After nearly a decade of serving nourishing, mixed-heritage food at Jikoni in Marylebone, multiple sell-out pop-ups at Frieze and three cookbooks, Ravinder Bhogal is used to working under pressure. Still, when conceptualising Cafe Jikoni inside the new V&A East Museum, she had some especially demanding taskmasters.
“We worked with the V&A Youth Collective, which was perhaps the most intimidating pitch I’ve ever done,” she tells Broadsheet with a gentle laugh. “It’s a bunch of 18- to 24-year-olds, and I can tell you there is no impressing an 18-year-old.”
Bhogal’s grilling shaped what will be available when the cafe opens on Saturday April 18. “We were able to really create in consultation with them and find out what’s important to them,” Bhogal says. “Both representation and affordability were two big things.”
The result? A 120-seater all-day restaurant inside the museum’s new Stratford outpost, which forms part of the East Bank cultural quarter. The chef and author can’t wait reach a bigger, broader group of people. “To go from our diddy little 50- or 60-cover restaurant in Marylebone and to take all that goodwill and that joy and expand it into a wider, more diverse audience is a really fantastic thing,” she says.
During lockdown, Bhogal and her husband, Jikoni co-founder Nadeem Lalani Nanjuwany, cooked meals for NHS workers – an experience that changed Bhogal’s view of food in public spaces. “I had this moment where I was like, ‘Wow, these public institutions are like international communities, and yet the food in the canteens or the cafes just isn’t representative’.”
The V&A East project came to the pair in a somewhat serendipitous way. “We went to the Hauser & Wirth [gallery] in Menorca and we were sitting having this delicious lunch in the sun, looking out at this statue,” she says. “And I said to Nadeem: ‘Can you imagine having a restaurant in a gallery or a museum and overlooking a piece of art like that every day?’” Months later, she received a call from the V&A asking her to speak about a potential partnership.
Three years on, their idea has come full circle. “Now, here we are. My view literally is almost exactly the same [here at Cafe Jikoni]” she says, referring to the towering Thomas J Price sculpture of a young woman that welcomes visitors into the V&A East Museum. “I think it was a moment of manifestation.”
At Cafe Jikoni, the menu is designed to meet multiple needs all at once. “We’ve really had to consider who’s visiting a museum, and we want to be lots of things for many different people,” says Bhogal. “If someone wants to come and have a nice long lunch, there’s something for them; if someone wants to have a cup of coffee and a nice little cake, that moment is covered; if there’s a stressed-out mum coming in, there’s a lovely big mug of bone broth.”
Dishes stay true to the cross-cultural, “no borders” approach that make the OG Jikoni a perennial hit. Silken macaroni dhal and mushroom and egg congee sit alongside more familiar cafe staples such as spiced lamb sausage rolls.
In terms of savouries, Bhogal’s personal favourite is a turmeric and ginger chicken pie inspired by both east London and further afield: “It leans into the sort of Middle East in its flavours but it has all the comfort of a British chicken pie.” Meanwhile, she singles out one sweet in particular: “We’ve got a yuzu and pandan strawberry iced bun, which is a dream … it tastes like summer in every single bite.”
“A restaurant is supposed to restore you,” she says. “So we want people to walk away feeling restored, feeling well, feeling healthy, feeling looked after.”
Cafe Jikoni
V&A East Museum
107 Carpenters Road, E20 2AR.
Hours:
Sun to Wed: 10am–6pm
Thu 10am–10pm
Fri 10am–6pm
Sat 10am–10pm
