Rene Redzepi Quotes

When you start at catering college, nobody prepares you for a book tour or public speaking.

When you get close to the raw materials and taste them at the moment they let go of the soil, you learn to respect them.

When people are grownups they’re grown ups. They make their own decisions you know.

When I turned 15, I left school having failed to make the minimum grade. With little direction I enlisted at the local culinary school. Here the academic demands were less rigorous.

There’s no media training. In cooking school, there’s not even manager training. You learn the fundamentals of cooking. Everything else is learning by doing.

There is no conflict between a better meal and a better world.

Take a trip to the forest and experience the greatness of getting on your knees and picking your own food and going home… and eating it.

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

People will travel anywhere for good food – it’s crazy.

My last meal on Earth, I would love it to be a bowl of blueberries with cold cream.

Learning about issues such as sustainability and locavorism are things that you need to have as part of you as a chef because it will make you cook more delicious food.

In my home I tend to eat a very simple version of what we cook at the restaurant, which is vegetable-oriented, with a little bit of fish and very little meat. For instance, a dish in my home could be steamed spinach with spruce, where I take a spruce branch and put it in the pot and that infuses into the spinach.

If you see someone in the kitchen that has good hands and a quick brain, then you need that person to be in the front of everything.

If you see how a plant grows and you taste it in situ you have a perfect example of how it should taste on the plate.

I’ve never had anything but the freedom to do what I wanted just as long as it made me happy.

I’m a bit of a glutton – I eat too much of all that is good to eat.

I would love to eat a really great burger, but it doesn’t exist in our part of the world.

I think that in our part of the world, Scandinavia, we are one of the pioneers of showing that gastronomy can be something – high gastronomy can be something very, very present and doesn’t have to involve, you know, what is perceived as the normal luxury items that belong in a high gastronomy restaurant.

I started my cooking ‘career’ aged 15, almost 20 years ago. At the time it was quite a shock suddenly working 75 to 80 hours a week, without time to play football or other sports.