Chat Over Lunch: Jimi Famurewa
A journey from picky kid to leading UK food voice, the complexity of code-switching, and the new world of video.
Chat Over Lunch was conceived as a justification to ask people like Jimi Famurewa to lunch. When I developed the idea, Jimi was the restaurant critic at the Standard and an unusual voice in that highly selective, often stultified coterie of newspaper restaurant critics. I admired his writing (and still do). I was and remain mystified why the Standard chose to end his run. But it hasn’t slowed his momentum, and I wish The Observer would grab Jimi for its vacant restaurant critic role. I’m incredibly grateful that he agreed to sit down with me as part of his tour to launch his new book Picky, which goes on sale today, and which you should definitely buy and read.
We met for lunch at Rita’s in Soho, a wonderful, bright bistro with a North American accent and spectacular food. You can find all of the usual restaurant details at the bottom of this article.
Jimi Famurewa is not Anton Ego. He is pleasant, funny, generous, welcoming and anxious to please. He arrives at tiny Rita’s hauling his folded Brompton bike, introduces himself, then disappears for a moment to stash his wheels in the garden out back.
“I particularly enjoy carrying it into really high end places to see how they react,” he confides, smiling as he does. The Brompton, I later learn, is a trademark, and it’s been to virtually every restaurant that he has.
The team in Rita’s greeted him like an old friend. The chef sent out a special snack for us. He had done some filming with them a few days prior, and the video was released a few days after our lunch. Spend a minute with that film, and it’s obvious that Jimi is different from other food writers.
That he is not, as he puts it, the cliché “scarf-tossing hauteur of the classic restaurant critic” is, for me, one of the many things that makes his perspective so appealing. And, unsurprisingly, he is intensely self-aware of those differences.
He has explored them in two books. In Settlers, he offers a penetrating exploration of Black life in London. And in Picky, he gets even more personal, mapping his journey to leading voice on eating through a lifetime of food milestones, often punctuated by the need for code-switching between his Nigerian roots and the culinary realities of modern Britain. As he says:
What can we divine about the persona and perspective I was trying to cultivate for myself from the squeamish rejection of all things perishable, pungent and messy, the unhealthy obsession with cartoonishly proportioned American convenience foods, the youthful conviction that ‘curry wasn’t for me’ despite never having actually gone to the trouble of trying it? Well, the truth is, my eating identity, like my actual identity, is knottily complex. There is Nigerianness. There is Britishness. There is the reverberative impact of parental abandonment, bursting suitcases of cultural baggage, and the kind of class incongruence that tends to go hand in hand with an immigrant background.
Jimi was picky from his earliest memories. In primary school, an unambitious after-school child minder fed him a daily snack of toast followed by a dinner that was almost always potatoes and rice. “The monotony … was preferable to the potential discomfort of a more varied diet.”
Later, in secondary school days, there was “a particular preposterous period around fourteen where [his] entire lunch would consist of two chocolate Rice Krispie triangles alongside a strawberry or chocolate milk-shake for dipping purposes.”
School brought the code-switching challenge into sharp relief. “There was always a worry and fearfulness of wanting to fit in,” he told me. “And there is always a lot of stigmatising of ‘stinky foreign food’ and people making fun of what was in your lunchbox.” So, while he was eating and enjoying “approachable” West African food at home, when he was out of the house, it was corner-shop British and American junk food.
Jimi spent several summers in the U.S. to see family during secondary school. He had already fallen for Aunt Jemima syrup and Bisquick, but in Florida, Michigan, and Maryland, he found a gold mine of sweet, processed food that paid off an innate desire. “The world was obsessed with Americana — food and culture,” he told me. “The food on my visits felt safe and glamorous.”
“I was coded to have social prizing on things that were western or British. Behaving the way I thought I should.” On the other hand, “Nigerian dishes felt like the possessions of my elders, like they were for someone else.”
It was only later, studying drama at Royal Holloway, that he really began to discover his love for food. And like many of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, television played a vital role. In our conversation, he called out as favourites Keith Floyd, Jamie Oliver, Gary Rhodes, Nigella Lawson, and the Two Fat Ladies. All but Rhodes are real favourites of mine, too.
Over Rita’s absurdly good Mixed Grill, Jimi told me that “The shows made it cool to cook. I would eat dinner in my flat in New Cross and watch Rick Stein. And there was great food around. An amazing rotisserie place near New Cross station. And Sunday Roast at the Royal Albert in Deptford. They did whole chicken and plantains.”
And then, around the corner from his flat, arrived MEATeasy, which became a defining moment.
