Chef Jeremy Chan doesn’t want you to think of his debut book as a cookbook. “I think of it as a book of stories on creativity and inspiration—and it’s very autobiographical, very much in my voice.”
It’s more cross-disciplinary than your typical collection of recipes, he explains. “It could apply to someone studying fashion or design or anyone with a creative impetus that wants to think creatively about a concept or distance themselves from subject matter to open the horizons to influences and ideas.”
As chef and cofounder of the two-Michelin-starred London restaurant Ikoyi, Chan is certainly familiar with resisting easy labels. 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.
The gorgeous, vibrantly-hued new book contains more than 80 recipes, exactly as they’re written in the restaurant’s kitchen, including his decadent take on the classic jollof rice (recipe below). There’s also a series of candid and compelling essays in which Chan details his personal journey to becoming a chef, whether how he found particular inspiration in Chinese food amid his father’s insistence that he eat everything as a youngster, or a transcendent Sichuan hot pot in college that committed him to a life of spice.
He discusses developing (and eventually abandoning) the concept of a Nigerian restaurant with his childhood friend—and Ikoyi’s managing director and cofounder—Iré Hassan-Odukale (the restaurant is named for the neighborhood in Lagos where Hassan-Odukale grew up). Elsewhere, he charts Ikoyi’s struggle to stay open the first year, despite glowing reviews, and how a passion for exceptional seasonal produce has continued to drive everything on the menu.
The 36-year-old British chef, who grew up between Hong Kong, Canada, and England, recently chatted with Vogue from London, where he’d just returned following a monthlong stint at Louis Vuitton Maison Seoul. (There, he designed not only the Korean-inspired menu but also everything from the ceramics and cutlery to the uniforms and music.) He discussed the cookbooks that inspired him, why he considers Ikoyi a British restaurant, and how one of his signature dishes has roots in both Ridley Scott’s Alien and Mark Rothko.
Vogue: I was surprised to hear you wrote a cookbook because Ikoyi’s dishes are quite elaborately prepared. What would you say to those who might be intimidated by them?
Jeremy Chan: It’s not really designed for people to cook at home. An individual is not going to have the resources or capabilities to actually re-create a dish. But having access to that in-depth information can be inspiring. Maybe they’ll read my essay about the fetishization of scallops and won’t re-create the whole dish but maybe the way the scallop is cooked or part of the aesthetic of the dish. So why not bare all? The whole idea of the book is that I’m giving away all my secrets, my techniques, my ideas. This is why I don’t see it as a cookbook, because it’s extremely revealing and honest and goes deep into the creativity. A lot of cookbooks have this almost esoteric poetic language that is hard to decipher. 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. This is a technical manual to cooking as well as an in-depth personal reflection.
Is there a recipe you might recommend for home cooks?
Trying to re-create a very technical recipe which is very labor intensive with obscure ingredients—they’re not going to be able to do it. 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.
Speaking of ingredients, some dishes at Ikoyi contain hundreds of them in a single plate. Is there one in particular that’s vital to you?
Every single recipe has a Scotch bonnet chile or peppercorns. I’d recommend sourcing high-quality chiles. And don’t try to source the exact spices in the recipe, but go to a specialty spice store and try many different types. Build a pantry of things that you find delicious and intriguing. The philosophy of the restaurant is about ingredient sourcing as well as cooking.
How did you arrive at Ikoyi’s visual elements, like the interiors and plating? That style certainly extends to the design of the book.
I’m a very visual person. I’m responsive to colors and textures, things that pop, that are matte or dull or really sharp. Intense visual identity has always been super important to me with food. I’ve never wanted to have food that looks chef-y and gastronomic. I think of my food as pure expressions of flavor and passion and feeling, so the color and texture are reenacting and mimicking those feelings. It’s a very instinctive thing. 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. I talk about outer space and death and these morbid, disturbing images in my head, which are part of the inspiration for the restaurant. The food at Ikoyi is very spicy and joyful and salty and powerful, but it’s also very minimal. There’s something interesting about creating minimal food that’s condensed and concentrated but multilayered and complex at the same time.
Is there a recipe that has a particular personal meeting for you?
The sheep-kebab essay is the funniest one to me because it’s about being a child and being fascinated with this giant piece of fake meat—gray and extremely depressing looking—impaled by a skewer. What I’m trying to relate to the reader is that, yes, I had a privileged experience of eating amazing food as a kid because of my father’s Chinese background. If you grow up in a Chinese family, you’re exposed to so many amazing flavors and types of ingredients: jellyfish, chicken feet, dumplings, noodles, all kinds of ingredients and ways of eating that you just don’t get with a Western upbringing. But then my mum is Canadian, and her background is more humble: When I’m with her family, we eat tuna sandwiches, hot dogs, and mac and cheese. I’m really grateful for having a humble background as well so I see both sides of the coin. A lot of the food at Ikoyi references those humble ideas and dishes I ate when I was a kid. 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. Yet while I make a kebab out of this beautiful animal and show respect to this ingredient, it comes from a love of crappy kebabs I had when I was a kid, which I still love.
Which cookbooks have you found influential?
