The Mind of a Chef (2012) s03e16 Episode Script
Fäviken
Help everyone explore new worlds and ideas.
Support your PBS station.
This is Faviken, a restaurant in Sweden located 375 miles northwest of the capital, Stockholm.
Five nights a week, 16 diners primed with expectations and hunger gather inside a creaky barn for dinner.
In the span of just two and a half hours, they'll be served 20 to 25 courses.
Some dishes are familiar.
Many are not.
But together they weave a story of a place and time told by one twisted and brilliant individual.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
Having some limitations can be very good.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on the plate properly hot.
You feel when a dish really sings to you.
Crisps for a table of six, table of four, and a table of two.
Six, four, and two.
Okay, come on, guys.
Not like that, not like that.
The same position all the time.
Plates, crisps, come on.
Okay, pick up.
I think that in any restaurant like Faviken, which is so shaped by one person, hopefully the experience that the customer takes away from it will be kind of a reflection of that person.
And by being a reflection of the person, it will inevitably also reflect the area.
Because a restaurant like this is so tied in to the area as well.
It's something that has developed naturally, developed organically.
I don't know how to run a brasserie, an everyday restaurant.
But I do know what makes up a great dining experience.
Is that too thick? Yep.
This one here is fine, but it's not even.
Now, have you tried to eat one of those? No.
Well, put this in your mouth and try to eat that.
Does it stick to your teeth? Yes.
Yeah.
If you want, you can pick out whatever is thin enough here, and fill up with the new ones, or you can start over.
You do as you want.
My whole idea of running the kitchen is that I believe that anything that could be controlled, it should be controlled.
And anything that can't be controlled anyway should just be left like it is.
Okay, come on, guys, come here.
It's time for the meeting.
Come on.
Jesper is the head chef, together with me, who is the person who makes the whole kitchen actually function.
I want to hear fast and loud, "yes," "no," or, "I will mark," or, "I haven't done," okay? Trout roe.
Yes.
Pig's head.
Yes.
King crab.
Yes.
At 6:00 every day, we will go through every single item that's going to be part of any dish in the menu.
Yes.
Herring.
Yes.
Mini rusks.
Yes.
Rusk powder.
Yes.
Fresh cheese.
Yes.
Dried flowers.
Yes.
If they say yes, then that means that they're not only in control, then, they are responsible for that item on the menu until, you know, it's on the plate and being served.
Pickle, yes.
Fermented carrot, yes.
Puffed barley, yes.
Chives? Yes.
Okay, let's hit it.
Yes.
Okay, come on.
We're done cleaning, and we're getting ready for service.
I think this is a very important moment, because it's actually a time where people can get sort of in the right mood for service, you know? It's good to have a calm start to the service.
And the cool thing is that almost 7:00 now.
It's 6:30.
9:30 we're going to be done.
It's a very sort of brief moment of time we're focusing for.
I get pleasure from all parts of running the restaurant creating the dishes, working with the garden, finding the produce, designing the lighting.
You know, all those little things that makes up the whole restaurant experience.
I do very, very few things just for myself.
Most of the stuff is in some way to improve the experience of eating.
Okay, Peter, crab is next.
Seven minutes to going up.
Seven minutes.
So this is a dish made from king crab that's going to be fried in a very hot and dry pan, and then sprayed with a little bit of vinegar after cooking, to be served with a cream, also cooked in a pan until it burns.
And the trick here is, of course, to cook the crab nicely, but mainly the cream.
It needs to have, like, the perfect relationship between burnt at the bottom and creamy and caramelized on top.
To achieve that we have, like, a very precise quantity of cream in relation to the temperature and the size of the pan.
When the cream is in, it's important not to touch it until it's actually just right.
Because if you start stirring around here, you will not get the caramelization and the cream burning at the bottom that we want to have.
This is about right now.
As you can see, you have, like, a layer of burnt lactose and milk protein here at the bottom.
And then a reduced cream part floating on top.
To cook the crab, we'll do it in a completely dry pan, a very hot pan.
