Chef-owner Maria Bradford has brought thrillingly contemporary West African flavours to the Kent commuter belt
Though it has been almost four months since Shwen Shwen first opened, Maria Bradford, the chef-owner of this contemporary Sierra Leonean restaurant in the heart of Sevenoaks, is still very much in house-tour mode. “That’s the outline of Sierra Leone,” she told me recently, emerging from the kitchen at the end of our lunch and gesturing towards a topographical silhouette carved into one of the first-floor dining-room walls. Soon she was proudly showing off the geometric “country cloth” fabrics used to upholster the restaurant’s chairs, leading us past banquettes detailed with a hibiscus-flower pattern and sweeping an arm towards wall frames of eBay-sourced Sierra Leonean postcards that, on the advice of a concerned associate, have been fixed to the walls to make them less nickable. “I couldn’t believe it,” Bradford said, “but apparently people will just put things in their bags if they can.”
It struck me as a quietly revealing moment. Not just in the picture that it paints of what a meticulous and expensively rendered labour of love Shwen Shwen is (, notably,notably Bradford has remortgaged her house and sunk her life savings into it), but because it shows the purity of intent, edging towards a kind of sweet naivety and blind faith that underpins the project. Is it a risk to meld African flavours and occasional curveball flourishes of modern European technique? To visibly splurge on design-forward interiors and complimentary spritzing bottles of Acqua di Parma in the toilets? And to mount the whole thing not in London but in commuter belt Kent?
The answers are, of course: yes, yes, a thousand times yes. To launch a gastronomically ambitious Afro-fusion restaurant in this Gail’s-coded market town feels, on the face of it, a deliberate act of financial recklessness. And yet, through openness, adaptability, dazzling skill and sheer force of personality, Bradford turns unfavourable odds into something extraordinary.