Chef Jeremy Chan's Two Michelin-Starred Restaurant Is Secretly a Steakhouse — Mise En Place

So this is Aji, Canadian Aji, and he's become a plantain guru. I think the plantain dish is like the symbol for the restaurant. It's the symbol for this kitchen. It's kind of a signature dish. It's the first dish that we made for the restaurant. So I think what's neat about this dish is a lot of sort of discipline and technique that's being applied to this ingredient, almost more so than any other ingredient in the kitchen, because we feel like there's almost this absolute idea of what the perfect Ikoui plantain is. In our judgment, 13 centimeters is where perfect plantain is for this restaurant, and I think that's why it symbolizes the kitchen, because everything is done very deliberately and with a lot of intent. I know Jeremy said 13, but it's actually 13 and a half centimeters. A team of serial killers in here. I just, everyone's really f***ing on it. Ideally, that's the shape that you want. From here, I'll slice them and then just lay them out. Quite cool when you see them all like that. So after all the plantains are shaped, we marinate them or brush them in a little bit of buttermilk. From here, after they're all marinated in the buttermilk, we toss them in the plantain flour, just an even, even light coating. You'd be surprised that a lot of people do this and they actually, it comes out pretty lumpy and clumpy. So the brushing beforehand is really important. Sounds really, it looks really simple, but mine was too clumpy. We're just gonna store these away and have them ready for service. When people see the plantain, when you catch people in the moment of unsettling, that's when you can really push them over the edge. It's 9 a.m. in here, and we've been in here for nearly an hour now already. We're getting ready for dinner. That's the absurdity of Ikoui. Just have a lot to do. First thing in the morning here at Ikoui, this is a five-month-aged beef rib. Comes from Philip Warren in Cornwall. First, we take the rib off the bones. It's been so nicely aged that it's just sort of become one dense substance. So it's actually quite tricky to take it off because it's so, so dense. It's like going to the gym, breaking down these ribs. We do this first thing in the morning because we have a very small kitchen. We don't have a massive cold room. We don't have a meat prep area, a fish prep area. We don't have that much space to work with. So instead of having those luxuries, we work in a way that simulates those luxuries. So this is something we really like to do here, which I think is quite unique to Ikoui. We actually separate the muscles in the rib. They cook differently, and they make different styles of steaks. I actually don't know sometimes whether what I'm doing is right or wrong. I just know that it works. We figure out a lot of our techniques here by common sense and by trial and error. We really, really prize this specific muscle here. We have a beef tartare serving. We use different parts of the animal for the tartare. These loins, they're pretty much done now. We're just gonna dry them out. So this is my favorite steak that we get from the aged Philip Warren ribs. It's called the deckle muscle. What I really like about it is it's so thin, it puffs up. I think that's what's interesting about the butchery that we do here is every single guest gets a different style of steak from the same rib. This beef now, we're just gonna blast chill it for about an hour. This is the cat from the stabilizer rib. And we just break this down as well because usually this is put into burgers, but we take it because we use the fat. This is how we cook the beef. So we have this amazing super aged fat. So we take all of these little cubes and we make kind of an aromatic beef fat. So while we're grilling the steak, we also poach it in a bath of its own fat. It's about 10 a.m. now. The meat's had some time to dry out. As you can see, it's nice and compact. And then we're gonna portion it for dinner service. So we have 30 guests tonight and we usually do around 100 to 130 grams of meat. This is the deckle muscle that we prepared earlier. You can kind of see now how beautifully dried out it is. So normally if you were to eat like a ribeye on a steakhouse, you'd have this piece and this piece would sort of, they'd be attached as one piece. So we've removed all the pieces inside so that what the guest eats is something very tender. So now the beef's ready. I'm gonna give it to one of the guys in the grill section to store in his fridge. I felt that beef is one of the best representations of ingredients in this country. I kind of became obsessed with beef and I realized that it would be quite powerful to have the restaurant centered around beef as the main source of protein. So the meat is grilled, glazed, and poached in its own fat. If you're gonna come to a koi, you wanna have all the condiments, all the tingling sensations and sour aspects and spicy aspects. It's 10 o'clock. We still have eight hours until service and there's still a lot to do. So the next thing that I'm gonna prepare is the aged trout. We actually treat it quite similarly to the rib in that we break down the loin and the belly and we serve them as different cuts. We've been open five years. I feel like this year is the year where we've actually started to define techniques and define our knowledge. Up until now, it's been experimentation and we've done really well. I think I only spent three or four years cooking in restaurants and I never really held a job down for very long. I found it quite difficult working in restaurants. I wanted to create something and I think that's my nature is to create and to not follow a preset structure. One really important