And what I'm going to do just to make it brown and a little bit more even is that I'm going to coat each piece with a little bit of butter.
This is actually not a particularly difficult technique, but you probably have to train a few times, because it needs to be very precise to get the right amount of coloration on the crab.
Something like that.
When you cook in a dry pan like this, you kind of roll it onwards.
Like, you never turn it, flip it, and put it back exactly where it rested from the very beginning.
Now it feels like they're beginning to be ready.
So we're going to cut and plate this straight away.
So I'll position them closely so they can support each other while I'm carving them.
This is the Attika vinegar.
I just want to give it a little bit of a spray to cut that very sweet seafood flavor.
And to me, like, when we're doing the cuts like this, it's really important to do it with as little sort of going back and forth as possible, so you get, like, a nice clean cut.
So we're going to plate the crab, placing one piece in the bowl like that.
And then a little bit of the almost-burned cream like that.
Plating in two minutes.
Plating in two.
Pick up.
So this is the king crab, fried in a very hot and dry pan, and served with a cream, also cooked in a pan until it was burnt.
There should be a little bit of cream on each bite of crab.
My God.
The format of the tasting menu, it can be one of the most enjoyable things there is to experience in this world.
But it can also be one of the most horrible things to be subjected to.
The point for me with a tasting menu, it's about trying to understand how things are perceived.
And crucial for that is to control the pacing of the menu.
To me, the ideal tempo is if one dish is finished, and you're just beginning to kind of look around you in the dining room, and the next one just arrives.
Then after, like, four or five dishes like that, you can see that people are starting to get comfortable and relaxed, which is a good thing, but also a potential threat in the sense that they will become less alert.
And that's when we just change the whole pace of the meal, and we increase it.
And that kind of just shakes people up a little bit.
After that, we'll go back to the previous pacing again.
It kind of resets everyone into a mood where they're excited and open to stimuli that we provide them.
So potatoes have this very particular flavor to them a sort of earthy, waxy thing that's very hard to describe.
I've improvised a cooking technique where we boil them with this, which are autumn leaves that have been decomposing for one full winter.
Now, this is also to invite the eater into kind of a bigger potato eating experience by having them dig these potatoes out of a steaming pile of leaves, almost turned back into soil again, and then picking the potatoes up one by one, crushing them between their fingers, dipping them in some salty butter, and eating them just like that.
So I'm just going to put these potatoes in water, and then all of these leaves just straight in there.
Now I'm just going to put this on the stove, let the potatoes cook.
This technique we came up with when I was walking around, like, in a spring birch forest, you know, just after the snow had melted away.
I felt a smell that I recognized quite a lot, and I couldn't really put my finger on it.
And then after a while, I just realized that it smelled like oxidized Chinese tea, like pu-erh tea.
And I realized that it was all these birch and aspen leaves that have been decomposing for one full winter under the snow.
Something happens when they decompose under the snow.
If you just try to dry them, this doesn't happen.
It doesn't turn into this.
These are done now.
I'm going to go back over and plate it.
I start with fishing these leaves out like this.
It's important to be really quick, because you want the leaves to be kind of still steaming, so you can feel all these very sort of earthy, spring foresty aromas coming up from the plate.
I'm just going to make, like, a little hole in the pile of leaves, and pick up the potatoes and put them in there.
And then just cover them up with the leaves like that.
And, you know, the dish is finished.
So a dish can't express itself verbally, obviously.
But it can still tell you so many things.
I still find it fascinating that there is a difference between a good dish that is just, you know, a good and delicious dish, and a dish that, you know, evokes so much more than that.
And it's really difficult to explain how to construct a dish like that.
But I know when we do it.
Like, if I stand in the stairwell, looking up over the dining room, I can see when a dish hits someone that way.
Although the plants that surround us here in the forest are actually used in cooking, and have been for a very long time, but they're mainly the obvious ones, like all the berries and all the mushrooms, and a few different herbs, and so on.
But there's so much more I can use.
