René Redzepi: In His Own Words

June 17, 2010 — -- RENE REDZEPI: My name is René Redzepi, I'm from Denmark. Em, I'm 32 years old. My father's Macedonian. I've grown up partially in Macedonia. My father's Muslim. My mother's Danish. So I've had a very different upbringing then most people from Denmark, because when we used to be in Macedonia, life was very different from Denmark. For instance, there was no refrigerators; there was only 2 cars in the city. And you know, the whole family lived together in a house and everything was, was evolving the meal. The whole day was planned around the meal . People were farmers and if you had to have a chicken you slaughtered the chicken. If you wanted to have a glass of milk you had to actually milk the cow. (Laughs) I never tasted coca cola until I was 10 years old. If we wanted the drinks—em, my aunt, she took the old rose leaves and she put sugar water over them to infuse and so on and so on. And then in Denmark, when we were there it was just a normal school life and I never expected to be a chef. As so many young kids when they, when they, when they finish the first part of school they don't know which direction. And then I was the same I just followed a good friend who wanted to be a chef and I thought okay, I have nothing else to do, nothing better. And so I followed him and on the second day of school there was a competition where the teacher asked us to cook a dish, that we wanted to. It could be whatever we wanted and we would be judged on how it looked and how it tasted. And this is of course many years ago, there was no internet and so on. So we immediately we, we looked into our books and magazines and so on to find a dish and I was 15 when I started my chef schooling and I remember that that was one of the first times in my adult life, my so called adult life, that I had to take a standpoint on anything. You know what was important for me back then was when I'm gonna go to the… and play soccer. Those were the decisions I had to make. Not major ones or not anything where I really asked myself what do I really like about something.

REDZEPI: And this was the first time I asked myself, what is it I like about food, how do I win this? What do I have to do to to to win this. And then we started looking in—I had my, these childhood experiences of roasting chicken in the oven and the fats and juices melting down into the rice underneath it in the oven and so on and so on. So we cooked chicken with rice in a cashew nut sauce. Cashew, I've never heard about it before but I love nuts, so I thought it was a little exotic, a little modern, a little innovative. And we cooked that and unfortunately there was a, (Smiles)there was a person in the competition, he was a trained butcher. So he made a ham salad you know that was eh, that won it. We became second. But ever since then, I think combined with what I've had as a child; I've just never been in doubt. I've always worked as a chef and always really all the time tried to, to work on becoming better at what I do and becoming clearer and clearer, clearer and clearer in our, in my way of defining who I am as a chef.

Do you think that your Macedonian roots or your Danish roots have more of an effect on your cooking?

REDZEPI: Macedonian, for sure. Even though today, our restaurant is known for doing a Nordic cuisine you know, a cuisine where we involve our natural products, our culinary heritage. And we've don't, we've stopped looking at our own products as something that doesn't belong in the culinary top. But I think in order to do that, I think it's been such a big advantage for me that I have a little outside upbringing, because if you are 100% native, I think sometimes you, things you grow up with, they are just things you grow up with, you can never put them in another context, therefore I think it's been to a big advantage that I come from outside. You know flat bread for a Scandinavian is a flat bread; it's something you have in your home. You have it in your home and that's it. You could never do anything gastronomical with it and serve it at a restaurant. But, in fact, you can, of course, it's just on how you see it and if you try to open the next door on flat bread and not always entering the same one again and again.

Did your mom or your dad cook?

REDZEPI: Yea, my father, he cooked. And I think that's also very important thing, that you actually get home cooked food. We didn't have, let's say, fancy foods or anything. It could be the most simple things, you hear this story again and again but it just, it really does matter that you actually--that somebody cooked food, home cooked food and you're sitting around a table eating with each other, no television going on and you're looking each other in the eye and you're having a conversation, you're speaking. And you're perhaps even discussing the food if it's good and so on. I think that's a very big part of it.

REDZEPI: And growing up in the 80's in Denmark, I think sometimes it could be very different for the most part of Denmark. It was… Microwaves were out, that was what people ate, ready meals in the oven and so on and so on and so on. So my father, he cooked and that's also been one of these things that I think now that's pushed me in this direction.

Give me one of your first food memories.

REDZEPI: One of my first food memories is watermelon, for sure. Because my family—they don't do that now, now they have cafes in Macedonia, but in Macedonia, they, uh, back then they were farmers and they lived on red peppers and watermelon. And still today, watermelon is something I love eating. And if it's not that, there's also, the one that's very close there's also roasted chestnuts. In the season, freshly roasted chestnuts in the fire with cold milk on as breakfast, that's also a very, very big childhood memory. And then berries of all sorts, but that's a Scandinavian memory.

Everyone always says you're Danish, you're Danish, you're Danish, you're from Denmark, you're fromDenmark, would you rather me say this is Rene Redzepi from Macedonia or it doesn't matter?

REDZEPI: I am from Denmark. I consider myself a Dane but I have a different upbringing and also a different culture in my family as my father is a Muslim. But I have a—I consider myself a dane—I have a Danish wife, my child is Danish and I am the Dane, Rene Redzepi with the not so Danish name and some other ways of looking at things and perhaps a normal Dane wouldn't.

Do you eat pork?

REDZEPI: yea. I'm not a Muslim.

But when you were growing up, was pork introduced into your life?

REDZEPI: I've always been told by my father even though he's a practicing muslim that we had to do what came naturally to us and It's impossible to escape pork in Denmark. I mean there's 5 million people in Denmark and there's 46 million pigs. So—have you ever heard the term Danish bacon? (Smiles) Because we grow a lot of porks—or pigs in Denmark and I ate pork as well when I was a kid.