Ikoyi Co-Founder, Jeremy Chan: What It Takes to Build a Global Top 50 Restaurant

0:00I've been very consistently disciplined. I haven't taken my eye off the ball for 10 years. I've kept it laser focused for 10 years and it's still there. You know, I still think about it every day. I wake up every morning thinking about it and I go to sleep thinking about it.

0:15Cameron:Hello and welcome to Giant Ideas with me, Cameron McLean, and me, Tommy Stadlin. We're co-founders of Giant Ventures, which builds and backs purpose-driven companies. At Giant, we're lucky to meet extraordinary people with Giant Ideas that are changing the world. This podcast brings you behind-the-scenes access to those ideas and the inspiring stories of the people behind them. We explore how one giant idea can kickstart a billion-dollar company, shape culture, and transform life as we know it. Today on the podcast, we welcome Jeremy Chan. Jeremy is a British-Canadian chef who grew up between London and Hong Kong and is the co-founder of Ikoyi.

0:51Cameron:In 2017, Jeremy joined forces with his childhood friend, Irla Hassan Odakale, who had just left a career in insurance. and together they decided to build Ikoyi. Ikoyi is now a two Michelin star restaurant in London and it's recently been voted one of the world's 50 best restaurants. But Jeremy has not always been a chef. In fact, he studied philosophy with me at Princeton and worked briefly in finance. After leaving finance, he wrote to many, many restaurants asking them to take him on for some experience and ended up working at institutions like the two-starred Hibiscus, Dinner by Heston, and in one of the world's most famous restaurants, Noma.

1:27Cameron:He's known for his creativity and his innovation. Jeremy, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So Jeremy, let's start at the very beginning. You and I first met studying philosophy at Princeton, kind of quite a different setting, but you always had, I think, a very unique obsession that you applied to whatever you were focused on at the time. I remember distinctly at the time that was philosophy and I think you went deeper and probably broader than I did, but you also then I think applied that to cycling at one point was that you're very obsessed you're always in your lycra walking around Princeton which stuck out and then later on to finance and now to food so you know what what is it about becoming obsessed with a with a topic and going deep into it that you think you really excel at and and how does the study of philosophy that you did at Princeton connect to now what you do with food I think it's just part of my nature part of my psychological way of mind.

2:21Maybe I'm an obsessive person. I don't like small talk. I don't like going into things halfway. I think if I'm really interested in something and really passionate about it, I've always completely consumed that thing. And how did I end up in food? Well, I think I've always been a very physical person, I've always been very into sports and exercise and movement. And at the same time, I've always been very analytical and very structured, mentally very organized. So I found cooking to be that perfect combination for something extremely physical and also something very mentally challenging. At the same time, like it brings in that element of creativity, which is I think I have a dualistic personality.

3:13I'm kind of like in a way not like emotionless but there's a cold like calculated like very focused concentrated person that has an ability to kind of disassociate myself from emotions and then there's another side that's very warm and very creative and very caring and I think that's where the element of hospitality comes in. it's hospitality it's creativity it's figuring out what makes people tick what makes people feel good so I think that's how I ended up in cooking it's very dualistic personality and it's very

3:51Cameron:dualistic type of work maybe just give us a little context on your journey from Princeton to to now to call you so finished university 23 years old very very uh in the prime of my existence like when you finish university you think you're the best in the world and you've done you've made it but actually you're you're nothing and I realized that very quickly when I went into the real world and I wasn't surrounded by friends anymore and I didn't have this spoiled like existence of just pleasing myself and I realized that like actually this is it like I have to really make it and I tried some some things that I wasn't really destined for I worked very briefly in finance.

4:33I wouldn't even say I worked in finance. To work in finance when you're 23 isn't working in finance. That's basically an internship for one or two years. You only really work in finance when you've been doing it for five to 10 years. You're a real banker or something, but everyone that gets out of college and goes into a bank or something is really just a trainee. So I don't like to say that I had this career in finance. I'd say that I dabbled with it very briefly and I felt like a caged animal. And, you know, I had a tremendous amount of energy in university, like explosive and like limitless, basically.