There's very, very few plants in this part of Scandinavia that will actually make you ill or kill you.
So, you know, you can experiment a lot.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on, until it's properly hot.
I think we can actually start spreading the coals now and go as swiftly as we can.
This here is some juniper.
I'm going to just I'm going to cut a few of these, like, nice big bunches, and bring them with me to Faviken.
And we use them to both season and to decorate the scallop dish.
And you want, like, nice looking, full branches like this, that doesn't have too many berries on them, because if you have many berries, they don't give off smoke the same way.
These lower branches, it's going to be trimmed off at the restaurant and become seasoning.
The upper part is going to be coupled with another one, look like this one, and then placed on like, in the moss like this.
And then you're going to have a scallop there and a scallop there.
And a little piece of coal here, giving off smoke.
The scallop dish is one of the dishes that's been on the menu the longest at Faviken.
And what's interesting with that is that it actually still changes.
Like, it looks the same.
But it still improves.
We're trying to sort of tickle people's senses the most we can during those two and a half hours.
And that involves creating contrast.
Because if you just go into some kind of maximum level of deliciousness and stay there, it's going to get boring really soon.
You know, if you have a huge bowl of potato chips, of your favorite flavor, nothing is as good as the first three.
Then it's just the same.
Like, it's just the same flavor all through.
And the end is just, you know, not that pleasurable.
Whilst if you change back and forth with between potato chips and cheese curls, you know, it's going to be much more interesting, even though cheese curls is a disgusting thing to eat.
This is a dish called turbot and sunflower.
Of course you have a turbot.
It's going to be served with different things made from sunflower.
And this is a winter dish, so all of the sunflower has been prepared to be stored.
So we're going to cook the turbot.
These are little pieces of filet, and we're going to poach them really, like, gently in butter.
The trick when you're poaching turbot with the skin on is that the skin and the meat, they're not cooked at the same temperature.
So first you have to focus, like, on slowly cooking the meat until it's perfect.
And then you finish by putting the skin side down.
The skin gets a little bit more temperature than the actual flesh of the fish.
And then you can, like, very easily peel it off, and it gives a very beautiful surface.
I'm just going to pop it in there.
Now, when the fish is cooked, it's quite fragile, so it's important to pick it up really carefully with a spatula like this.
So now it's time to pull the skin off like that.
So this, I'm just brushing off a little bit of that fish protein that leaked out of the fish and coagulated close to the skin.
Before we cut the fish, plate some of this vinegar jelly, so that in one bite you have quite a lot of jelly, on another bite you have no jelly at all.
So I'm spreading it out like this, and I'm going to hide that with all the other garnishes so that people can't see that and be curious and then take the whole thing and just that.
So it's time to cut the fish.
Once again, to me it's really important that we use the whole length of the blade to produce, like, a really nice cut surface.
We're going to plate some of these sunflower seeds coated in sunflower leaf.
To the side like that.
A little bit of this sort of toasty sunflower seed sauce.
And then to finish, a few drops of this green oil made from the leaf of the sunflower.
Like that.
Cutting and plating in two minutes.
Hot tray, please.
Wake up, guys.
Hot tray, come on.
Hot tray.
Stack the plates.
Okay, spread them straight away.
Jens, start plating.
Spreading.
Okay, I'm cutting.
Very nicely cooked.
Super good.
Come on.
Okay, Peter, continue.
Okay, on six, Peter.
Six.
Extremely nice cooking, Peter.
Super good.
Thank you.
So this is turbot.
It's poached very gently in butter with some vinegar.
And it's served with a few different things made from dried sunflower and sunflower seeds.
It makes me very happy to have sort of started something like this and to have made it function.
Oh There is no reason to run a restaurant like this if you're not intending to enjoy the actual running of it.
Because you don't make much money, you work a lot, you have to share your passion with new people every day, which can be very exhausting.
But to me, that's the whole point of it.
That's, like, the up side, you know? That's the good part.
I know that this restaurant has a "best before" date, like, when I am going to grow tired of it, or when the customers are going to stop coming.
