- So this is Argie, Canadian Argie,
and he's become a plantain guru.
(upbeat music)
I think the plantain dish is, like, the symbol
for the restaurant.
It's a 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 moreso than any other ingredient in the kitchen
because we feel like there's almost this absolute idea
of what the perfect Ikoyi plantain is.
In our judgment,
13 centimeters is where a perfect plantain is
for this restaurant.
And I think that's why it symbolizes the kitchen,
'cause everything is done very deliberately
and with a lot of intent.
(upbeat music)
- I know Jeremy said 13,
but it's actually 13-and-a-half centimeters.
- It's a team of serial killers in here,
'cause just everyone's really f****** on it.
- [Argie] Ideally, that's the shape that you want.
From here, I'll slice 'em and then just lay 'em out.
- [Jeremy] 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, light coating.
- You'd be surprised that a lot of people
do this and actually,
it comes up pretty lumpy and clumpy.
So the brushing beforehand is really important.
Sounds really, and looks really simple.
But mine are always too clumpy.
We're just gonna store these away
and have 'em ready for service.
(upbeat music)
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.
(upbeat music)
It's 9:00 AM in here.
And we've been in here for nearly an hour,
and now we're ready.
We're getting ready for dinner.
That's the absurdity of Ikoyi. Just have a lot to do.
First thing in the morning here at Ikoyi.
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 just sort of become one dense substance.
So it's actually quite tricky to take it off
'cause it's 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 Ikoyi.
We actually separate all 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 we,
every single guest gets a different style of steak
from the same rib.
This beef now,
we're just going to blast chill it for about an hour.
This is the cap 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 10:00 AM 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've prepared earlier.
You can kind of see now how beautifully dried out it is.
So normally,
if you were to eat like a ribeye at a steakhouse,
you'd have this piece and this piece would sort of,
they'd be attached as one piece.
So we have removed all the pieces inside,
so that what the guest eats is something very tender.
(gentle music)
So now the beef's ready,
I'm going to give it to one of the guys in the grill section
to store in his fridge.
I felt that beef was one of the best representations
of ingredients in this country.
I kind of became obsessed with beef,
and I realized that it'd 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.
You're going to come to a Ikoyi,
you want to have all the condiments,
all the tingling sensations
and sour aspects and spicy aspects.
(dramatic music)
It's 10 o'clock.
We still have eight hours until service,
and there's still a lot to do.
So the next thing I'm going to 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.
But 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,
most of 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 trayed 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 char is counted,
and if we get an extra guest,
it actually makes it very challenging for us
'cause we have to portion hundreds of things a la minute.
(upbeat music)
(blender whirring)
I'll 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 ragu, with Samson. (laughs)
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 Bearnaise.
We have the choux, almost like a babar, or 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
'cause we can get nice, clean geometric cuts.
- So 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.
(gentle music)
Like our beef,
we wanted to serve something pretty epic
as a main course serving, for fish.
For me, turbot is 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 Ikoyi, from Jersey.
He's going to prep turbot.
- Yeah, I'd like to take it off from one fillet.
Well, my dad's a fish monger,
so I've grown up doing this, I guess.
So yeah, we used to work from like 3:00 AM until 8:00 AM
just filleting, prepping big turbots,
sea bass, wild sea bass, lots of local mackerels.
So it's quite nice to be here where we're just
really focused just on one or two fish a day.
We can 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 is so fresh and vibrant.
The chefs,
we 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 there's some excess moisture
coming out of the surface of the fish.
Once we brush that out,
soak up that one, two percent of water content,
and we air dry it,
it creates this nice, dry texture.
We're just going to 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 and bene seed miso,
garlic that's been confited in brown butter.
A lot of 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 confiting and we realize that grilling fish
is probably the best way to go for us,
because something about the way it forces heat
into the fish just gives it that really alive texture.
(upbeat music)
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 with the juices dripping
and it's still kind of hot.
(upbeat music)
So the dumpling,
it's inspired by a traditional Nigerian dish
called Moin Moin.
These are the beautiful dumplings with the turbot.
It's the turbot collar, some of the head meat,
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 Moin Moin.
- Well, he's Nigerian, and he's familiar with Moin Moin.
So, I don't know.
(upbeat music)
Samson's doing tarts and crepes.
Samson? - [Samson] Yeah?
- Crepes, tart stuff. That's it?
- [Samson] Yeah.
- So we're really lucky to get fresh veal sweetbreads
from a region of France,
which specializes in limousine veal.
We grind them in a salted milk solution overnight.
These ones are cooked and un-skinned.
So I just need to skin these,
and then we're going to 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 de-boned chicken wing.
I'm going to get this whole pan portioned up for tonight.
(upbeat music)
These are English Victoria plums.
They just come into season
and we make fresh plum sauce with horseradish
and sour onions to go with the sweetbread.
So this is just three minutes of, let's like...
(blender whirring)
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 pour the sauces,
we just spread them out to get 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's,
it also signifies the way we cook here,
it's quite simple-looking dishes,
but with many, many layers that are packed in.
It's kind of like being a kid,
and 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 like, remove the mystery
and the fun for me.
It sort of loses its 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 going to do the shelves.
We're just going to clean some fridges and some shelves,
and then after, 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.
There's hygiene, there's organization.
So if you're really good at cleaning
and you can get all the super fine details,
your eyes will be attuned to looking for small things.
I love these little, little fridges.
They've been good to us for five years,
have never broken down.
I think it's good though. It's like part of our system.
When you're putting these things away,
make sure we always, we can take the soaked peas up,
make sure we always compact to the back as far as possible.
- Yeah.
- This is the only fridge we have.
- [Off-Screen Voice] It's impressive
that you're able to do this with this much space.
- Yeah. Wait till you see the menu tonight. (laughs)
What I mean is like, you can 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 get, 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 Bearnaise.
The ikejime trout with husk cherries,
the last husk cherries today.
Can we 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 it's ikejime trout, a piece of the loin,
and a piece of the belly.
Excuse me.
So we've finished our staff briefing.
Let's do the count.
We've got half, we've got 27 minutes.
Beef.
You've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,
nine, 10, 11.
A three and a four. Done.
Okay. Sweetbreads, you have 28 sweet breads. One set.
(upbeat music)
- [Off-Screen Voice 1] Has anyone done the lemon bergamot?
How are we looking on that?
So we need to do lemon bergamot.
(upbeat music)
- 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.
(upbeat music)
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.
- [Off-Screen Voice 2] Yes, sir.
Careful, careful.
Okay, octopus coming up.
(upbeat music)
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.
Turn 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.
(classical music)
(classical music continues)
Ikoyi 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 with 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 has a gap here.
You see that gap?
I really like making tiny gaps.
Basically, looks like it's touching but it's not touching.
Ikoyi 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
and 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.