5:12And so to have to sit down and stare at something that like when the work was finished, I wanted to do more. I wanted to do other things. But you're kind of limited at that age. You kind of have to sit there and just like. The sitting's hard. It's genuinely, genuinely hard. So I'd fantasize about escaping. and that's when I started thinking about cooking. So I was 23, 24. I really think that cooking is the only career that I've had because I really started it as my own choice of what I really wanted to do.

5:43Cameron:I remember you telling me that you were sort of cooking for your, when you were just getting the initial idea, you were cooking for your roommates, I think. Well, actually, technically I've been cooking since I was about 14. My parents, my dad is Chinese, my mom's Canadian. and they're quite different culturally. Chinese families are very food-focused, flavor-focused. Canadian families are very un-food-focused. They like food, but it's very simple. It's bland. It's neutral. Maybe a bit neutral, yeah. And so I felt like the family dynamic needed honing and optimizing. So as a kid, I took over the cooking to make it more delicious, more intense so that my dad would be happy.

6:24And then I think that's where the urge to cook came from, this idea of uniting my family or at least improving the social interaction and then I think that's where the instinct to cook came from and then and then I figured this out when I was in when I was working well you know dabbling in finance I read as many books as I could about cooking and I was very arrogant and I was like I read all these books and I because I was obsessed with it I remembered every recipe every detail like you could ask me anything about any of these chefs and I would know exactly which recipe and I would know which restaurant and that time there was no Instagram wasn't that long ago but that's when books were romantic and I think I had it there was a romance about cooking and I had this dream of the beauty of cookbooks and seeing these places that I had I couldn't really see and now it's all exposed it's all out there but back then you could really delve into your imagination and that's when I was like this is something that I want to get into and then so I left my career and my mini career in finance and started cooking and that was pretty like eye-opening because I realized no one gave a damn that I went to Princeton no one cared that I had a top degree that I was well read and it was can you peel onions or can't you and I felt quite old as well at 24 25 like everyone else was 18 19 and much faster much more capable much more intelligent in ways than I wasn't and so I kind of loved that I had to start from nothing again and um you know I didn't have any support from my parents and they were a bit upset with me they're like you've worked so hard in this professional world to get to this place in this very safe professional like path which is going to set you off onto a really nice mortgage one day and like a stable family with a house and now you're like doing this and like are we gonna have we're not gonna pay for your lifestyle so that you can cook so that was the best lesson that I learned was not only having to do what I want but also figure it out on my own and like get there I had to do all kinds of jobs like I had to work in like massive catering companies or like industrial kitchens just to like make ends meet pay rent while my friends were back in finance making hundreds of thousands of dollars I think it was that was a really good time for me I really liked that because it was pure work it was like but it was also like psychologically like why did I have this education if I'm doing this now but I think I think everyone should have that kind of experience in a way.

9:06Cameron:Well, it's working out for you. But I think it's interesting. I know you think of yourself first as an artist, I think, right, or as a chef, as an artistic chef. But when you talk about the story, you exhibit a lot of the same qualities we would look for in our entrepreneurs, right? Obsessiveness, complete commitment to learning everything about the topic, a willingness to go against the grain, particularly, I think, the safe choice your parents think you should choose. I think hustle, like you hustled your way into the Noma kitchen with really no, really I think right to be there probably at the beginning right and you know hustle kind of getting in the right room so there's a real entrepreneurial drive I think to set anything up from scratch and that includes a high-end restaurant that's a very unique vision and I think a lot of people would tell you that you're not going to succeed in that you won't put it off it's really impossible yeah the odds are against you right the odds are definitely against you um and and but you have a pretty unique philosophy of food that you've developed over the past you know i don't know decade or so what how would you try and describe that in a few words so i quit cooking i hated it i hated working in kitchens the things that i loved about it obviously the cooking but i didn't like the culture of cooking was very patriarchal very hierarchical it wasn't as meritocratic as i thought it would be and there are a lot of like intense personalities and kitchens and i think uh yourself yourself myself but i think like They need to be managed, including myself.