aspect about the way we work is, and also this goes into the aspect of not wasting really good material. We just count everything. So if we have 30 guests, we have 30 portions of trout and everything is traded up. Seems very obvious what I'm saying, but actually I don't think it's that normal practice in restaurants to count this specifically. Every vegetable, every portion of trout is counted and if we get an extra guest, it actually makes it very challenging for us because we have to portion hundreds of things a la minute. Show you what's going on in here. It's a bit mad. So this is our spring green sauce, which is made with all the seasonal green vegetables we get from one of the farms we work with. This is the base for our squid ragout with Samson. So we have four snacks and they're all incredibly labor intensive and intricate. We take it as a challenge. So we have the octopus fried confit grilled octopus fried in wild rice with a yeast bernese. We have the shu, almost like a baba bread. It's dipped in pork fat, grilled and served with a lobster and fig leaf and cucumber salad. Then you've got the Ikejime trout tart and the aged sirloin with Kaluga caviar. So we actually freeze the rib down because we can get nice clean geometric cuts. This is our caviar coming in. It gets sent in every couple of days. So Cedric's just broken apart the grains delicately. Now he's making perfect 12 gram balls. I just love just watching him work. It's really funny. He's really quiet and focused. The Germanic hands, gentle giant, yeah. Like our beef, we wanted to serve something like pretty epic as a main course serving for fish. For me, turbot's probably the most impressive fish to cook from the UK and we get one a day. They're all aged off-site. This is Christian. He's a sous-chef at Ikoi from Jersey. He's gonna prep the turbot. Yeah, I like to take it off in one filler. Well, my dad's a fishmonger, so I've grown up doing this, I guess. Yeah, we used to work from like 3 a.m. until 8 a.m. just filleting, prepping big turbots, sea bass, wild sea bass, lots of local mackerel. So it's quite nice to be here where we just really focus just on one or two fish a day and kind of take a lot more time with the process and make sure it's super perfect. So it's quite nice that when guests come to eat here, they're all eating from the same rib of beef and they're all eating from the same wild turbot. It's almost like we're cooking out of a home kitchen in a way. It's a tiny kitchen. Everything's coming in every single day. We don't have any long-term storage, so we're counting hundreds of ingredients every single day. But I think that adds to the appeal of eating here because everything's so fresh and vibrant. The chefs here have to do a lot of hands-on work every single day. So instead of applying a lot of cure and leaving it for several hours, we apply less cure for less time. And instead of soaking the fish, we brush off the moisture that's released from the flesh. So that means you're actively drying something out. You can see, like, there's some excess moisture coming out of the surface of the fish. Once we brush that out, soak up that one, 2% of water content, and we air dry it. Creates this nice, dry texture. We're just gonna portion some fish. And as you can see, it's been lightly dried out. Beautiful piece of fish. So clean. Just before service, we're going to marinate the cured fish. So it's a combination of brown butter, a benne seed miso, garlic that's been confit in brown butter, a lot of, like, amazing aromatic spices. And so we make this beautiful paste, just pure flavor and deliciousness. We've played a lot around with grilling and steaming and confit-ing, and we've realized that grilling fish is, like, probably the best way to go for us because something about the way it forces heat into the fish just gives it that, like, really alive texture. We don't really rest the fish either. We just hit it with very hot, high heat and then carve it and send it. I quite like serving it when the juice is dripping and it's still kind of hot. So the dumpling, it's inspired by a traditional Nigerian dish called moin moin. These are the beautiful dumplings with the tarbot. It's the tarbot collar, some of the head meat. It's based on a traditional Nigerian recipe called moin moin, but we don't call it that because we don't want to claim that it's a traditional Nigerian dumpling called moin moin, so we call it a dumpling. But it is that, and that is what it's inspired by. But it is a moin moin, right? It tastes exactly like a moin moin, yeah. Well, he's Nigerian and he says it's a moin moin, so I don't know. Samson's doing tarts and crepes. Samson, crepes, tarts, stuff, that's it? So we're really lucky to get fresh veal sweetbreads from a region of France which specializes in limousine veal. We brine them in a salted milk solution overnight. These ones are cooked and unskinned, so I just need to skin these and then we're gonna portion them. We poach them for about two hours and then we press them overnight. So after pressing, you get a really nice flat texture. They're actually an incredibly luxurious product and it's a piece of offal, but I think they taste like a deboned chicken wing. I'm gonna get this whole pan portioned up for tonight. These are English Victoria plums. They just come into season and we make a fresh plum sauce with horseradish and sour onions that go with the sweetbread. So this is just three minutes of blitzed lentils. A lot of chefs message me and ask about our sauces and why they are so shiny and synthetic manufactured looking. And the answer's actually pretty simple. We cook the sauces in the blender. So the blender creates heat. We use a lot of blending, a lot of blending. Once we've poured the sauces, we