Fine dining is an occasional treat for most people.

Scandinavian-Danish cuisine was something quite rustic, mostly known for pastries and smorgasbord cuisine, which in itself has become a joke.

Fine dining is an occasional treat for most people.

The drive for working comes from everyday moments - the thrill of experiencing a young cook succeeding in what they thought was an impossible job, as well as guests being happy. I also love the unknown - discovering new things and trying to make sense of them.

But when spring and summer happens, it's intuition. Everything is based on intuition. There's not too much time to overthink, over-complicate. Those wild strawberries, they might be there for two days.

21 years ago when I started cooking, to be a cook meant that you were going to stay in the basement. Being a chef, you would never be on a book tour. You could never dream that 20 years later on you would be on a book tour. It wasn't a part of your dreams because it was just totally unrealistic. When did cooks - restaurant cooks, not cooks that have 15,000 television shows - when did cooks become part of pop culture the way they are?

I had turned down other head chef jobs. I didn't want to take over someone else's cuisine. I wanted to start from scratch.