Match of the week

Smoked jollof rice and pu’erh tea

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on June 19 2025 at 14:21

I not only had one of the best meals I’ve had this year at Ikoyi last week but some of the most fascinating drinks pairings.

Two were with tea - a dish of turbot, crab salad and tonnato which went brilliantly with the Ali Shan, High Mountain Oolong from Taiwan and - better still - a dish with smoked jollof rice with an 8582 raw Pu Erh from Yunnan in China.

Both elements probably need explaining.

Jollof rice is a classic West African dish of spiced rice with tomatoes and peppers. (There’s a classic recipe by Yewande Komolafe in the New York Times which points out that it’s often prepared over an open fire so the smokiness in the Ikoyi version makes sense

Obviously it’s much more elaborate:

“We first barbeque vegetables covered in spices then we make a tea from this that we use to cook the rice” explains chef Jeremy Chan. “Then we fry it in a pan together with garlic, ginger and spring onion and top it with a lobster & scotch bonnet custard. It is then smoked with hickory and opened at the table.”

“There are layers of different types of heat to this dish, the intense spices in the tea that cooks the rice, the ginger the rice is fried with and the scotch bonnets used in the lobster custard. This leads to a crescendo of flavours and spices that while extremely spicy, has a certain comfort.”

Pu-erh is an aged fermented tea with an intensely earthy taste which in this case almost felt like smelling a forest floor after a rainstorm. That might not sound that appealing but it’s one of the headiest teas I’ve ever tasted and went stunningly well with the rice (though interestingly not quite as well with the beef rib that it accompanied which was better with a more conventional Julien Cecillon Saint-Pierre Cornas).

(8582 refers to the recipe, leaf size and factory the tea comes from. All pu’erh comes from Yunnan. There’s an interesting piece about it on Serious Eats.)

With a tasting menu at £350* Ikoyi is pretty well as expensive as restaurants get in London (though I was lucky enough to be taken there) but given its totally original menu and two Michelin stars (I reckon it should have three) it’s a restaurant right at the top of its game.

STOP PRESS: Ikoyi won the Highest Climber award in the World’s 50 Best awards this week coming in at no 15.

*there’s a shorter lunch menu for £150.

Apologies for rubbish photograph. We were in a relatively dark room under overhead lights. At least that’s my excuse.

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