10:30They need to be called out. They need to be managed. And there needs to be a balance. And I think sometimes high-pressurized environments, there's not always someone to say, like, calm down, everyone. Like, this is just cooking. When you're living in someone else's, like, dream, and it's really intense, you know, it's probably not the easiest experience. It depends what kind of personality you are. And I think I'm a dreamer as well. so if you're also a dreamer and you're in another person's dream 100 you you want to do your own thing and so i think that's more what i'm trying to say yeah but i think there are other personalities that like to follow and have really good executors and that's that's fine too but i just wasn't that type of person i've always been you need some of those to make dreams come true but yeah so i've always been an individualist and then i so my best friend asked me if i wanted to open a restaurant and we didn't know what kind of cuisine and then we started looking at his heritage he's nigerian and I tried his food from where he's from.

11:29We went to Lagos and I got this inspiration for flavor from this part of the world. And it was really inspiration for cultural open-mindedness in cuisine, which I hadn't seen before in that like Western cuisine, technical cuisine, refined cuisine was all centered around France, Japan, Europe. and that this is the like symbol of refinement. And I realized that there's a whole world out there of flavor and like cooking is about soul. It's about people. It's about heritage. It's about personality. And I think like I realized that like I could use spice as the catalyst for my creativity and express my heritage, which was really about spice and really about complexity.

12:17So that's kind of how it started. And then now it's grown into something very complex and even more undefinable. I'd say if I had to say what the cuisine was today, it's about produce. It's about seasonality. It's about studying seasonality and using bold flavors and spices to give layers of flavor and complexity to seasonal cuisine. It has its own identity, its own aesthetic. I mean you'll see in the cuisine references to so many different ideas and things that you've experienced before but you won't see in in the image of the dish something that you recognize but you'll taste it it's like a poem it's like each dish is like a poem you'll see something new you'll hear something new but there might be like history time you know ideas culture like

13:09Cameron:embedded within within the dish and I remember that I came when you just launched the restaurant and uh when i was excited to try the food but i was also being a supportive friend and i remember how you spoke about each dish uh and the story of the food where it had come from and and really imbued it with yeah i guess a feeling or an identity that was quite it was quite unusual and that was i think almost seven years ago now yeah since then you've added i think two michelin two michelin stars you've moved location you've been i think awarded uh recently one of the top 50 restaurants in the world what like how did you you know what was the journey from from starting where when i came to to where you are now and how has it changed well doing that type of cuisine which is very difficult to talk about yeah in a way but in a way it isn't guests come to the restaurant they say what kind of food are we eating and i'm saying this is you know it's hyper seasonal cuisine and it's spice driven it's about flavor yeah it's about representing cuisine of spice you know something very unmarketable um so we started and when we opened it was super busy because people were like what is this restaurant it's quite unique two friends mixed cultural background there's an element of like west african flavor to this restaurant because of one of the founders is nigerian but it's not a west african restaurant but a lot of people thought it was.

14:32So so many Nigerians came to the restaurant. It was full of only Nigerians. I remember that, and me. And everything was getting sent back to the kitchen. Everything. Why are we eating sushi? Why is the beef raw? And then we got a really good review from Sunday Times from Giles Curran, and then suddenly the whole restaurant was white. It was all women from different counties around England who liked Giles Curran, and they all ordered the same thing that was in his review.

