Ikoyi

Has any restaurant in London evolved quite so unpredictably and brilliantly as Ikoyi? Last time we were here, the restaurant (in its old St James’s digs) offered a three course, £35 lunch menu. Long gone are those days - Ikoyi is a completely different beast now, heralded as one of the best restaurants in the world, and hauling two Michelin stars among a raft of other awards.

The dining room is painstakingly cool - a sleek, futuristic mini-hangar of steel mesh, mottled copper wall panels and solid red oak tables. Three custom aging chambers by the door hold rows of neatly-hung beef, poultry and fish. The atmosphere is fairly hushed and reverential, perhaps the result of chef patron Jeremy Chan’s cooking, which at times requires a certain degree of focus and concentration. Chan is omnipresent at the pass, calmly directing the action, and regularly visiting tables to deliver dishes.

Famously distinct and impossible to pigeon hole, Chan’s cooking feels almost purposely non-conformist; he weaves intricate, unusual flavours with the skill and confidence of a mad genius, focusing much of the menu around a core of dry-aging and hyper-seasonality. Some of the results are extraordinary, and genuinely one-of-a-kind. A grilled veal sweetbread comes with a long list of accompaniments - crab salad, fermented chilli, a langoustine and blood orange emulsion, a little pool of hazelnut and kumquat milk, and more. What could be a cacophony is instead harmonious - a million voices singing a symphony.

The same is true of a stunning raw scallop, served alongside just-blanched asparagus and a ‘pudding’ of pistachio and avocado. It has texture, sweetness of scallop, not overpowered but perfectly matched by the fattiness of the green pudding, lifted by tart batak berries in the sauce. It’s masterful, unexplainable stuff.

Even geniuses have their blind spots, though, and not everything comes off with the same aplomb. We found a final bite of lavender and blood orange far too bitter and floral, and lacking balance. The question of price is a hard one - some will feel that at £350 (or £320 for lunch) Ikoyi has no margin for error. Is Ikoyi perfect? No, but Chan’s cooking isn’t about perfection, it’s about originality, and there is no more original restaurant in London than his.

Ikoyi is a two Michelin-starred restaurant on the Strand in central London, where chef Jeremy Chan builds complex, boundary-pushing menus, inspired by British micro-seasonality and sub-Saharan spices. 

Ikoyi has been on quite the journey since opening its doors in the summer of 2017. It survived a heavy barrage of TripAdvisor criticism in the first six months, then emerged as a genuine trailblazer in London's restaurant scene, scooping a Michelin star in 2018, then a second in 2022. Although it started broadly as a West African restaurant, it has worked hard to shed the moniker over the last five years. To call this a 'West African' restaurant is a wild simplification of what dinner at Ikoyi entails. Yes, the restaurant is named after a district of Lagos, Nigeria, and yes, there is a great deal of West African inspiration in the dishes, but the menu at Ikoyi is so much more - it's West Africa via Noma, with smatterings of chef Jeremy Chan's Chinese-Canadian background and everything in between.

Ikoyi has built a unique spice-based cuisine around British micro-seasonality, using vegetables that have been slowly grown for flavour, sustainable, line-caught fish and aged native beef. That produce is then served in it's optimal state, and combined with carefully constructed pairings using umami flavours. That umami can come from beef, or mushroom, or tomato, but also comes from a vast collection of sub-Saharan West African spices, meticulously researched and sourced by the restaurant.

By building layers and layers of flavour and umami, Ikoyi's dishes are intensely moreish, and the results are astonishing, sometimes challenging and totally unique. The tasting menu can feature dishes like octopus fried in wild rice and yeasted béarnaise, plantain smoked kelp and blackberry, turbot, caramelised chicken and artichoke miso and pistachio, comice pear and grains of peace - an African seed pod that has notes of liquorice and mandarin. And, of course, that smoking jollof rice that graced Instagram for many years.

Ikoyi also offers a shorter lunch menu but this is without doubt one of the most expensive restaurants in London, with the regular tasting menu coming in at £380 a head. There is, however, a less expensive, shorter tasting menu priced at £170 a head.