just spread them out to get a nice surface area and we don't seal them. We blast chill them just so that they can become extremely cold before they get sealed. We don't have very much space in this kitchen, so this is why we have to store things in this way. It's not the most ideal way. And when you get the sweetbread, it's sort of a brightly colored crispy nugget, but there's hundreds of ingredients that go into this plate. And I think that's what it also signifies, like the way we cook here is quite simple looking dishes, but with many, many layers that are packed in. It's kind of like being a kid and like thinking you're a magician and coming up with like a potion of some kind. There's no research, there's no testing. We just make everything for the first time and then it goes on the menu. There's no R&D development of the dishes here. They just become how they are from the excitement of putting it on the menu. People find that quite surprising that we don't test any of the dishes. I've never eaten any of the dishes at this restaurant in five years. Maybe it seems a bit mad, but it actually works for us. Eating my own dishes would be like remove the mystery and the fun for me. It sort of loses excitement and it's sort of like a special quality, which is like it's here, it's now, the plums have come in, we've made this beautiful sauce, let's serve it. In 15 minutes, we're gonna do the shelves. We're just gonna clean some fridges and some shelves and then at four o'clock we have a hard break and we go for staff food. Cleaning is like, if you can clean amazingly well, then you can cook amazingly well. Having a clean kitchen is the basis for having clean, delicious food. It's hygiene, it's organization. So if you're really good at cleaning and you can get all the spot-fine details, your eyes are gonna be attuned to looking for small things. I love these little fridges. They've been good to us for five years. I've never broken down. I think it's good though, it's like part of our system. Are you putting these things away? To make sure we always, we can take the soaked peas out. Make sure we always compact to the back as far as possible. Yeah. This is the only fridge we have. It's impressive that you're able to do this with this much space. Yeah, wait till you see the menu tonight. Like what I mean is like, if you see there's a gap there, make sure we have all, as big as possible containers always. See there's a gap there? Yeah. I just wanna make sure that we always have, exactly, because that's how we do it. Also find the smallest container possible for everything. We need to put these in smaller containers. All right, let's go through today's menu. We have the octopus fried in wild rice with the yeast beurrenaise, the ikajime trout with husk cherries, the last husk cherries today. Can you please tell the guests that we're serving the loin and the belly because there's a lot of work that goes into preparing that and it's like nice detail. So ikajime trout, a piece of the loin and a piece of the belly. Excuse me. So we finished our staff briefing. Let's do the count, Sedi. We've got half, we've got 27 minutes. Beef, you've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, three and four, done. Okay, sweetbreads, you have 28 sweetbreads, one set. Has anyone done the lemon bergamot? How are we looking on that? So we need to do lemon bergamot. I haven't eaten it with everything, just nibbles. We always have spares at the end of the night. I like how bitter it is. We're just setting up for dinner. As you can see, this is where we cook all of our food. It's a very tiny space. Samson is making the crepes. This is the beef fat that we have for service. So the beef fat starts like that and it ends up like this. All right, we're about to open the doors. Two guests in, one well done, one no caviar. So let's go two tasting into two tasting. Careful, careful. Okay, octopus coming up. How many fish on hold? One, two, three, four, followed by another four. You got the four ready. If the fish is perfect, let's carve it on the pass. Four beef on hold, two well done. One well done on this last two. This is one well done. Too many well done orders of beef. We should probably speak to the team about discouraging people from ordering well done beef, yeah. Joan, the four mains, two well done. What is it with the well done today? It really depresses me when it's well done. If you're watching this, please don't order well done. They call it, started off as a project to do with sub-Saharan West African ingredients, Nigerian culture and cuisine. But very quickly it morphed out of that. We realized that our vision for true Nigerian and West African cuisine would be having a connection to the place and the land. And we're so far away from that region that I feel like we couldn't do it in good faith. We're in Britain and there's so many other things here that are inspiring. So we wanted to take the best of those flavors and ideas and use them as a catalyst, as a jumping point. So I'd say that the spirit of West African and Nigerian cuisine is in our menu. It's the spice, it's the heat, it's the pungency. So we are paying respect to the ingredients, but we're trying to do our own thing. And we're not saying that what we're doing is better or enhanced in any way. It's just our own thing. The perfect plantain is that it has a gap here. See that gap? I really like making tiny gaps. Basically it looks like it's touching, but it's not touching. Ikoi is a new concept, it's a new idea. It doesn't exist anywhere else. I think that's why people can't define it. You have to eat here and experience it. Try and stay away from these in-depth, analytical discussions with guests and just serve them tasty food because that's what it's about.