When that happens here, it's time to close the restaurant.
Support your PBS station.
This is Faviken, a restaurant in Sweden located 375 miles northwest of the capital, Stockholm.
Five nights a week, 16 diners primed with expectations and hunger gather inside a creaky barn for dinner.
In the span of just two and a half hours, they'll be served 20 to 25 courses.
Some dishes are familiar.
Many are not.
But together they weave a story of a place and time told by one twisted and brilliant individual.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
Having some limitations can be very good.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on the plate properly hot.
You feel when a dish really sings to you.
Crisps for a table of six, table of four, and a table of two.
Six, four, and two.
Okay, come on, guys.
Not like that, not like that.
The same position all the time.
Plates, crisps, come on.
Okay, pick up.
I think that in any restaurant like Faviken, which is so shaped by one person, hopefully the experience that the customer takes away from it will be kind of a reflection of that person.
And by being a reflection of the person, it will inevitably also reflect the area.
Because a restaurant like this is so tied in to the area as well.
It's something that has developed naturally, developed organically.
I don't know how to run a brasserie, an everyday restaurant.
But I do know what makes up a great dining experience.
Is that too thick? Yep.
This one here is fine, but it's not even.
Now, have you tried to eat one of those? No.
Well, put this in your mouth and try to eat that.
Does it stick to your teeth? Yes.
Yeah.
If you want, you can pick out whatever is thin enough here, and fill up with the new ones, or you can start over.
You do as you want.
My whole idea of running the kitchen is that I believe that anything that could be controlled, it should be controlled.
And anything that can't be controlled anyway should just be left like it is.
Okay, come on, guys, come here.
It's time for the meeting.
Come on.
Jesper is the head chef, together with me, who is the person who makes the whole kitchen actually function.
I want to hear fast and loud, "yes," "no," or, "I will mark," or, "I haven't done," okay? Trout roe.
Yes.
Pig's head.
Yes.
King crab.
Yes.
At 6:00 every day, we will go through every single item that's going to be part of any dish in the menu.
Yes.
Herring.
Yes.
Mini rusks.
Yes.
Rusk powder.
Yes.
Fresh cheese.
Yes.
Dried flowers.
Yes.
If they say yes, then that means that they're not only in control, then, they are responsible for that item on the menu until, you know, it's on the plate and being served.
Pickle, yes.
Fermented carrot, yes.
Puffed barley, yes.
Chives? Yes.
Okay, let's hit it.
Yes.
Okay, come on.
We're done cleaning, and we're getting ready for service.
I think this is a very important moment, because it's actually a time where people can get sort of in the right mood for service, you know? It's good to have a calm start to the service.
And the cool thing is that almost 7:00 now.
It's 6:30.
9:30 we're going to be done.
It's a very sort of brief moment of time we're focusing for.
I get pleasure from all parts of running the restaurant creating the dishes, working with the garden, finding the produce, designing the lighting.
You know, all those little things that makes up the whole restaurant experience.
I do very, very few things just for myself.
Most of the stuff is in some way to improve the experience of eating.
Okay, Peter, crab is next.
Seven minutes to going up.
Seven minutes.
So this is a dish made from king crab that's going to be fried in a very hot and dry pan, and then sprayed with a little bit of vinegar after cooking, to be served with a cream, also cooked in a pan until it burns.
And the trick here is, of course, to cook the crab nicely, but mainly the cream.
It needs to have, like, the perfect relationship between burnt at the bottom and creamy and caramelized on top.
To achieve that we have, like, a very precise quantity of cream in relation to the temperature and the size of the pan.
When the cream is in, it's important not to touch it until it's actually just right.
Because if you start stirring around here, you will not get the caramelization and the cream burning at the bottom that we want to have.
This is about right now.
As you can see, you have, like, a layer of burnt lactose and milk protein here at the bottom.
And then a reduced cream part floating on top.
To cook the crab, we'll do it in a completely dry pan, a very hot pan.
