Original Story Published by: Lucy Morgan for South China Morning Post
Photo Source: ©SCMP
- Princeton-educated Chinese-Canadian Jeremy Chan and his friend, LSE graduate Iré Hassan-Odukale, set up Ikoyi in London in 2017
- They combine ingredients and flavours from West Africa with Chan’s culinary skills and ideas to come up with something unique
An imaginative London restaurant created by a Chinese-Canadian chef and a Nigerian-Sierra Leonean director has surprised British gastronomes and was last month awarded a star in the Michelin Guide Great Britain and Ireland 2019.
Fuelled by West African flavours, Ikoyi is now among the 14 of London’s 71 Michelin-starred restaurants serving non-European cuisine. The Araki, a small Japanese omakase establishment, holds the highest accolade of three stars. Umu, another Japanese place, has two stars. Six Indian and five Chinese restaurants each have a single star.
Ikoyi – named after a suburb of Lagos, Nigeria – opened in central London in the summer of 2017 and is the first West African-inspired restaurant to be honoured by the guide.
After a private school education in Britain, co-founder and head chef Jeremy Chan studied languages and philosophy at Princeton University in the United States before taking a job in finance. Realising it was not for him, he left and started work as a chef, spending nearly five years gaining experience at highly regarded European restaurants Noma, Hibiscus and Dinner by Heston Blumenthal.
“There were some tough moments,” Chan says. “Having a really serious academic background, working in finance and having financial stability … then leaving that and working for free, for months at a time, with no career prospects, no cooking school.”