15:01Cameron:No way. And then that period died out and then we were dead. We had like no guests. We had like one guest at 9 p.m. And it was a really dark time. We were making like, we were barely hanging on. And that's when I like realized that I was a very difficult person because I was unwilling to make food that was conventionally recognizable. Like it had to be like my own. It had to have integrity and it had to be completely unique in my own thing. And I even remember saying to my business partner, I'm the reason this business is failing. What does integrity mean? I think it means true to yourself and blocking out other voices.

15:40And I think that's when the food was its best, when we first opened the restaurant, because it was pure. It was like my pure soul. But as you get older, as you become more affected by what other people think, you know lists Michelin stars customers industry what people think about you you you start to mold your creativity around what works for society instead of just cooking for one yeah so now I think the food is still stunning but it's in a way it's been molded by society a little bit in a dialectic like a dialogue yeah so then I think the food was the best then because it was in its raw form but but we were empty but I basically just held on for dear life and I like push and pushed and I pushed the food so hard that like chef started to notice so we'd be completely empty but we'd have a three Michelin star chef from Japan eating and it was so embarrassing because the restaurant was empty and I had to explain oh we just had a quiet night we had you know Magnus Nielsen from father can eat with his whole team and he showed up at 8 30 p.m.

16:44the restaurant was empty that's not a good feeling when VIP guests come in and you're at you're empty and I remember just feeling quite frustrated for many years but I kept going and I think the word in the industry caught fire and I think the restaurant started to get a cult following with chefs and then I think that's how the survival aspect started to kick kick in for the

17:11Cameron:restaurant that's this amazing because that's even like I didn't know that I thought it was all sort of somewhat up into the right type no I meant him but but so you actually went through kind of some, some tough periods. Big time. And it's still gone through tough periods. Like I guess running, running a, running a, an institution like you do is challenging. I mean, there's COVID there was, there's also like the attention span of like people that go to restaurants and like, are you, if you're a creative restaurant, people are expecting reinvention all the time. If you're not reinventing yourself, people don't come back.

17:47If you change your concept, people don't come back. and we've changed our concept a lot. That is the nature of the restaurant. It never stands still. It's like a demon. This is how I would describe it. It's like a demon that consumes cuisine. It consumes cultures, ideas, and it gets bigger and bigger. And now it's this enormous thing. It's huge. The creative energy that's behind Ikhoi is this enormous wealth of experience and details and like observations and all of these like minutiae of like thoughts go into everything in the restaurant. So the way that we look at cabbage now is not how we look, how we look at cabbage.

18:29We used to look at cabbage when we opened the restaurant. When we opened the restaurant, we saw it from a very beautiful perspective, roasted in turmeric butter, like stunning. But now we see it from like many, many, many other perspectives, which are collective experiences from myself and from my team that we've gathered so that now we have all this experience and we enrich in the food all the time with it and that's how it's different to another restaurant say french cuisine which is about more set in time it's set and it can't really expand beyond that realm right can't really like to an extent you can but you can't really embed other experiences into a dish that's supposed to represent authentically a specific culture.

19:12But if you're a restaurant like us that doesn't claim any authenticity other than itself, you can use any tool you like to expand the cuisine. We call it self-referential now in that when we started the restaurant, we used to look for external references to guide the creativity. And I think that's when anyone's starting a creative journey, you need to emulate something. sure of course you need to emulate someone or something and it's like a patchwork of like different people that's how you create your own voice inspire us you look at their styles and you kind of blend them together to create your own style you emulate them that once your style is up and running and you have iterations of executions over the years now what we do is we reference old executions but we we don't recreate them we combine them and we expand on them and we We use previous new ideas as inspirations for current new ideas.

20:12So they're almost like self-referentially creative.