And what I'm going to do just to make it brown and a little bit more even is that I'm going to coat each piece with a little bit of butter.
This is actually not a particularly difficult technique, but you probably have to train a few times, because it needs to be very precise to get the right amount of coloration on the crab.
Something like that.
When you cook in a dry pan like this, you kind of roll it onwards.
Like, you never turn it, flip it, and put it back exactly where it rested from the very beginning.
Now it feels like they're beginning to be ready.
So we're going to cut and plate this straight away.
So I'll position them closely so they can support each other while I'm carving them.
This is the Attika vinegar.
I just want to give it a little bit of a spray to cut that very sweet seafood flavor.
And to me, like, when we're doing the cuts like this, it's really important to do it with as little sort of going back and forth as possible, so you get, like, a nice clean cut.
So we're going to plate the crab, placing one piece in the bowl like that.
And then a little bit of the almost-burned cream like that.
Plating in two minutes.
Plating in two.
Pick up.
So this is the king crab, fried in a very hot and dry pan, and served with a cream, also cooked in a pan until it was burnt.
There should be a little bit of cream on each bite of crab.
My God.
The format of the tasting menu, it can be one of the most enjoyable things there is to experience in this world.
But it can also be one of the most horrible things to be subjected to.
The point for me with a tasting menu, it's about trying to understand how things are perceived.
And crucial for that is to control the pacing of the menu.
To me, the ideal tempo is if one dish is finished, and you're just beginning to kind of look around you in the dining room, and the next one just arrives.
Then after, like, four or five dishes like that, you can see that people are starting to get comfortable and relaxed, which is a good thing, but also a potential threat in the sense that they will become less alert.
And that's when we just change the whole pace of the meal, and we increase it.
And that kind of just shakes people up a little bit.
After that, we'll go back to the previous pacing again.
It kind of resets everyone into a mood where they're excited and open to stimuli that we provide them.
So potatoes have this very particular flavor to them a sort of earthy, waxy thing that's very hard to describe.
I've improvised a cooking technique where we boil them with this, which are autumn leaves that have been decomposing for one full winter.
Now, this is also to invite the eater into kind of a bigger potato eating experience by having them dig these potatoes out of a steaming pile of leaves, almost turned back into soil again, and then picking the potatoes up one by one, crushing them between their fingers, dipping them in some salty butter, and eating them just like that.
So I'm just going to put these potatoes in water, and then all of these leaves just straight in there.
Now I'm just going to put this on the stove, let the potatoes cook.
This technique we came up with when I was walking around, like, in a spring birch forest, you know, just after the snow had melted away.
I felt a smell that I recognized quite a lot, and I couldn't really put my finger on it.
And then after a while, I just realized that it smelled like oxidized Chinese tea, like pu-erh tea.
And I realized that it was all these birch and aspen leaves that have been decomposing for one full winter under the snow.
Something happens when they decompose under the snow.
If you just try to dry them, this doesn't happen.
It doesn't turn into this.
These are done now.
I'm going to go back over and plate it.
I start with fishing these leaves out like this.
It's important to be really quick, because you want the leaves to be kind of still steaming, so you can feel all these very sort of earthy, spring foresty aromas coming up from the plate.
I'm just going to make, like, a little hole in the pile of leaves, and pick up the potatoes and put them in there.
And then just cover them up with the leaves like that.
And, you know, the dish is finished.
So a dish can't express itself verbally, obviously.
But it can still tell you so many things.
I still find it fascinating that there is a difference between a good dish that is just, you know, a good and delicious dish, and a dish that, you know, evokes so much more than that.
And it's really difficult to explain how to construct a dish like that.
But I know when we do it.
Like, if I stand in the stairwell, looking up over the dining room, I can see when a dish hits someone that way.
Although the plants that surround us here in the forest are actually used in cooking, and have been for a very long time, but they're mainly the obvious ones, like all the berries and all the mushrooms, and a few different herbs, and so on.
But there's so much more I can use.
There's very, very few plants in this part of Scandinavia that will actually make you ill or kill you.
