaurants where technical fine dining ambition meets a culinary tradition that has not historically been given the starred treatment, venues such as Atomix in New York City are working in a comparable register with Korean cuisine. Le Bernardin in New York City sits at the opposite pole: the canonical European-tradition fine dining benchmark against which alternatives define themselves. Within the UK, the dominant tasting-menu conversation remains ingredient-led and largely rural: The Fat Duck in Bray, L'Enclume in Cartmel, Moor Hall in Aughton, Gidleigh Park in Chagford, Hand and Flowers in Marlow, and Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons in Great Milton all pull in a different culinary direction. Akoko is a London restaurant for which London , its diasporic population, its access to West African ingredients, its density of informed diners , is a necessary condition. It would not exist in the same form elsewhere.

Planning Your Visit

Akoko operates from 21 Berners Street, W1T 3LP, within easy reach of Goodge Street and Oxford Circus stations. Dinner service runs Monday through Saturday from 6 PM, with last orders at 11 PM. Lunch is available Wednesday through Saturday, noon to 4 PM. The tasting menu is £125 per person at dinner; the lunch menu is the entry point at £55. The kitchen counter is available on request and worth prioritising if the cooking process is part of what you are coming to experience. The supplement for tatale with goat cashew cream and Exmoor caviar is £35 and has drawn consistent attention in reviews. For broader planning across the city, see our full London restaurants guide, our full London hotels guide, our full London bars guide, our full London wineries guide, and our full London experiences guide.

What should I order at Akoko?

The full tasting menu at £125 per person is where the kitchen's range across West African culinary traditions , Ghanaian, Senegalese, Nigerian , is most coherently expressed. The £55 lunch menu offers a more accessible entry point into the same cooking philosophy. Past menus have highlighted the tatale supplement (Ghanaian plantain pancakes with goat cashew cream and Exmoor caviar, £35) as a dish that draws on the kitchen's pairing logic between West African preparations and premium British produce. The kitchen counter provides the closest proximity to the charcoal grill that gives the meat cookery much of its character. The wine programme, which moves between English, Austrian, and South African producers, is designed around the food and is worth following by the glass rather than navigating independently.