Overview

'A culinary journey like no other - sharp, funny, and full of heart.' - JAMIE OLIVER 'A rich and nourishing story of food and identity.' - ANGELA HUI 'Exquisite, evocative writing from the heart, soul and very witty pen of Jimi Famurewa.' - ANDI OLIVER 'Wonderful . . . This is a moving, charming but also wonderfully astute exploration of food today, across continents, and from the home table to the school canteen and the high-end restaurant. It's also a beautiful reminder that our appetites, like us, can transform beyond what we ever thought possible.' - RUBY TANDOH 'A feast of a book packed to the brim with honesty, bravery, nostalgia and humour . . . Truly affecting and brilliantly written.' - CAROLINE EDEN 'Shows us that food is never just food - it's memory, identity, and home. Jimi's journey from picky eater to food critic is a powerful reminder that what we eat can reconnect us to who we are, where we've come from, and who we're becoming.' - ASMA KHAN 'Vivid, funny and deliciously frank, I tore through this like an after-school bag of Monster Munch.' - FELICITY CLOAKE --------- Food is never just food. It is freighted with our upbringings, our heritage and our sense of self. Jimi Famurewa spends his days hunting out the very best food London has to offer and writing about it. But as a child, he hid gobbets of mash in his pocket at school, refused all vegetables and looked forward to Happy Meals in the back of a steamed-up car after late night football practice. He spent weekends in crowded flats at parties, watching his family preserve their Nigerian roots through jollof and fried plantain, as well as grow new shoots through American delights like Aunt Jemima's pancake syrup, furtively hidden in suitcases. But what happens when he grows up, stretching beyond the joyful chaos of his mother's kitchen and into the uncharted territory, unfamiliar flavours and overlapping identities of the adult world? With glorious dollops of nostalgia, Picky is as much a hymn to the gleam of the golden arches and the soft shine of worn formica as it is to opulent marble and tweezered micro herbs.

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9781399739542

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Reviews

A culinary journey like no other - sharp, funny, and full of heart. -- Jamie Oliver Jimi writes with such warmth, honesty, and humour about his family in Lagos, his childhood in South East London and his glossy yet frantic life as a restaurant critic. His writing truly comes alive when he talks about food. Picky is a rich and nourishing story of food and identity. -- Angela Hui His words leap from the page and take a fully addictive delicious form! Exquisite, evocative writing from the heart, soul and very witty pen of Jimi Famurewa. -- Andi Oliver A feast of a book packed to the brim with honesty, bravery, nostalgia and humour. At its heart is the tale of a young boy who goes on to become one of our best food writers but present throughout are big universal themes that we can all relate to: love, loss and identity. I found Picky truly affecting and brilliantly written. -- Caroline Eden Jimi Famurewa shows us that food is never just food - it's memory, identity, and home. His journey from picky eater to food critic is a powerful reminder that what we eat can reconnect us to who we are, where we've come from, and who we're becoming. -- Asma Khan

Author Information

Jimi Famurewa is a British-Nigerian author, broadcaster and freelance journalist. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Wired, GQ, Empire and Time Out London. He is the former restaurant critic for the Evening Standard, regular guest judge on the BBC One series MasterChef and was also one of the lead judges on Channel 4's The Great Cookbook Challenge with Jamie Oliver. He hosted the award-winning podcast Where's Home Really?, and, in 2021, he won Restaurant Writer of the Year at both the Fortnum & Mason Awards and the Guild of Food Writers Awards. His first book, Settlers: Journeys through the Food, Faith and Culture of Black African London, was published by Bloomsbury in 2022 and was shortlisted for Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

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