Ikoyi: A Journey Through Bold Heat with Recipes

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Since opening in 2017, it has become a culinary destination: impressing diners and critics alike with its bold West African-inspired flavors, innovative combinations of spices with the freshest British ingredients, and striking, textured, minimalist-leaning aesthetics. What they can do is read the broader, more important messages, which is the philosophy on how to handle meat, source good meat, cook meat, caramelize fish skin, the passion and care with which to handle specific kinds of ingredients. With “IKOYI”, Chef/Author Jeremy Chan illuminates the journey to creating, sustaining, and evolving the two-Michelin starred IKOYI in London. He insisted we stick with jollof, espousing the open-minded belief that there was no one true authority on the dish.

As chef and cofounder of the two-Michelin-starred London restaurant Ikoyi, Chan is certainly familiar with resisting easy labels. I love that recipe: The kebab is made with amazing grazed sheep, and the farmer is creating a very sustainable, holistic way of farming sheep. Divide the rice between two sharing bowls and glaze with the custard so it evenly coats the top layer of rice. There’s very artistic photography, but the recipes aren’t that clear and are presented in a way that’s almost useless to a reader other than being some kind of aesthetic or poetic inspiration around cookery.Vogue may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. After graduating from Princeton, Chan originally worked as an analyst in Madrid, before deciding to become a chef. I suppose we both come from strong rice-eating cultures, so it’s no wonder that we have always reverted to cooking rice with prawns (shrimp) and roast chicken on the occasions that we hang out together.

I went on to create the greatest defense mechanism I could think of: a powerful jollof broth, a vehicle of umami-laden depth, followed by layers of aroma, smokiness, and an all-out assault on the palate. Along with the other recent triumph of “BAO” that I loved, I look forward to this new focus on chef-centric storytelling and artful presentations of the worlds greatest restaurants and cuisines.Today Jeremy is at the forefront of the gastronomic landscape, blending his dishes with spice, flavor, and his personal experiences. Ikoyi, named as one of the World's 50 Best Restaurants in 2022, is one of the most original, flavor-driven restaurants of its time. Pour the resulting custard into a wide pan and cook gently, whisking and scraping the edges with a spatula until the mixture coats the back of a spoon. If he claims to be cooking Cantonese cuisine, then yeah, there might be an issue because he’s claiming something he’s never experienced and doesn’t know anything about. Toast all the spices in a wide frying pan until fragrant, then blitz to a fine powder in a spice grinder.

In the essay on the plantain dish, I talk about Ridley Scott’s Alien, Mark Rothko, and how colors influence my sense of flavor and intensity. Partnered with Nigerian-born Iré Hassan-Odukale, who handles front-of-the house, chef Jeremy Chan draws on a wide range of culinary influences even as he keeps an eye on the restaurant’s African inspirations. I know if the jollof has been cooked correctly by listening to the frequency of the sizzle as the pan draws near the pass for plating. Against each of the Phaidon-published tome's 40 or so recipes are mini essays that range from 300 to over 1,000 words. The rice is then dried, rubbed by hand with oil, and cooled before we finish it off by roasting it in hot, aromatic beef fat and our wok hei paste.My mom is Chinese American, also Cantonese, and I was thinking about how I might feel if, say, a white chef did that with Cantonese ingredients—use them regardless of their contexts.