Jeremy Chan

Jeremy Chan is the chef and co-founder, with his school friend Iré Hassan-Odukale, of Ikoyi — a London restaurant that opened in 2017 and within seven years had earned two Michelin stars, the Michelin Green Star and a permanent place in the top ranks of the World's 50 Best Restaurants. Ikoyi is unusual in almost every way: Chan had no professional kitchen training before opening it; he is not Nigerian (he is of Chinese and Canadian heritage and grew up between Hong Kong, Toronto and London); and the food, while built around the spice palette of West Africa, refuses any one national or regional label.

Chan studied philosophy at Princeton and intended a career in finance — he worked briefly at Goldman Sachs in London — before walking out of finance to teach himself to cook. He staged at Hibiscus in London under Claude Bosi, at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, and at the Basque restaurant Mugaritz under Andoni Luis Aduriz, but never completed a formal apprenticeship. He partnered with Hassan-Odukale, whose family is Nigerian and from whom he learned the foundations of West African cooking — the smoked-grain stews of the Hausa, the suya spice mixes of the north, the palm-oil-and-prawn jollofs of the coast — and built a tasting menu around them.

The Ikoyi menu has no obvious nationality. A typical course might pair Cornish turbot with a sauce of fermented shea butter, Scotch bonnet and Hojiblanca olive oil, or feature plantain glazed with raspberry and smoked Scotch bonnet. Chan describes the cooking as 'borderless' — a refusal of the category 'African restaurant' that has historically meant cheap, casual and unstarred in European cities. In 2024 he and Hassan-Odukale moved Ikoyi from its original 26-seat site in St James's Market to a larger room at 180 The Strand.