Picky

From fussy eater to professional food critic, Jimi's story is 'a culinary journey like no other' - JAMIE OLIVER 'An insightful, engaging and often profound memoir' BEE WILSON, The Sunday Times 'Exquisite, evocative writing' ANDI OLIVER 'A rich and nourishing story of food and identity' ANGELA HUI 'Shows us that food is never just food - it's memory, identity, and home' ASMA KHAN ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- 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. ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- 'Instantly likeable . . . Engaging . . . There is a palpable hunger (pardon the pun) in the pages for all cuisines' KATHARINE SPURRIER, The Mail on Sunday 'Wonderful . . . 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' CAROLINE EDEN 'Sharp, funny and full of heart' JAMIE OLIVER 'Vivid, funny and deliciously frank, I tore through this like an after-school bag of Monster Munch' FELICITY CLOAKE 'Absolutely beautiful. Funny, warm and nourishing' HASAN SEMAY ('BIG HAS') 'Filled with honesty, humour and packed with flavour. I devoured it' GEORGINA HAYDEN

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.