Vacherin sends chefs to stage at Michelin-starred Akoko
Twenty-four chefs from the contract caterer traded their canteens for Akoko's kitchen, then built a West African menu from what they learned.
Vacherin has sent 24 chefs to stage at Akoko, London's first Michelin-starred West African restaurant, in a training exchange that has already produced a new Jollof Collection for the caterer's own menus.
The placements ran through Vacherin Stages, a programme now in its third year. Past partners have included Silo, Doug McMaster's zero-waste restaurant, and Plates, a plant-based kitchen in Clerkenwell. This year the London contract caterer, part of CH&Co, turned to Akoko in Fitzrovia, where founder Aji Akokomi built the menu around his family's Nigerian recipes and the kitchen holds one Michelin star.
Chefs from across Vacherin's sites took part, ranging from commis chefs to executive chefs. Each spent time working Akoko's stations, learning the ingredients and techniques behind dishes such as jollof rice, suya-spiced grills and egusi stew.
A stage with a Michelin star doesn't make a canteen fine dining, but it can make the rice taste like someone meant it.
What the chefs brought back
Steve Humphries, Vacherin's head of culinary hospitality, said the programme is “central to our chef culture, where learning and culinary development never stop.” He said the stage introduced the team to new ingredients, techniques and approaches to flavour that go beyond what most contract-catering kitchens handle day to day.
Akoko founder Aji Akokomi said it had been “wonderful to welcome so many of their chefs,” calling Vacherin a “wonderful partner” for the exchange. Akokomi opened Akoko in 2020 and went on to open the Bib Gourmand-rated Akara nearby in 2023.
A new menu built from the stage
The work has taken a concrete form: the Jollof Collection, a set of West African-inspired dishes now rolling out across Vacherin's sites this month. It includes smoked beef with a suya spice rub and bone marrow emulsion, and ekume served with an egusi stew condiment, citropsis articulata and a hibiscus ata sauce.
Vacherin's chefs cook for corporate dining halls and workplace restaurants rather than a la carte rooms, a sector where catering groups are chasing growth through better food rather than contract volume alone. A stage at a Michelin-starred independent is a harder sell to pull off at scale, which is part of why Vacherin frames the Akoko exchange as a one-off collaboration rather than a standing arrangement.
West African dishes have been gaining ground on UK menus well beyond fine dining, from home cooks reaching for yassa and jollof to supermarket ready meals. Whether the Jollof Collection stays on Vacherin's menus beyond this launch will depend on how it sells in canteens that rarely see food this specific.
