Jeremy Chan
Jeremy Chan
A deeply thoughtful and analytical chef, Jeremy Chan takes the scientific principles of flavour and applies them to create undeniably delicious food at London's two-Michelin-starred Ikoyi.
Amid the twists and turns of Jeremy Chan’s striking, evocative tasting menus at Ikoyi, what really hits home is the attention to detail. Whilst London is embracing a restaurant trend of rustic, relaxed and home-style cooking, Jeremy’s dishes emerge from the kitchen like art exhibits – intricately designed and impeccably crafted.
Too often we’re forced to choose between an emphasis on taste or presentation, but Jeremy’s obsessive, unwavering precision delivers both with incredible consistency. The ruby-red plantain fritters that open proceedings are a perfect example of this – the plantain must come in at the perfect ripeness, the batter must be exactly the right combination of polenta, rice flour, sorghum and tapioca starch, and the dish must be plated to exact geometric specifications. ‘If there are only three elements to the dish, you can’t just plonk them on,’ he explains. ‘It would taste the same, but it wouldn’t be the same experience.’
The ‘experience’ he refers to – the pleasure that comes with good food and good company – is the foundation of his cooking, and it always has been. Jeremy’s parents instilled the importance of food and family from an early age, and Jeremy started cooking as a way to ensure his family could spend as much time as possible together on the rare occasions they were all united. ‘We didn’t have the whole family together very often,’ he explains, ‘so when we did, it was always for a meal. I started cooking at about fifteen years old as a way to speed up and improve the meals, so we could make the most of our time together.’ Jeremy’s obsessive streak was present even then – he would spend days researching and testing meals for his family ahead of their reunions.
Jeremy has always has a prodigious, borderline eidetic capacity for learning. As a teenager, he taught himself to speak six languages fluently because he found them interesting, and later added Farsi to the collection when he studied philosophy and theory of languages at Princeton University. ‘When I’m interested in something, I want to know everything about it,’ he explains. ‘I was interested in languages in my teenage years, but that flipped onto cooking later on.’ Jeremy fuelled his hunger for knowledge with cookbooks, reading hundreds of them – he would absorb them page by page, then move onto the next one.
Even after he graduated and moved to Spain to take up a career in finance, Jeremy's obsession with cooking continued. Struggling with the loneliness of a new country and the weight of monotonous office work, food became Jeremy’s touchstone – a link to happier memories that kept him stable. He fell in love with Spanish food – the culture, ingredients and the indulgence – and dedicated himself to researching the science of cooking. ‘I read so many books and I didn’t forget a single thing,’ he says. ‘I thought I could just walk into a three-starred restaurant in Madrid and start working, but I realised that no restaurant was just going to take this random person who had no experience.’
He moved back to London, quit his job and wrote to a bunch of chefs all over the city, asking for stages. A few people said yes, including Claude Bosi at his much-lauded two-Michelin-starred restaurant Hibiscus. ‘I walked into that place wearing a pair of black Converse, some khakis and a T-shirt, with no knives,’ he laughs. ‘Everyone looked exhausted and stressed out, and I was this chirpy nerd, asking questions all the time.’
At Hibiscus, then Noma, and then Dinner by Heston, Jeremy spent his time soaking up information – he tasted everything, questioned their methods and the provenance of ingredients. ‘Even if I didn’t have years of experience cooking on a line, no one was going to stop me from knowing infinite amounts of information,’ he explains. ‘You can have a chef that has been cooking for eight years, but hasn’t asked questions – does that make them a powerful person as a chef? I don’t think so. The dexterity and speed and stamina is important, but if you want to be a chef-owner and a creator, information is power.’
Jeremy points to Noma chef Rene Redzepi as an example. ‘He started at twenty-six, did a few stages at places like elBulli and The French Laundry, but he wasn’t someone’s sous chef or head chef for ten years. He’s someone with a strong will and a powerful character – he was always destined to do his own thing.’ Jeremy – similarly strong-willed and self-assured – has always had a similar goal. He took everything he could from each restaurant he worked in – analysing the leadership styles of his chefs and the way they worked, as well as their cooking practices – and once he had mined all the data he could, he left in search of more fuel for his insatiable fire. ‘I had no interest in being part of a preordained structure – I've never been happy working for anyone,’ he adds. ‘I wanted to create my own universe.’
Jeremy left Dinner by Heston in 2016 to join forces with Iré Hassan-Odukale – a childhood friend who shared a similar passion for food and had also just left a career in insurance. Iré had plans to open a Nigerian restaurant and the two decided to attack it together, taking West African flavours and ingredients as a starting point from which to plunge into Jeremy’s own research and ideas. ‘There was no cultural attachment to Nigeria, really,’ says Jeremy. ‘It was just about really tasty and original food. We wanted to show how powerful and extensive the applications for West African ingredients could be, whilst being original, delicious, unpretentious, raw and relatable.’
The problem with creating your own vision is that it’s not always well understood; at least, not at first. When Ikoyi opened in the summer of 2017 it was pigeon-holed as a West African restaurant, and many guests who turned up looking forward to Nigerian home cooking were less than pleased when they received Jeremy’s ‘deep thinking on a plate', as he jokingly calls it. Ikoyi suffered their wrath on TripAdvisor, where some questioned why a Chinese-Canadian chef was running the kitchen at a West African restaurant. ‘We had reviews like, ‘this food is an embarrassment to my culture’ or ‘as soon as I smelled the food I felt sick',’ says Jeremy. ‘One person even said ‘the owners need to get rid of this Chinese chef and get a real African cook in the kitchen’.'
Still, the reviews from critics were overwhelmingly positive, and those who came in with open minds discovered something very special. There’s nothing authentic about jollof rice cooked with smoked crab custard, or suya – a traditional West African barbecue dish – marinated in kombu paste, but the balance of flavours and layers of umami are undeniably delicious. As far as Jeremy is concerned, that deliciousness is objective – based on the science of umami. ‘As humans we’re naturally drawn to umami flavours because they trigger mouthwatering reactions,’ he explains, ‘so there’s a logic behind building layers of umami in dishes – it makes food moreish.’
Fas-forward a year, and Jeremy was on stage collecting a Michelin star for Ikoyi, finally cementing his place as one of London’s most exciting young chefs (the restaurant was then awarded its second in 2022). ‘In a way it wasn’t a surprise,’ says Jeremy. ‘I don’t mean that in an arrogant sense! Deductively, I knew we fulfilled Michelin’s criteria of quality ingredients, consistency and originality – I think we do those three things as well as any restaurant in London.’ The approval of Michelin is one thing – it certainly helps to put bums on seats and makes Ikoyi a profitable business – but Jeremy’s real critique still comes from his family, just as it did at the beginning of his journey. ‘They’ve been a few times,’ he grins. ‘They love it, especially my sister and my mum. Dad is really happy about it too – he has incredibly high standards for everything, so for me, that’s been the best training possible.’
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