So, you know, you can experiment a lot.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on, until it's properly hot.
I think we can actually start spreading the coals now and go as swiftly as we can.
This here is some juniper.
I'm going to just I'm going to cut a few of these, like, nice big bunches, and bring them with me to Faviken.
And we use them to both season and to decorate the scallop dish.
And you want, like, nice looking, full branches like this, that doesn't have too many berries on them, because if you have many berries, they don't give off smoke the same way.
These lower branches, it's going to be trimmed off at the restaurant and become seasoning.
The upper part is going to be coupled with another one, look like this one, and then placed on like, in the moss like this.
And then you're going to have a scallop there and a scallop there.
And a little piece of coal here, giving off smoke.
The scallop dish is one of the dishes that's been on the menu the longest at Faviken.
And what's interesting with that is that it actually still changes.
Like, it looks the same.
But it still improves.
We're trying to sort of tickle people's senses the most we can during those two and a half hours.
And that involves creating contrast.
Because if you just go into some kind of maximum level of deliciousness and stay there, it's going to get boring really soon.
You know, if you have a huge bowl of potato chips, of your favorite flavor, nothing is as good as the first three.
Then it's just the same.
Like, it's just the same flavor all through.
And the end is just, you know, not that pleasurable.
Whilst if you change back and forth with between potato chips and cheese curls, you know, it's going to be much more interesting, even though cheese curls is a disgusting thing to eat.
This is a dish called turbot and sunflower.
Of course you have a turbot.
It's going to be served with different things made from sunflower.
And this is a winter dish, so all of the sunflower has been prepared to be stored.
So we're going to cook the turbot.
These are little pieces of filet, and we're going to poach them really, like, gently in butter.
The trick when you're poaching turbot with the skin on is that the skin and the meat, they're not cooked at the same temperature.
So first you have to focus, like, on slowly cooking the meat until it's perfect.
And then you finish by putting the skin side down.
The skin gets a little bit more temperature than the actual flesh of the fish.
And then you can, like, very easily peel it off, and it gives a very beautiful surface.
I'm just going to pop it in there.
Now, when the fish is cooked, it's quite fragile, so it's important to pick it up really carefully with a spatula like this.
So now it's time to pull the skin off like that.
So this, I'm just brushing off a little bit of that fish protein that leaked out of the fish and coagulated close to the skin.
Before we cut the fish, plate some of this vinegar jelly, so that in one bite you have quite a lot of jelly, on another bite you have no jelly at all.
So I'm spreading it out like this, and I'm going to hide that with all the other garnishes so that people can't see that and be curious and then take the whole thing and just that.
So it's time to cut the fish.
Once again, to me it's really important that we use the whole length of the blade to produce, like, a really nice cut surface.
We're going to plate some of these sunflower seeds coated in sunflower leaf.
To the side like that.
A little bit of this sort of toasty sunflower seed sauce.
And then to finish, a few drops of this green oil made from the leaf of the sunflower.
Like that.
Cutting and plating in two minutes.
Hot tray, please.
Wake up, guys.
Hot tray, come on.
Hot tray.
Stack the plates.
Okay, spread them straight away.
Jens, start plating.
Spreading.
Okay, I'm cutting.
Very nicely cooked.
Super good.
Come on.
Okay, Peter, continue.
Okay, on six, Peter.
Six.
Extremely nice cooking, Peter.
Super good.
Thank you.
So this is turbot.
It's poached very gently in butter with some vinegar.
And it's served with a few different things made from dried sunflower and sunflower seeds.
It makes me very happy to have sort of started something like this and to have made it function.
Oh There is no reason to run a restaurant like this if you're not intending to enjoy the actual running of it.
Because you don't make much money, you work a lot, you have to share your passion with new people every day, which can be very exhausting.
But to me, that's the whole point of it.
That's, like, the up side, you know? That's the good part.
I know that this restaurant has a "best before" date, like, when I am going to grow tired of it, or when the customers are going to stop coming.
When that happens here, it's time to close the restaurant.