ERIC VILDGAARD
An unlikely star chef he might be, but it is evident that, despite the choices he has made along the way, cooking was always part of him. “I believe that the talent for cooking is something you are born with. Of course, you can teach people to cook, but you can’t teach them the passion,” he says. “You either have the flair or you don’t.” Aged 13, he was kicked out of state
institutions, an out-of-control child nobody knew what to do with. “They sent me sailing because that is what they did with kids who made trouble,” he says. During his time at sea, he discovered how to make people happy with food – it was a revelation. “I baked a cake and I made everybody’s life more joyful,” he recalls. Despite this realization, he went back to the same environment when he returned to Denmark, in a pattern that would repeat itself many times as he spent years moving between the criminal underworld and gastronomy. “For a long period of my life I lived off people’s sorrows, I was in the business of making people unhappy through crime, instead of where I am now in the business of making people happy,” he says. Through dark times, cooking was
his safe place. “I always escaped into gastronomy when I needed to escape from myself. This is the place where I belong, I feel at home when I cook, the true me,” he says. Today, he understands that at the core of his dark life was unhappiness and a lack of confidence. “No happy people commit crimes.”
But then, he points out, being in a criminal gang is not actually so different from working in a professional kitchen. “I fit in very well in the kitchen, there is a hierarchy, a structure and the people share your values – everybody agrees on the purpose of being here and everybody knows their place,” he says. “I think the environment is the same as a gang environment, although kitchens have changed a lot, there used to be more shouting and putting people down.” Kitchens are definitely different from
how they used to be, but he concedes he gets caught up in the emotions at times. “Do I get angry? Yes. Do I like it? No. Do I make an effort not to get angry? Yes, of course and I weigh my words before I open my mouth.” In previous roles he says he would lose his temper with people, because it was all he knew. “Now I understand that people give more of themselves to the restaurant if they feel acknowledged than if I make them feel scared. I am a big guy and I know if I raise my voice, I can scare people,” he says. Calling himself a gentle giant, he
says this is who he always was, but he operated in environments where he had to put on a façade. Kindness was simply not accepted. “When you run with cattle, you sound like them, you will become part of the culture you are in,” he says. “I am happy I am out of that world, but I wouldn’t want to be without it because it is part of who I am; I think I know more about myself than the average person.” Love, he says, runs through everything he does in the restaurant, from the way he works with ingredients to the way the team welcomes diners and, of course, how he manages his team who are family to him. “I never had a family. Of course, I
had a family, but I never had that pure straightforward love without limits,” he says. This informs everything that happens in the kitchen, and beyond. “Yes, we are professionals and we work hard, but joyful people make joyful food and what we do is a transaction of feelings between people – the guest and us – and it needs to be happy feelings; if not it doesn’t taste good,” he says. “The worst way to add salt to a soup is with tears.”
A double life His first taste of working in a professional kitchen came 20 years ago and he experienced the highest level of Nordic cuisine shortly after. His brother, Torsten, is a well-known chef in Denmark who took a more direct route and avoided
“What we do is a transaction of feelings and it needs to be happy feelings. The worst way to add salt to a soup is with tears”
the environments his brother got caught up in. “My brother is a famous chef. Then, he was René [Redzepi’s] right-hand man. We didn’t have much in common besides being brothers, but I saw him being successful as a chef and I wanted to be a chef too,” he says. In 2005, while his brother was working at Noma, he called Vildgaard to help organize some functions. It was another chance to escape and, after six months, Redzepi asked him if he would take charge of the functions department at Noma. “I said, ‘I’m not the guy for this’, but René had faith in me. He was right and I stayed for three years,” he says. “But after, I was so stupid and went back to my old role models again. Many people would have gone from Noma to open their own projects, but I went to deal drugs. There was something relaxing about being part of that world, I fitted in, and I was good at it.” This time it was another level up in the world of organized crime. “That was a really tough time in my life,” he says. After living this double life for years, he decided to get help seven years ago. “I felt like I always pushed away every good thing that happened to me, always putting myself down. You might have friends who support you, but they don’t really want you to be a success because then you become more successful than them,” he explains. He asked his brother for help in securing his chef qualification and went back out to sea, sailing with a group of
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