Jeremy Chan

Credits Brambilla-Serrani

Credits Brambilla-Serrani

Ikoyi

1, St James's Market
SW1Y4AH - Londra
+44 (0)20 35834660
info@ikoyilondon.com

Born in 1987 in Hong Kong to Chinese father and Canadian mother, Jeremy Chan lived in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and then ended up in London. He opened Ikoyi in the West End with his business partner Ire Hassan-Odukale, from Lagos, in Nigeria. They are the first case of a restaurant with a strong African character to receive a Michelin star. 

However, the West African label was given a little hastily to his cuisine. The misunderstanding lies in the fact that in his restaurant opened in London in 2017 between Piccadilly and Trafalgar,  Jeremy decided to focus his culinary experiments on ingredients from that part of the world. They are not common for our palates, so they are stimulating for a chef with the soul of a researcher (someone closer to Isaac Newtonthan Indiana Jones) like himself. Plus, generally speaking, he’s not fond of categorizations and strict definitions. “What we do at Ikoyi”, he says, “is more about personal creativity, it’s my interpretation of colours, flavours, textures, which I want to convey in the most immediate possible way”.

This chef with the face of a child and the deep thoughts of an old wise man, before deciding to dedicate his whole life to cuisine, acquiring experience with people like Rene RedzepiClaude Bosi andAshley Palmer Watts where he was a silent and diligent apprentice, graduated with honours in Literature and Philosophy from Princeton and worked as a financial analyst.

Chan  takes the license of including in the menu traditional recipes without worrying too much about their philological coherence; as in the case ofmaafe, a popular recipe across Central and West Africa which includes a stew or a sauce of peanuts: he interpreted it as a thick and velvety sauce of red carrots from Normandy, enriched with collagen of cow foot soup, which, together with another sauce of carrots with a silky and light texture and a slightly sour flavour given by the Chardonnay vinegar and the dehydrated fruit of the baobab, is served with a fillet of beef that is only seared. Dishes that offer a good summary of his philosophy: no bullshit, but with taste”.

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