The McMuffin with a Michelin star… | financial times

Jeremy Chan is one of Britain’s most cerebral and creative chefs. His Ikoyi restaurant, with two Michelin stars in London, hosts meticulous dishes that push the limits of spice-based gastronomy. So it’s surprising that his new book ikoyi (Phaidon), based on the restaurant’s tasting menus, includes a dish inspired by McDonald’s Sausage and Egg McMuffin. “It’s a bit complicated,” Chan admits. “But I grew up at McDonald’s. It is part of [my] childhood nostalgia. And while I’m ambitious as a chef and have artistic goals, I think the McDonald’s breakfast sandwich expresses something honest about what we find delicious.” Ikoyi’s brigade eats it all the time, too. “Ours is serious cooking,” he explains. Chan “We cook exquisite food that is organic, nutritious and labor intensive. Then at the end of the week we binge on McDonald’s. It’s a release, a contrast, instant gratification. There’s also an element of togetherness of the team. Everyone likes junk food. I don’t think chefs are any different.”

Their “breakfast sandwich” briefly appeared on the menu in 2020, after the first closure. “I wanted to cheer people up,” recalls Chan. A typically complex rendition, it features a white pepper sausage burger made with aged Mangalitza pork, a taleggio omelette in place of the steamed egg, a Guinness-infused cheese slice and beef broth, and milk rolls with a crunchy glaze. “I wanted to celebrate the artificiality of the fast food breakfast sandwich by exaggerating each of the components that I loved,” Chan notes in the recipe.

Some people love the taste of a Big Mac in a paste.

Chan isn’t the only one paying homage to his junk food favorites. A generation of cooks who grew up attending birthday parties thrown by Hamburglar and forging friendships with KFC buckets are serving up their own fun iterations. Take the campanelle pasta in Butter in shoreditch. “We make a ragout with soy beef, shiro-dashi, and black garlic,” says chef and co-founder Chris Leach. “When the pasta is added, we toss it with lettuce and finish with Parmesan cheese and a splash of remoulade, which contains dill, garlic and pickles. Some people love to get the flavors of a Big Mac in a paste. Some are appalled that pasta has mayonnaise, but you can’t please everyone all the time.”

The reference points are clearer in Open market, a cult neighborhood store in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. Its chefs Andrew Marco and Ralph Hsiao bonded over their shared love of McDonald’s. Her signature sandwiches have included the “McMarket McChicken” with fried jidori chicken, lettuce and kewpie mayonnaise, and the “What She Order Fish Fillet” inspired by McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish and using halibut, tartare, cheese cheddar and pickles. Served during Lent, the latter sandwich proved so popular that one customer proclaimed, “They’re doing God’s work.”

Informally known as the “Big Mac bao”, the beef short rib bao at the London Taiwanese chain beam uses top quality beef ribs from the butchers at Philip Warren & Son in Cornwall. “When you eat McDonald’s, it’s a guilty pleasure because you know it’s unhealthy, but you enjoy the pleasure,” reasons co-founder Erchen Chang. “When you have those elevated flavors with great products, there’s nothing wrong with that.” Among other homages, the black fish bao at the King’s Cross branch was originally inspired by the Filet-o-Fish. The team also tried and failed to replicate McDonald’s sweet and sour sauce, which Chang considers the fast-food chain’s “work of art.”

In bonnie’s in Brooklyn, the cha siu McRib has become their best seller. A Cantonese riff on the McRib, the dish promises a third of a rack of cha siu-glazed short ribs with bread-and-butter pickles, onion, and Chinese spicy mustard on a sesame brioche. It speaks to the second-generation perspective of its chef-owner Calvin Eng, who grew up in a Cantonese household in Bay Ridge. “I grew up eating fast food,” he says. “He will always have a place in my heart.” His takeaway menu “McBonnie’s” also nods to the style of Happy Meals.

Australian-Indonesian cook Lara Lee based one of McDonald’s desserts for a recipe in her new book. a splash of soy (Bloomsbury). “My tamarind-spiced pineapple cake started out as a tarte tatin,” she explains. “But the cake was soggy.” It was only when she modeled the dessert after McDonald’s apple pie with its “gooey cinnamon-tipped apple encased in a crunchy batter” that the dish worked, underscoring both the nostalgic appeal and functional artistry of the original.

It’s not just about replicating American fast food favorites, though. The high street curry house and chip shop are also inspirations. “I grew up eating ‘authentic’ Punjabi curry in Leicester, as well as ‘inauthentic’ curry house Tikka Masalas,” says British-Punjabi cook Gurdeep Loyal, whose book Mother tongue (4th Estate) exemplifies his embrace of third culture cuisine and hybrid flavors. “Since then I have been drawn to ‘curry’ in all its forms. Curry sauce from chip shops was a Friday night staple throughout my childhood, as were the German currywursts I found in my 20s thanks to weekends spent clubbing in Berlin. They don’t taste anything like it, and nothing like any curry I’ve eaten at home, yet the story of my life is ingrained in all of them in different ways.”

And that is the point. These junk food upgrades go to the heart of who is a chef. “Instead of trying to cook something that doesn’t relate to who we are,” argues Jeremy Chan, “the key to making delicious food is cooking something that is honest and true to our experience and everyday life.” Junk food is a first love that does not need to be abandoned.

@ajesh34