If you had to guess where you’d find an innovative restaurant serving Sierra Leonean food with British influences, you’d probably say London. Maybe Manchester or Birmingham. Few people would pick Sevenoaks, in Kent – but that’s exactly where Maria Bradford decided to open her restaurant Shwen Shwen in 2025.

Born and raised in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, Maria didn’t dream of becoming a chef as a child. ‘It wasn’t really an option,’ she explains. ‘The nearest you have is cooks in a domestic setting. You’re expected to know how to cook because one day you’ll get married and need to cook at home, but it’s generally not considered a profession. So the aim was to be an accountant.’

That aim resulted in Maria moving to the UK to attend university in 2000 which, as you’d expect, came accompanied by a massive culture shock. ‘I arrived in around September and it was the cold weather that really got to me – I could feel it in my bones,’ she says. ‘The second thing I didn’t expect was the lack of diversity in West Malling, where I was living. It was a little village in the Kent countryside, and it was the first time I’d thought about the colour of my skin or my accent. All of a sudden it made me different to everybody else.’

This, combined with people’s views and assumptions around Sierra Leone and its civil war, plus a complete lack of culinary home comforts, meant Maria’s initial time in the UK was, as she puts it, ‘pretty miserable’. ‘I remember going to the supermarket and getting really excited after seeing some tropical fruits we’d have back home. But when I ate them they were just completely without flavour. It was so disappointing. Peanut butter, something which is toasted and ground in front of you at the market in Sierra Leone, was packaged in a jar and often sweetened, so you couldn’t use it in stews. I found it so bizarre.’

Whilst Maria found a few things to get excited about (‘I never knew there were so many varieties of apple, and that they could be so crunchy and fresh’), she had all but abandoned hope of enjoying the flavours and aromas of Freetown again. That is until she heard about a place in London – Peckham. ‘Visiting for the first time was mind-blowing,’ she says. ‘I passed people in the street talking in Krio (Sierra Leone’s most spoken language) and I could suddenly find cassava, plantain, breadfruit… I'd assumed everywhere in the UK was like rural Kent. Once I started getting access to the ingredients I knew, I became much happier – even more so once I started to mix it up with other products and flavours from the UK.’

Maria graduated university, married her husband in 2004 and got a job – just as she was meant to. But by this time, cooking had very much become her passion. ‘My husband is white and British, and had never really eaten Sierra Leonean food before,’ she says. ‘I found it quite strange that he would get so excited about it, but I suppose you take things you know so well for granted.’

Talk of Maria’s cooking began to spread, and more people started asking to try her food. Unhappy in her accounting job, hosting dinner parties became a real focus, and Maria started to test the waters professionally – covering the catering for the wedding of a family member; selling homemade chilli sauces at food markets and building a presence online. ‘I started an Instagram and wrote these huge long captions which I’m sure nobody read about Sierra Leone and the context around the food I was cooking,’ she explains. ‘It was my online diary and really cemented my relationship with food.’

Maria then decided to enrol at the culinary school Leith’s, so she could understand and learn about food from a more European point of view. Her supperclubs began to take off so she was able to quit her job – and then she was offered a book deal.

‘Three publishing houses wanted to publish the book, which was amazing as a first-time writer, but I went for the one that offered a location shoot,’ she explains. ‘I’d left Sierra Leone when I was a teenager and apart from a few holidays I hadn’t spent much time there. I wanted to delve into things a little bit more and have a proper look at Freetown and the wider culture.’

Sweet Salone was published in 2023 to critical acclaim, breaking from the more usual blanket term of ‘West African’ and really highlighting the food of a single country within the region. But while many would see this as the culmination of a career in food, for Maria it was just the beginning.

‘I wanted to take things to the next level and put everything I had into a restaurant. It was about bringing the recipes and the writing in the book into the real world. Of course, I didn’t really appreciate how hard running a hospitality business was going to be – I don’t think anyone does until they do it. But it has been really amazing to see people come in and want to know more about Sierra Leonean food. British guests might not know anything about it but want to learn; Nigerians and Ghanaians visit to discover the differences between their cuisine and mine.’

Shwen Shwen opened in summer 2025 and quickly caught attention of critics – after all, it’s not every day a modern Sierra Leonean restaurant opens in a Kentish market town. The accolades came soon after – in February 2026 the restaurant was awarded a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and then it was named Opening of the Year at the 2026 Michelin awards ceremony.

Maria might not have come to the world of cheffing in the traditional way but her natural talent, enthusiasm and ambition have made her first venture a huge success. While a handful of Sierra Leonean restaurants exist in the UK, Shwen Shwen is the first to take the flavours and ingredients of the country, combine them with the best of the British larder, and create dishes that educate, inspire and – of course – taste delicious.