“I wanted to give an honest exposé of what we do here”
Jeremy Chan’s debut book represents a long overdue glimpse into the ground-breaking gastronomic world of Ikoyi.
Very few restaurants receive the same cult-like status and international recognition from diners that Ikoyi enjoys.
Included in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2022, the two-Michelin starred restaurant is one of the most innovative restaurants on the planet.
Opened in 2017 by childhood friends Jeremy Chan and Iré Hassan-Odukale, Ikoyi builds its own spice-driven cuisine around British micro-seasonality; vegetables slowly grown, sustainable line-caught fish and aged native beef, with Jeremy’s menus delivering maximum flavour from meticulously sourced and chosen ingredients.
Documenting his ground breaking approach to food, Ikoyi: A journey through Bold Heat with Recipes tells the story of Jeremy’s incredibly creative and innovative approach to cooking.
Explaining the book in his own words, Jeremy said: “The book is a collection of essays about food, family, culture, creativity, insights into ingredients, insights into my interpretations of specific cultures and specific ideas about food. I don’t really think of it as cookbook, I think of it as a form of creative writing, and I wrote it about a year and half ago in one sitting.”
With a Canadian mother and Chinese father, Jeremy grew up between Canada, Hong Kong and England.
A natural academic, he has a degree from Princeton University and only became a chef in his twenties, after a chance conversation with his friend and Ikyoi’s co-owner Iré Hassan-Odukale.
Discussing how his upbringing and experiences feature in the book, Jeremy said: “I had a personal rule that when I was to write this book, I couldn’t reference any kind of other books or literature. I had to pull and extract everything for myself, so it was just me and my computer and the pre-existing recipes that I had from the restaurant.”
Since opening in 2017, Ikoyi has distinguished itself for its bold use of flavour, introducing new and original ingredient combinations and presenting them with indefinable style.
Evolving over the last 5 years are a series of new dishes with distinctive international flavour profiles from a kitchen driven solely by Jeremy’s search for ‘deliciousness’ and a totally objective, creative reaction to often overlooked ingredients in terms of context and culture.
What began with the bold flavours of West Africa has continued way beyond, transforming the identity of Ikoyi in the process, resulting in cuisine totally unique to themselves and arguably one of the most innovative in the world.
what to expect from the book
Ikoyi: A Journey through Bold Heat with Recipes features 82 micro-seasonal recipes with beautiful photographs by Maureen Evans and eloquently written narratives by Jeremy.
Recipe chapters, which open with a gallery of plated food shots, include base recipes, snacks, seafood, vegetables, meat, desserts and improvisations.
Explaining how recipes in the book are presented and the purpose they serve for the readers, Jeremy added: “The recipes themselves aren’t designed for people to recreate them at home, however they are 100% faithful to how we make them here.”
He added: “I hope a reader is more inspired by the way we that think about the recipe or an idea, rather than trying to recreate the whole thing. I think there’s a lot of really interesting practical cooking knowledge in this book. If you read the recipes it will tell you how we cook meat and how we handle specific types of ingredients. If you look deeper than the dish itself and look into what the recipe is saying about how to approach an ingredient there’s a lot to learn from it.”
in Burned Seaweed & Asun Relish
Dish examples include Varieties of Summer Squash; Cull Yaw Cured in Burned Seaweed & Asun Relish; and Brown Butter Apples, Cinnamon Berries, Custard & Rhubarb.
The book opens with a substantial introduction covering Jeremy’s personal history, his journey to becoming a chef and the story of Ikoyi, inviting readers into Jeremy’s imaginative cooking, philosophies on food and incredible dishes created from his vast collection of global spices combined with an in-season snapshot of produce from the British landscape and seas.
“I think of it as a collection of essays, it’s a collection of cross-disciplinary thoughts and ideas, and it’s all tied together in the form of a recipe book,” he explained.
“What you read in this book is exactly what the chefs in my kitchen read, to the gram, to the method, to the measurement, everything is the same. I wanted to give an honest exposé of what we do here and not hide anything.”
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