Mr. Chan, as a chef and co-owner of the two Michelin star restaurant Ikoyi, when did you first fall in love with spice?
I think my first memory of spice is when my dad would make wontons or noodles for us as kids, and when we’d eat them as a family, he would always have a very intense chili oil seasoning in his broth. I would only put a pinprick of it on my chopstick, but I remember tasting his broth after he’d finished his noodles, and I would think, “This is the level of spice that I need to get to.” Even though it was too spicy for me at the time, I remember the intensity of the flavor, the saltiness, the sweetness, the depth of flavor…
So you really grew up being open to spice and heat, exploring its different flavor profiles, its mouthfeel, the different dimensions that it can take.
Absolutely, my parents have been always very open minded, they’ve always exposed me to different cuisines, different tastes… So I grew willing to try things, I approached spice with this worldview. I had an exploratory mind when it came to food. And then in college, I had a very close friend who was from Sichuan and I would go to his house and have hot pot with his parents. And that really blew my mind! I remember it was summertime, it was humid, and we were eating this crazy spicy broth with shrimp, tripe, beef, mushrooms and vegetables. But it felt cleansing! This heightened, intense, almost painful spice experience with these fresh vegetables… I couldn’t stop eating, even though the spice was causing me pain, it was burning in my mouth and I was sweating from the humidity. I felt cleansed. I felt like I’d had been through some kind of Ayahuasca experience. It was very mind awakening. That was a very important moment for me, because it really impacted how I cook and how I view the pleasure and deliciousness of eating.
“When you’re cooking something with your soul, you want to give the most of yourself.”
It was not just a physical food experience, but a mental and almost spiritual one as well.
Right, it’s not just in your mind and your body, it goes into something else. That definitely changed a lot for me because I realized that you go through a small phase of discomfort to reach this next phase, which is a feeling of enlightenment and being cleansed. And once the spice is washed off, everything’s very tender in your mouth and your eyes feel brighter. Your mouth feels slightly numb… I don’t know, I feel very mentally stimulated. I think there is a connection with eating in that way. It makes you feel very alive.
Are you trying to bring that sensation to your guests at Ikoyi London through your bold, spice-forward menu?
Sure, I’m trying to bring some form of multi-dimensional experience. Spice gives me control, it gives me access to a more layered, complex experience. I can create more detail in my dishes using spices, by infusing them or by creating different concentrations of spice. When someone eats a dish, they can have something bright, they can have something aromatic, they can have something smoky, they can have something acidic, something bitter, something floral… They can have them all at once with texture, and that makes eating very engaging and complex. It’s an inspiring experience, it’s not just meat and veg on a plate, although there’s nothing wrong with that. But when you’re cooking something with your soul, you want to give the most of yourself.
How do you go about crafting your menu, which I know is very connected to instinct, memory, and experience — but you’ve refused to label it much further than that.
Well, at the beginning when we first opened Ikoyi, I was looking more outwardly, there were three to five years where I was doing some research outside of myself. And then eventually the restaurant formed its own identity, its own personality. And in the past couple years, I’ve completely cut myself off from that outside world and now I use the pre-existing identity of the restaurant to reinterpret what’s coming next, it’s kind of self-referential. It’s self-contained.
It sounds pretty abstract, to be honest!
(Laughs) Okay so initially, my earliest process was this: I want to create a dish with the texture of the surface of Mars, I want an intense flavor of smokiness, things like that… That was the original process. Whereas now I will simply look back and think, “How did we look at asparagus last year and how can I push my mind deeper to think about asparagus in a new context from its previous iterations?” It grows from these concepts that we’ve already created and I think that keeps our identity very strong. In terms of how that translates into a new dish, you’re right that it’s guided by passion and instinct and experience. Lately we’re using a lot of white asparagus, and instead of using many different spices, I want to talk about cloves. They’re difficult to use, a lot of people don’t like cloves, they’re too pungent. And so I took it as almost this like challenge to think about cloves, how can we capture the sweetness of cloves and use it to scent white asparagus. And so that’s kind of like how new ideas will arise.
Is it true that you’ve never eaten a dish from your restaurant?
That was true up until a couple months ago! I tried one of our dishes for the first time, just out of curiosity.
But how does that work? If you’re not trying the dish, how can you know if your idea with the cloves has worked?
I can’t! And I’m okay with it, because in one way, I’m really sure of myself… And in another way, I have no idea. I try to see life as, like, you have no control over what people are going to say and what people are going to think or you really just have to give it your all. So I’m living life that way. I’m not scared of anything, I feel very confident, and I don’t want to overthink things. I don’t want to micro analyze and over-taste and build a dish and eat it to death… But that doesn’t mean I don’t know or I haven’t deeply thought and analyzed what I’m building. It’s kind of similar to jazz. A jazz musician will build an incredibly complex piece of music that is influenced by emotion, by sense of humor, by feeling. It’s very technical and it’s very thought-out, but it’s also uncontrolled in a way. That’s what makes it like unique, and it makes it exceptional.
It’s kind of like you’re capturing the purity of the moment.
Right and it goes back to what I was saying about self-referential creativity. I don’t want to be polluted. I’m just thinking inward, I’m thinking more about the things I can control: What equipment do I have? Who is my team? How many people am I cooking for? What are my ingredients? And whatever’s beyond that limit, you know, a customer’s reaction to a flavor, or how many reservations we have… I can’t control that. But the things I can control, I’m all in. It feels very free.
Have you ever felt pressure to stick to the usual fine-dining playbook?
Not really, because I don’t even think of it as a fine dining restaurant. I think of it as a restaurant in the pursuit of technique and precision, we’re interested in making an original idea, in seeing how spice and can interact with seasonality. I’m exploring my personality and my life through this restaurant, it’s a living thing that has come from deep within me. So I think it’s not traditional anyway! It can be challenging sometimes when people come in with a certain expectation and they’re confronted with something different… New flavors, new presentation, new styles of hospitality… But for the most part, the reaction is genuine and warm. I don’t know… We’re trying to express something really precise and unique, but I also don’t want to impose anything on anyone. It’s just me and how I work, and whether people choose to see it and appreciate it in that way is up to them.