I don’t love chef cookbooks. I don’t think they’re particularly well written. The photography can be beautiful, but only a few cookbooks have stood out to me in terms of the depth of the writer and the messages. Benu by Corey Lee. Magnus Nilsson’s cookbook on Fäviken—he was definitely a big inspiration to me in terms of the standard of cookbook I wanted to write. For both those books, the recipes tell you a lot about who the chef is as a person. Also Coi by Daniel Patterson; I find him very philosophical.
You write about the death of your initial concept of a Nigerian restaurant and then how you came to feel more comfortable working with ingredients outside their traditional contexts and more considering just how they resonated with you. 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.
It all depends on what the chef calls his cuisine. If he’s calling his cuisine modern Cantonese and is a white guy and knows nothing about Hong Kong and never lived there, then it would really depend on what the food was. 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. But if this were a chef using ingredients that can also be found in Cantonese cuisine and making up his own thing and not calling it anything—and if the food is exceptional, delicious, and original—I would have no problem with that. He’d just be making beautiful food.
I use ingredients that are found in sub-Saharan West African cooking. But I don’t call my cooking West African and I don’t cook dishes traditionally found in a Nigerian menu. It’s my own cuisine, and I’m just inspired by certain ingredients. But most of the fresh produce I use is British—I think of my restaurant as a British restaurant.
Have you ever thought about a restaurant in the US?
It’s quite terrifying, especially in New York. New York seems like a beast, and you need to be unbelievably well-resourced and prepared. New York restaurants need to be full all the time, heaving, feeding people constantly. When you open a restaurant there, you’re giving birth to a beast that will never sleep. One quiet day, and you’re done. The costs are just insane. The Grill in Manhattan, one of my favorite restaurants, is an example of a beast.
The beauty of being in London is we have the best of both worlds: We’re a city, but we’re on an island. Britain is so small in comparison to America; I can get line-caught fish from the coast, and it just takes four hours for it to get to my door. Being in England makes all those connections and deliveries very possible.
Smoked Jollof Rice and Crab Custard
Serves 4
Adapted from Ikoyi: A Journey Through Bold Heat With Recipes
My friendship with Iré has always been centered around the celebration of rice. 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. Of all the dishes we have created for Ikoyi, our jollof rice is probably one of the most complex technique-wise but also one of the most personal in terms of storytelling. Though most Ikoyi dishes are born out of subjective and abstract inspirations, jollof rice is an existing culinary tradition—and a fiercely debated one, at that. During our research trip to Lagos, we listened to many conversations on the topic among our Ghanaian, Senegalese, and Gambian friends, and it became clear that the origins and supposed ‘best versions’ of jollof rice were polemical topics.
My intention was never to attempt to elevate any preexisting concept but instead to elaborate on an original recipe centered around the core ingredients of the dish: tomatoes, onions, peppers, chiles, spices, and a variety of meat, fish, or vegetables. I was scared to call the dish jollof, however, and asked Iré whether he thought “smoked rice” might be more appropriate, or at least less incendiary. He insisted we stick with jollof, espousing the open-minded belief that there was no one true authority on the dish. But if I was to create a half-Chinese, half-Canadian jollof, I knew it would have to stand up in terms of flavor. 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. If our guests were going to argue over the dish’s authenticity, at least they would be doing it over inarguably delicious spoonfuls of rice.
After witnessing the smoking firewood under pots of jollof cooked in Lagos, I knew that the concept of burning must lie at the heart of our dish, too. In our recipe, we burn and smoke the vegetables over the grill until blackened and blistered, before blending them into a broth of roasted chicken, dried mushrooms, spices, condiments, seaweed, and caramelized tomatoes. We gently toast the rice grains before steaming them in the broth to a very al dente, almost undercooked, consistency. 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 father introduced me to wok hei on the very rare occasion that he cooked Hainanese chicken rice. After finely chopping ginger, spring onions, and garlic, he poured boiling hot oil over the vegetables, which bubbled and fizzled in the inferno of wok-breath heat. I’ve been mesmerized with the sounds, aromas, and process of this dipping sauce ever since and knew its fragrance would add its own dimension of smokiness to our jollof.
When we roast the rice, we are aiming for crisp, separated grains with bouncy centers. 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. If the pan is silent, or has been sitting just 30 seconds too long, I know the grains will have an oily, bland consistency and will require re-cooking. For some reason, most of the cooks at Ikoyi think the rice section is the easiest, but it actually requires a surprising amount of attention to detail to execute an exceptional bowl of rice. Timing and temperature are everything. As the rice cooks, we simultaneously warm the crab custard, which acts as a glaze, added at the last moment, before we smoke the entire dish. Crispy, chewy, creamy, crunchy, smoky, spicy, sweet, salty, it’s the kind of food you want to eat when you’re hungover or sitting in front of the TV with a beer.