A short-lived, south-east London burger residency that was the springboard for the all-conquering MEATliquor chain, a pure, glinting encapsulation of a very 2010s collective mania for both authentic street food and ephemeral, internet-fuelled pop-ups. …
A candlelit dining room turned into a raging furnace of noise, heat and enthralling controlled chaos. Grinning hordes made their way through the tight maze of mismatched tables and chairs, ferrying paper plates of burgers, mac and cheese and glistening stacks of onion rings through the crowd. …
Every one of my trips to MEATEasy (for there were repeat visits throughout its short run) was like a Tetris block sliding neatly into place. It was both full-circle moment and gateway drug into a new world of gastronomic obsessiveness.
By this point, Jimi was an established writer and editor, working for lad magazines including Maxim, Zoo, and Shortlist. “I was always in what was new or what was interesting. I like being the first to be in on something. And I’m a born contrarian. I liked getting on things that everyone wasn’t into yet.”
His time in magazines, “where the feature desk might ask me for anything, forced to me to learn how to become an expert fast.”
In 2015, he made the leap to newspapers, joining the Standard as a Features editor and looking after “the back of book” on most days. But after a couple of years editing, he was ready to get back to writing. And in the summer of 2018, was asked to write a restaurant review for the paper’s magazine. He didn’t realise it was an audition.
He succeeded Fay Maschler, who had held the role since 1972 and played a key role defining what “restaurant critic” meant for the UK.
But he felt ready. “I always knew how I wanted to approach it. I wanted to convey how the restaurant makes you feel. And I was always looking for the wider story,” he told me. “Food writing become the perfect vessel for all sorts of other interests. How is the city changing? How is behaviour around eating changing? What are the key cultural trends.”
And it was a critical moment for the wider culinary landscape.
Though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, 2018 was a particular global inflection point for food media in the US and the UK especially. Three prominent restaurant writer posts at American newspapers had been filled by female writers of colour; sites like Eater and the megaphone of social media popularised a kind of gastrocultural vigilantism, if writers were ever guilty of any particularly egregious insensitivities or generalisations. There was a renewed movement to highlight smaller, scrappier food establishments of the kind famously championed by food writers like Jonathan Gold and Charles Campion. …
As a rare black face in a historically white field, I was undoubtedly one of the beneficiaries of this broader shift. But I was spurred on and inspired by it too. Having initially found some of the hospitality industry focus on my race a little bewildering, I was soon proudly leaning into my particular perspective as a lapsed picky eater, elder millennial and suburbanite British-Nigerian.
The picky child had become a leading voice, ready to try anything.
I asked Jimi whether there was anything that remained on his “dislike / avoid” list. “There’s very little I won’t do, though I’ve never tried eel. I still find joy in trying new things. I feel like I’m playing catch-up.”
Neither of us avoided Rita’s “Texas pain perdu,” a delight smothered in creme fraiche and blueberries.
After a couple of years in the critic’s role, Jimi noticed that the Standard had changed the standard photo that ran with all of his articles.
The smiling photograph above my words was suddenly replaced by a sterner one. ‘The feeling here’, explained a colleague over email, after I had asked what had happened, ‘was that it would be good if you looked a bit less approachable.’
It didn’t work. Jimi remains friendly and approachable, even as he is often recognised by strangers.
In 2024, the Standard ended its print edition and closed down its magazine. As part of cost reductions, they ended Jimi’s contract and later named on-staff editor David Ellis as their restaurant critic.
In spite of that door closing, Jimi is busier than ever.
The critic’s role with the Standard led him to Masterchef in 2018. In our conversation and in Picky, Jimi is coy about the experience. “I think it’s important to not let too much light in on the magic of how those shows come together,” he writes. But he soon realised “that the pressure of the show – to essentially freestyle a restaurant review with no safety net and the expectant glare of an entire film crew and other experts – was something I welcomed and thrived on.”
These days, he has an occasionally updated Substack called
and is working with Shaftesbury Capital, which owns much of Soho, on a series of videos and food guide spotlighting the area’s restaurants.And, of course, the critic’s role at the Observer is currently vacant.
Jimi’s experience in front of the camera gives him a circumspect view of the increasingly angsty conversation between writers and video influencers. “Video is a super-charging force,” he told me. “And the whole argument seems a bit fake. The move to video is really striking. So many people just don’t read. And video keeps bubbling up.”
Jimi says that in spite of all of his on-camnera work, he still feels a little old school media.
That said, “Whether you are a writer or TikToker, the key is that you have to be curious. That was the thing I always admired most about Fay. She was ever-curious.”
For his 18th birthday, his mother gave him a copy of Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef — something to help ensure he occasionally ate a decent meal while he was away at university. Today, Oliver is a friend and has offered a strong endorsement of Picky.
It says a lot about Jimi’s own curiosity, analytical mind, and high expectations for himself that he is now one of the nation’s leading voices on food. It might not be too much to suggest that his success is down to being picky.
Restaurant Details: Rita’s
Quick hit: American-accented delights in a small, bright spot in Soho.
Details: Booking advised. Soho.
Restaurant website. More on Instagram.
Read Jimi’s review of Rita’s here.
Find it on Google Maps. 49 Lexington St., W1F 9AP.
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