{"id":163579,"date":"2023-07-22T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-22T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mediaintel.asia\/?p=921685"},"modified":"2023-07-22T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-07-22T00:00:00","slug":"chef-jeremy-chans-secret-ingredient-is-endless-curiosity-and-always-leaving-room-to-grow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/2023\/07\/22\/chef-jeremy-chans-secret-ingredient-is-endless-curiosity-and-always-leaving-room-to-grow\/","title":{"rendered":"Chef Jeremy Chan\u2019s secret ingredient is endless curiosity and always leaving room to grow"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"MediaIntel.Asia\"<\/a><\/div>\n

Open this photo in gallery: Michelin Star Chef Jeremy ChanIllustration by Photo illustration by The Globe and Mail
\nOff Duty is a series of lively conversations with influential people, from CEOs to celebrities, on life, work and the art of taking time off.
\nWhen buzzy Chinese-Canadian chef Jeremy Chan appears on my Zoom screen, he looks rather forlorn. His bike has been stolen, he tells me. But after a beat, Chan\u2019s face brightens considerably when we move on to another topic: his grandfather Fred Ross, the acclaimed figurative painter from Saint John, N.B., whose intimately dramatic work hangs in the National Gallery of Canada. Chan enthuses that his grandfather was once featured in The Globe and Mail, too.
\nThe London-based Chan has much to be proud of in his own right. In addition to his upscale West African restaurant, Ikoyi \u2013 which he runs with lifelong friend, Ir\u00e9 Hassan-Odukale \u2013 earning two Michelin stars, Chan also penned the recently published Phaidon title Ikoyi: A Journey Through Bold Heat with Recipes.
\nAt the start of the book, Chan writes, \u201cIn a kitchen, there is nowhere to hide: raw ability and attitude eventually triumph.\u201d It\u2019s a statement that says as much about the author \u2013 who after a brief stint in finance spent time in the kitchens of famed boites including Noma and Dinner by Heston \u2013 as it does his food. The book\u2019s dishes \u2013 including a corn, ube and razor clam combo as well as a smoked jollof rice and crab custard \u2013 further amplify Chan\u2019s creative, unabashed approach to cooking, showing he has more in common with his grandfather than one might assume. Here, he talks about cooking and curiosity, why he wanted to write a cookbook and what\u2019s capturing his interest in the farming industry right now.
\nYou studied philosophy and the theory of languages at university, and that leads me to think you\u2019re a very curious person. What kind of curiosity does cooking satisfy for you?
\nI don\u2019t think it ever satisfies, and I think that\u2019s why I do it. It\u2019s an evolving world of knowledge; once you think you know something, there\u2019s always another way to do it, or another perspective. And perspective changes how you feel and how your taste develops. As you get older, your likes and your dislikes transform. So, I find that cooking is frustrating but also satisfying, because it\u2019s a very open-ended field that relates to culture, technique, recipes, ideas, traditions and how to use ingredients. Cooking is never static. It\u2019s never just, this is what it is. It\u2019s always changing, and it\u2019s cross-disciplinary as well. I interpret my experiences and my memories together with ideas and try to make things that are beautiful and delicious out of a very personal experience. It\u2019s endlessly challenging and artistic.
\nI know that the restaurant business is notoriously gruelling; how do you prioritize downtime?
\nI don\u2019t. I\u2019ve been searching for a way of doing that, but especially with this year of being at a new location for the restaurant, it\u2019s kind of like starting from scratch again. It\u2019s been very challenging mentally and physically. But I\u2019m lucky that we close the restaurant on weekends; because of that, I have some time to myself and I usually just catch up on sleep on Saturdays. I like to run and cycle, and I\u2019ll usually cook at home a bit. It goes by quite quickly.
\nNot to mention you had this cookbook project on the go; tell me more about why you wanted to write one.
\nI\u2019d never had a desire to do one, but once I had the opportunity, it was a very special experience. I made it clear to myself that I didn\u2019t want it to be a research or reference book \u2013 I wanted it to be a very personal narrative. So I basically wrote it like a novel, or personal essay; everything that went into it had to come from my mind and my hands.
\nWhat are you hoping people get out of reading it?
\nIt isn\u2019t just for cooks \u2013 or even really intended for cooks. It\u2019s really for anyone who\u2019s interested in culture, family and theories about cooking, creativity, spice. \u2026 It\u2019s got so many ideas. It\u2019s about how to get into your own mind and develop creative ideas and know that you\u2019re not going to be able to recreate every recipe \u2013 the ingredients are too obscure, or the cooking techniques are too labour-intensive. But the point is that you can read the recipe, and you can get inspiration from one aspect of it.
\nAnd what about the dishes featured in it \u2013 how were they chosen?
\nI chose recipes that were seasonally feasible to be photographed. I wasn\u2019t going to write an essay or recipe that was contingent on sourcing very specific ingredients that couldn\u2019t be found within the timeframe I was given to write the book. That\u2019s just not how we work at Ikoyi \u2013 I don\u2019t just call a supplier at any time of the year and ask for this or that. It\u2019s like, if something\u2019s grown and available then it\u2019s there. It shows my methodology and mindset of taking everything into consideration, not just my desire to put a specific recipe in a book. It\u2019s about the whole picture and trying to optimize this moment of time with the resources I have.
\nThis is a good segue into the final question I have for you: What are you passionate about advocating for in the food or farming industries?
\nOne of the main things I\u2019m really interested in is grass-fed meat \u00ad\u2013 rotational grazing, and animals that have grazed in silvopasture, which is pasture that\u2019s covered in woodland. What I\u2019m overall attuned to is that the closer the farming system is to nature, the more diverse the environment they\u2019re creating and the better the ecosystem they\u2019re creating. I\u2019m inspired by people that are trying to work naturally and create natural flavour; I think there\u2019s something about things being done this way as having a form of perfection that we don\u2019t have control over.
\nThis interview has been edited and condensed.<\/p>\n

This data comes from MediaIntel.Asia's Media Intelligence and Media Monitoring Platform<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery: Michelin Star Chef Jeremy ChanIllustration by Photo illustration by The Globe and Mail
\nOff Duty is a series of lively conversations with influential people, from CEOs to celebrities, on life, work and the art of taking time…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":253,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1380,692,325,671,194,699,334],"tags":[3472,5099,10315,6555,2189,10479],"class_list":["post-163579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-canada","category-education","category-finance","category-news-chinese-law","category-sourcing","category-university","tag-chinese","tag-london","tag-media-intelligence","tag-restaurant","tag-supplier","tag-zoom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/253"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":163580,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163579\/revisions\/163580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}