I’m a two-Michelin-star chef and I’ve never tried my own dishes

Jeremy Chan’s restaurant, located on the Strand in London, adopts a philosophy based on risk - Maureen M. Evans

In a recent talk to some of the world’s leading chefs, Jeremy Chan, head chef at the two-Michelin-starred restaurant Ikoyi in London, dropped a provocative statement. “I haven’t tasted a single dish in my restaurant since the day we opened,” he declared. “And I have not, and will never, eat at Ikoyi.”

This “may sound crazy”, Chan concedes when speaking to The Telegraph, but “to eat at Ikoyi would be like eating a part of myself.”

For Chan, cooking is not about calibrating flavour on the spot (as a spoonful of sauce, say, tasted at the stove, might prompt a chef to do), but trusting in a philosophy based on risk. “It’s about cooking on that tight line of getting it right and getting it wrong” – which, when you’re serving a tasting menu that costs £350, is a perilous line to walk.

At Ikoyi, British produce meets West African flavours in a category-defying cuisine, with dishes such as crab salad with “tonnato” (a rich tuna sauce), suya (spicy grilled-meat skewers) with creamed peas, and the signature smoked jollof rice. “Every recipe we make is dialled to the gram,” Chan explains. “We have brutal consistency.”

His food, he admits, is a performance on the edge of precision and chance, as much about feeling as flavour. What matters most is not the chef’s perception of the food but the guest’s: “if you give something deeply personal with integrity, people will connect with it in some way,” he says.

Chef Chan (pictured with Ikoyi co-founder Iré Hassan-Odukale) focuses on a spice-based cuisine centred around British micro-seasonality - Maureen M. Evans

For most chefs, tasting dishes from their menu is not just routine but an obligation. That is the view of Rafael Cagali, chef of Da Terra (which also holds two Michelin stars) in London’s Edwardian Town Hall Hotel, where he serves highly original cuisine with a strong Brazilian accent – via a tasting menu that costs £245. “Consistency is the greatest challenge for any restaurant; without tasting, there is no way to guarantee regularity,” he argues.

Cagali follows a strict daily routine: spoonfuls of every element of the mise en place (purées, sauces, cured fish, butter and more) are judged to check balance and make fine adjustments. He also tastes full dishes every week, focusing on new additions as well as long-standing items to avoid complacency. “Even small details can alter flavour and texture,” he says. “The point is not just to confirm the recipe, but to refine it, to keep its balance.” Cagali admits to being obsessively attentive to what comes back from the dining room, which he sees as the clearest warning sign. “A clean plate is proof the dish was right. If anything comes back uneaten, I make a point of tasting [the dish] the next day. The guest’s perception is our compass,” he says.

The practice of tasting dishes during the cooking process in professional kitchens became organised in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely thanks to Auguste Escoffier. Before then, it was informal, undertaken here and there to adjust seasoning or texture. With his brigade system, Escoffier insisted on systematic tasting to ensure consistency and quality. These days it’s a universal standard, especially in fine dining, for menu consistency and flavour control – but not always for deliciousness.

At Mugaritz, in Spain’s Basque Country, chef Andoni Luis Aduriz has spent decades resisting what he calls the “dictatorship of flavour.” In the kitchen of one of the world’s most innovative dining rooms, deliciousness has never been upheld as an absolute. Instead, he embraces deliberately unsettling tastes, such as edible moulds (from cheeses to the fungi koji) or a kombucha “mother” paired with tuna marrow to test the texture’s limits. “At Mugaritz we often work on the threshold of flavour – a fragile, fleeting border where taste is not obvious but suggested,” Aduriz explains. “It is in that liminal space where the tongue begins to doubt.”

Chef Andoni Luis Aduriz is constantly exploring the limits of texture and flavour, often utilising unexpected ingredients like edible moulds - Juan Naharro Gimenez/WireImage

Nonetheless, tastings at Mugaritz are carried out daily, “like a pilot’s pre-flight checklist,” while the most important sessions happen annually, at the start of each season, and involve invited guests from different creative fields, from neuroscientists to writers. The purpose of these is to anticipate interactions at the table and gauge how each menu (which sets diners back €297, or £259) might be understood. “We are more interested in understanding people’s reactions and how we can develop the experience in the restaurant through this,” he says.

Just like novelists who refuse to read their own books, or musicians who avoid their albums, not all chefs relish the idea of reviewing their own work. When Santiago Lastra first opened Kol, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Marylebone with a Mexican spirit, he avoided tasting full dishes. “Sitting down with your own creation and being critical about it is tough,” he admits. Over time, however, Lastra realised that confronting his own work was not as daunting as he feared. He developed what he calls two levels of quality control: “testing the elements to keep the team sharp, and tasting dishes in full to be truly objective about your soul.”

Michelin-starred Kol offers Mexican-inspired food - Anton Rodriguez

Tasting sauces, condiments and marinades keeps the kitchen technically precise. But the aim is not merely to replicate recipes and freeze them in time; it’s to let them evolve. “Consistency is essential, but it can often take the spark away. That’s why we constantly question ourselves: how can this be tastier, more beautiful, more exciting?” Lastra says.

The insistence on tasting is especially crucial given his mission: to make dishes made with British produce “taste Mexican”. While at his more recent project, Fonda, where recipes are more traditional, Lastra admits he barely tastes dishes, at Kol the approach is different. The team develops ferments, oils and textures for its £185 menu that, in Lastra’s words, “don’t exist anywhere else.” Some ideas take years to mature, often requiring partnerships with farmers to cultivate rare crops. “Because we’re not giving people the flavours they already know, it’s my job to keep calibrating until it’s right.”

Part of Kol’s tasting menu ingredients are rare crops, used to create flavours that ‘don’t exist anywhere else’ - Anton Rodriguez

Lately, Lastra has begun sitting down to eat the full menu just as a guest would – sometimes with his mother or friends – to see the bigger picture. That’s “the ultimate test,” he says. “Not to spot mistakes, but to know if we still have a spark, if I’m still excited to come here.”

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