Akara | A West African Gem with Every Bite a Surprise 🌶️

😋Lunch on a weekday took us to Akara, a West African restaurant located in Borough. This restaurant is a sister establishment to Akoko in Fitzrovia, sharing a similar culinary lineage. While Akoko focuses on refined fine dining, Akara is perfect for a quick weekday meal. The restaurant has a very cozy atmosphere, a concise menu with affordable prices, and our meal lasted about an hour. Honestly, every dish at Akara was delicious!!! The menu is simple, and the waiter will briefly explain their specialties when you order. The waiter's recommendations for all the dishes were spot on. For starters, we ordered Rice pancake and two akara, which were shrimp and crab-filled fritters. Akara, named after the restaurant, is a type of chicken cake that is a common staple in West Africa. They were freshly steamed at noon, very fluffy and soft, with a great texture. For the main course, following the waiter's recommendation, we ordered lagos chicken and short ribs, with rice as a side. The short ribs were the best I've had in London! Salty, fragrant, and very tender, with a springy texture. The lagos chicken is a whole roasted chicken, equally tender and not at all woody, which is rare for chicken in the UK. The waiter also recommended we order rice as a side. The rice seemed to have been stir-fried with cream, giving it a rich, milky aroma. But no one told me that the side would be a whole pot of rice— the portion was really too large, and we didn't finish it. This place doesn't have desserts, but we were already extremely full, to the point where we only had a couple of bites of the side rice. So we skipped dessert. Overall, the meal was very satisfying, with each dish surprising me. However, there are two things to note about this restaurant: 😋West African dishes are generally spicy. The starters were mildly spicy, but the roasted chicken was too hot for me to handle. I was hissing after every bite, finishing what was on my plate for the sake of the deliciousness. Although the waiter warns you before ordering, if you really don't like spicy food, you might want to skip this place. For some reason, they don't have takeout containers 🤷. We didn't finish the rice, and the waiter told us we could get a takeout box from the nearby Borough market. We did manage to get one, but this policy is indeed a bit strange. #LondonLife #LondonRestaurants #HiddenGemRestaurants #FoodDaily #MyStory #LondonExplore #FoodDiary #London