For the jollof broth:
- 2.5 kg Roasted Chicken Wing Stock
- 80 g kombu
- 80 g dried porcini mushrooms (ceps)
- 90 g chipotle powder
- 90 g hot paprika
- 60 g black peppercorns
- 30 g red Kampot peppercorns
- 15 g black Penja peppercorns
- 90 g madras curry powder
- 45 g ground cinnamon
- 30 g ground cumin
- 200 g grapeseed oil
- 4 kg tomatoes, quartered
- 1.5 kg red bell peppers, deseeded and sliced into large segments
- 1.5 kg red onions, sliced into large segments
- 150 g fresh root ginger, diced
- 150 g garlic, diced
- 30 g Scotch bonnet chiles, deseeded and sliced
- 90 g crayfish powder
- 30 g Tabasco sauce
- 60 g tamari
- 30 g fish sauce
- 30 g Worcestershire sauce
- 100 g black garlic, diced
- 200 g light brown sugar
- 60 g smoked salt
For the crab custard:
- 300 g whipping cream
- 300 g whole milk
- 900 g brown crab meat
- 200 g egg yolks
- 60 g fresh root ginger, sliced
- 40 g garlic, sliced
- 20 g Scotch bonnet chiles, roughly chopped
- 12 g smoked salt
For the wok hei paste:
- 125 g garlic, sliced
- 250 g fresh root ginger, sliced
- 300 g spring onions, sliced
- 125 g grapeseed oil
- 30 g Scotch bonnet chiles, deseeded and finely diced
For the rice:
- 1 kg fragrant Thai jasmine rice
- 1 kg jollof broth
- grapeseed oil
- filtered water (optional)
To finish:
- 40 g Rendered Aged Beef Fat
- 60 g wok hei paste
- 100 g crab custard
- 50 g turnip tops
- Roasted Garlic Oil, for brushing
- smoked salt
To make the jollof broth:
- In a large pot, bring the chicken stock to 70°C (158°F), then add the kombu and dried mushrooms. Take off the heat and leave to infuse for 1 hour, then strain.
- Toast all the spices in a wide frying pan until fragrant, then blitz to a fine powder in a spice grinder.
- Heat 150 g of the grapeseed oil in a deep pot until smoking hot, then add the tomatoes. Leave the tomatoes to fry in the oil until they begin to split and catch on the bottom of the pan. Stir, then continue to fry over high heat until most of the liquid has been reduced.
- Preheat the plancha to high. Toss the peppers, onions, ginger, garlic, and chiles lightly in the remaining grapeseed oil and place in an even layer on the hot grill. Allow them to smoke and burn, but make sure they don’t overcook on the inside, and turn them to ensure they are all evenly blistered. Add them to the pot with the reduced tomatoes, along with all the spices and the crayfish powder, Tabasco, tamari, fish sauce, Worcestershire sauce, black garlic, sugar, and smoked salt. Add the infused chicken stock and simmer the broth, covered, until all the vegetables are cooked through.
- Blitz the broth in a blender for 5 minutes until very smooth, adding some filtered water if necessary, then pass through a chinois. Store the broth in an airtight container in the fridge and use within 1 week.
To make the crab custard:
- In a blender, blitz together the whipping cream, milk, crab, egg yolks, ginger, garlic, and Scotch bonnet for 2 minutes.
- 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. Pass the custard through a chinois and season well with smoked salt. Store the custard in an airtight container in the fridge and use within 2 days.
To make the wok hei paste:
- Place the garlic, ginger, and spring onions in a food processor and blitz to form a smooth paste. Place the paste into a deep pot. In a separate pan, heat the oil to 280°C (536°F) and then carefully pour it over the paste, stirring quickly.
- Let the paste cool, then fold in the diced Scotch bonnets. Store in an airtight container in the fridge and use within 1 week.
To prepare the rice:
- Rinse the rice gently, changing the water until it runs clear, then drain and allow the grains to dry.
- Preheat the oven to 100°C/210°F/Gas Mark 1⁄4.
- Bring 1 kg of the jollof broth to a simmer.
- Toast the rice grains in grapeseed oil, then place into large, flat Gastronorms. Pour over the broth; it should equal the weight of the rice. Loosen each tray of rice with some filtered water if necessary, then steam in the oven for 20 minutes.
- Remove from the oven and steam for a further 2–3 minutes until the rice is spongy but al dente. Leave to cool at room temperature, breaking it up with your hands and adding some cold butter and oil to further break apart the grains. Once cool, the rice can be stored in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 days.
To finish:
- Heat a nonstick frying pan over high heat, then add the beef fat, along with 70 g of rice per person and the wok hei. It should take only 30–45 seconds to cook the rice if the pan is hot enough. The grains should be shiny (but not oily) and extremely fragrant.
- At the same time, warm 100 g of the crab custard in a small pot until barely warm. The residual heat of the rice will continue to heat the custard.
- Prepare a handheld smoker filled with oak chips. Quickly grill the turnip tops and brush with roasted garlic oil and smoked salt. Divide the rice between two sharing bowls and glaze with the custard so it evenly coats the top layer of rice. Finish with the turnip tops and firmly place a lid on top. Insert the nozzle of the smoker under the lid, smoke the rice, and leave to infuse for 1 minute before serving.
Recipe excerpted from Ikoyi © 2023 by Jeremy Chan. Photography © 2023 by Maureen Evans. Reproduced by permission of Phaidon. All rights reserved.