20:15Cameron:Let's talk about what it's actually like to run a restaurant. So you're both an artist in the creation of the food. Then you are running the restaurant itself as something of an entrepreneur, of course, with your partner, taking on some part of that role. It's an interesting time to be building the business, right? It's a very difficult time to be a restaurateur. it's probably the hardest time that there is because we're up against so many challenges technology consumers lack of um attention span because of the the content that's being bombarded with them it's hard for people now to differentiate the truth there is no truth it's all just been atomic bomb with technology yeah we've gone from 15 seconds of fame to like 15 milliseconds i think and like how can you differentiate from all these videos what's actually good or not you know everyone's being paid to influence and create content for so i think it's really difficult but i think we got in at the right time just before this started and we've managed to build a cult following and i think i think of businesses now i call it um real conversions so there's there's a technology conversion where people see you on instagram they come they take the fit pictures they post about it and they never come back we don't want those kinds of customers i mean we do we welcome them but generally they're not the ones that tend to come back but if you think about a real conversion customer that's someone that you make a genuine human connection with but it has to be so powerful that they will remember it for the rest of their life and they will come back and that's if you keep on building that it takes years and years but now the restaurant is full of regulars because we've been doing this we've been working on real conversions which is making very strong human connections, friendships with guests, remembering their name, remembering what they like to eat, changing their cutlery, personalizing their cutlery, altering their menus every time they come back.

22:07You know, it's interesting.

22:08Cameron:It reminds me of Paul Graham, who's the famous founder of Y Combinator and his big advice that's sort of, I would say, you know, embedded in startup law at this point is, you know, find your first 10 to 100 customers that really love you. Don't try and scale to tens of thousands. just find you know even 10 that just truly truly love what you do and then you're on to something and obviously completely different uh you know type of building but kind of similarities i think it's a safer way and i think it's the only way a restaurant can survive and have legacy yeah otherwise if you're competing in the noise out there you're competing in the world of technology you're going to lose a lot of money and you're going to be fighting this battle that you're never going to win.

22:50I would say that it's gotten harder as I've gotten older. Like, it's not a glamorous job. Like people look at the restaurant, it's a beautiful restaurant, they think it's very glamorous. But actually, you know, I work 18 hour days, sometimes 20 hours. I work on my days off, you know, it's a labor of love. It's a labor of love. You know, I'm heavily involved in the prep of the restaurant. And that's something I've not been able to extricate myself from because the execution of the end product is related to my vision and my take on what produce we're using. And because we're using such perishable, refined ingredients, especially we do a lot of aging.

23:38We age a lot of meat, fish, shellfish. We work with line caught fish only. We work with incredible farms in Cornwall. all of our beef is handpicked for us it's grass-fed from one farmer you know we have really amazing relationships and i've been to all my suppliers even our caviar supplier in munich i drove there to pick our caviar for the restaurant in between days off between services it's like so

24:03Cameron:you can't really delegate or scale without losing the essence of what i can to an extent like i have my head chef who's incredible he's like almost my twin we like execute on a very similar level but there's some things that he does that I can't do and there's some things that I do that he can't do. So when you and I, when I watched the movie, I think it was with Ralph Fiennes. Yeah. It was called Chef. Yeah. Oh, you're talking about... Is it called Chef? No, it was called... No, I know the one you mean. He ends up... He ends up killing everyone. He ends up killing everyone. The menu. He ends up, he hosts a wonderful dinner.

24:46Cameron:There's all these sort of, all the characters you sort of just described. I love that film. People taking pictures of their Instagram, the sycophants, the true fans. He makes them eat, I guess, his perfect meal. His last kind of contribution. And then he kills everyone. I watched that movie and thought, thought of you. I wouldn't be surprised. And thought, I wouldn't be surprised if Jeremy, that was Jeremy's final act. you and I had some obviously intense discussions when we first met each other and both intense personalities but how are you are you Ralph in the kitchen absolutely not that's not you because you're much mellow or you're not going to kill everyone I'm definitely not mellow as I said before I think like I think I can be really brutal but it's more about the work the love of the work the passion and it's about like sometimes communication can be direct it can be intense but overall like you know I think I have a very caring personality and I really want to like nurture my team I think it shows like my there's no one in my kitchen really who's two new guys joined but everyone else has been with me for three to six years my last sous chef was with me for seven years I think people stay for quite a long time with me do you have any specific values that you sort of are explicit about in the kitchen Yeah.

26:09Share them. Uncompromising. Uncompromising. Yeah, like never relent. Like we'll never ever like not call someone out on something. We always push. Like every day we always push.

26:20Cameron:You know, Mike Moritz, the famous investor from Sequoia said, when I asked how do you build great companies, he said the relentless application of force. Exactly. Pure pressure all the time. Pure pressure. But also kindness. Like when there's the right moment, when something beautiful happens i'll always say if it's beautiful work that's taken place we'll always say but i'll always say when it's not just pure honesty the whole time pure honesty but um and do you do you think people are willing to go on the the hundred hundred hour week journey with you do you find that no they're not they're not and that's okay because it's not their business It's not their business.

26:59And I think that chefs should have, chefs today, like young chefs, they get paid a lot more than they did five, ten years ago. The minimum wage has gone up. The standard of living has gone up, as it should have. But I think to work in a restaurant is a very broad topic. It's like saying I'm a musician. It's like, okay, are you Beyonce? Or are you just recording some things casually? so yeah like it's it's it's the same in kitchens it's like if you work at somewhere like kori i have extremely skilled like very very talented people and i think they deserve to be paid well and so we pay them very well and i think that they should have a good lifestyle as well if you work at apple or google and you're a senior engineer should you be paid the same as someone at a smaller company that's just starting out maybe not I don't know I think like hard work and like sacrifice and achieving like a standard should be compensated well and I think in other industries it is but in cooking it's not yeah and so it used to be the thing that you work the higher the restaurant you went the less the pay because you were paid in the kudos of having the experience of having been there in some cases you don't get paid but if you work in a hotel or you work in a big brasserie or a bistro you get paid quite well because they need the manpower and your hours are better because maybe the quality of the work isn't as good and it's not going to necessarily like

28:31Cameron:take you places so it always struck me that noma the i think probably the most famous restaurant in the world uh arguably i think i or reportedly never really made a profit just broke even every year and i remember hearing that being like wow that's insane that is the that is the absolute pinnacle of food and they're just making ends me i think he shut down the restaurant because he said he couldn't really make he's still going he's still going he's still going i think he managed to i think it's been very challenging for him but you know he's like one of the most inspiring chefs yeah of our generation i think he's he's in many ways incredible he's a force of nature um but i think they managed to you know i honestly couldn't speak to what they do in how their business runs but it's still an inspiration and people are still going there one of my chefs who left me recently has gone to go work there and i think like that is a restaurant that's like demonstrates pure grit and like explosive energy that's just you know turned into something very unique and creative and it was way ahead of the curve i guess yeah trying to be more mindful about where we get our food from and how we think about food now that's obviously become a popular topic in mainstream culture, but it was way ahead of the curve.

29:50Cameron:Definitely. And where does, is there a finish line? Is there a point in which you say, I've achieved what I wanted to achieve, I've delivered to the world what I want to deliver? I mean, there's no such thing as perfection, but is there a moment where you feel you've... I feel physically drained and very tired all the time. and I feel like as I'm getting older, it's harder to do what I'm doing. I used to recover quicker. I watched Novak Djokovic playing tennis. It's a bit sad. I know. The great man. I feel a bit like him. Not that I'm nothing like him. He's great. But I mean, I've done well relatively in my field and I'm pushing still.

30:39But I feel like there's a finite time limit to the amount that I can push. So I think at some stage, like I might have to change the way in which I work a little bit, but I don't think my journey's over yet. And I'm kind of keeping an open mind. Sure. I think I would, I think I'm just living in the moment and I'm still learning and I'm still enjoying the craft of cooking. And there's many things I want to express, which I haven't done yet. In some ways, I feel like I'm just beginning yeah and i'm still at the end um so i think there's a lot there's a lot more to express and there's a lot more to go and i think the world is changing so dramatically it's kind of terrifying like people don't even notice how much is changing because they're too distracted but economically socially the way we're behaving as people it's just like and we're just drones we're not even tick we're not even noticing it and so i'm just kind of going along this journey curious i'm just curious about how much more will life alter and can i survive it and that's kind of my daily feeling it's it's there's a sense of hopelessness in it there's a sense of hopelessness and but there's also a sense of humor and like uh enjoyment in the in the process of course

32:01Cameron:staying curious yeah the novak thing you know that that i also watched that one he everything was played in the annex in a couple weeks ago and there's this thing in tennis I think is it's so intense like one mono mono a woman against women what two people on the court and he you know always seemed almost indestructible right his peak it was just like no one could touch you know not Federer not Nadal yeah and then suddenly at the peak of the seemingly indestructibility some young fellow or just sweeps up and and and kind of breaks the the kind of of, yeah, I guess the mirage of indestructibility.

32:37Cameron:It's kind of a fascinating thing to watch. Where does this drive come from? One of the things we've noticed with many people on this podcast is there often is some deeper drive, oftentimes rooted in childhood. We had Alain de Botton on the podcast recently talking about that. For you, this desire to create, this desire to create something beautiful, lasting, leave a legacy, be your own person. Where do you think that comes from? um be honest these issues always relate to childhood don't they typically i think like it's a combination of things i think what was your i think it's my energy levels are very high yeah so i'm inclined to do something that like allows me to release to move energy um i think like having a very like mixed background having parents that are like quite culturally different has given me a sense of like wanting to unify and bring people together and i think that's probably the essence of this drive it's like rooted in this like need to unify and need to perfect like create some kind of harmony out of chaos um so i think that's probably where it comes from a very eastern idea as well yeah but let's let's go let's go level deeper and actually running the restaurant as well so i don't know you let's give people a bit of a glimpse behind the curtain you've got say 40 30 25 20 25 young hungry brilliant people working for you i typically i think the kitchens are quite small always at least that's what i sort of glimpse from from the restaurants what's the kind of like what's the vibe how do you keep everyone running on time it's it seems like an incredibly complicated precise operation that needs to be run every night yeah it needs to be run more night and day night day yeah it's a full-time operation because we work with we don't work with big wholesalers when it comes to prime ingredients we work with line court fishermen we work with line caught fish sorry um uh this incredible farm uh butcher farmer butcher you've created your own unique supply chain we have like very niche ingredients we work with this like um citrus farm in the pyrenees um which we've also driven to um we meet all of our suppliers and we try to like develop very close relationships with them vegetables they're grown um around the uk um i take my team to visit them uh at least once a year um and so we really understand nature and we understand like what's like in the moment and that's also part of the essence of the restaurant and um and then like when you're actually like in the kitchen are you like who's who's telling who what to do well how are you making sure that it's all done the reason why i talk about the produce is because like that that is the like life force of like you get that right the restaurant takes care of itself and i think like i that's myself and my head chef and my two sous chefs all four of us are like constantly managing this net this supply chain we can't just show up at 9am and hope that things are there because every day we have people coming in expecting something stunning so i can't just call a wholesaler and say can i get some sea bus please they're going to send me sea bus but is it going to be any good no we have to serve like something unique something personal so ours will be one stunning ikajime line core age sea bus that we've ordered two weeks ago and we've aged for that specific day so every day i have different chefs coordinating ordering specific produce planning for weeks ahead sometimes months ahead and so that's the first element it's like the produce planning around the restaurant menu the guests that are coming in if you were to come in and eat i know that you've been before because we've had this interview i'd love to do something quite special for you so i'd look at the diary and i'd say cameron's coming we're going to do him the beautiful chestnut fed pigeon let's get two aging for him and his family and we'll put those aside so we'd think about that So that's the first element of organization is the produce systems and allocation.