Magnus Nilsson: "Fäviken", Talks at Google

JEFFREY FREEBURG: So welcome Chef.
MAGNUS NILSSON: Thank you.
Thanks for having me.

So my plan was to first introduce the restaurant which
I have in Sweden, and talk a little bit about what we do.
And then I was going to go more deeply into how we work
with vegetables--
how we grow them and how we store them.
That was my plan.
Maybe I can skip that.
Probably people know where Sweden is.
But that's where Faviken is, at least.
You see?
I usually say that it's in the northern parts of Sweden, but
it's actually in the middle towards the Norwegian border.

This is what we are.
We're a tiny, tiny restaurant.
We have like 12 to 16 people dining, 5 nights a week.
It's an ambitious restaurant.
What we try to do up there is to make the most out the
whatever possibilities we have-- and difficulties as
well, for that matter.
Which manifests foremost [? bit ?] because we only work
with products from this area.
This area is very interesting because it has inland climate
where we are.
It's hot in the summer and very cold winters.
And then if you cross [? the Scandinavian ?]
mountain range is very close to us.
Then you get to Norway where you have coastal climates.
You have a lot of different things.
A lot of diversity within a very small region.
And this is a question that I very often get--
why do you work with products from a certain area only?
Why don't you work with products from
all over the world?
And the answer to that is very simple--
it's actually quality.
Our products-- they are really, really good.
It's the best products I've ever worked with anywhere, in
any restaurant.
It's not because they are from the region as such--
because products don't get better from--
but yes because they are from a certain place.
But it gets much better because we can have
cooperation.
We can have a dialogue with all the people that produces
our food to the restaurant.
We can give them feedback, and they can tell us what works
for them, and not.
And we can support each other which brings progress and
development.
Another question that I get very often-- why do you have
so few seats?
Why is the restaurant so tiny, especially now when we are
quite a well-known restaurant.
We could probably fill it many times over every night.
But that's something that has never really appealed to me
because I like the format.
I like cooking myself.
I don't like to train a huge team to do my work.
And also, I like the dining experience that we can give
people which is a communal dining experience.
It starts at 7:00.
Everyone arrives at the same time.
Then we do a little bit of matchmaking.
We put people together.
They sit together for drinks for half an hour--
and some appetizers.
And then we move people upstairs and you have your own
separate tables, like in any restaurant.
But the difference then is that everyone will have the
same menu, at the same time, at the same place.
So everyone will share this experience, and then be seated
again downstairs in front of the fireplace afterwards.

So this is our business.
We employ 11 people in total.
7 of them work in the kitchen, and the rest in front of house
or with the hotel which we have.
It's a 6 room hotel, so it's also very small.
One of my chefs is responsible for all produce--
he more or less does only that.
Because it takes a lot of work to get all the stuff into the
restaurant.
Not only to get the quality, but actually to
get enough of it.
Because even if the restaurant is tiny, we serve about 3,000
people a year, and everyone will have in
between 20 or 25 servings.
So it makes up slightly over 60,000 plates a year-- which
is quite a lot, acutally.
The number of how the work hours in the restaurant is
split between the different things we do, is also very
different from other restaurants.
Because in most other restaurants people will work
with cooking only.
They would be like 90% cooking and 10% cleaning.
But with us it's 50% working with the produce before the
cooking starts, which is a lot of work hours and a lot of
money for us-- it's a tiny business.
And this is mainly spent on getting the produce in.
Driving around, talking to people, developing our
relations with the community, and getting all the
produce to the farm.
And also working in the storage techniques which I'm
going to talk later about.
So that was a little bit about the restaurant and such.
This is how we work the vegetable year at Faviken.
So if you start from the bottom, you
see two blue lines.
And they show when in the year we use a lot of forage
vegetables because this is something that people always
put together with restaurants from my area.
There's always big focus on forage, right now-- which not
always the case.
It's just during a few, few brief moments in a year.
So you see that in May and June-- that's the only, really
where we actually work with the foraged vegetables and
foraged herbs.
Just for 6 weeks maximum when they are young and tender in
the spring.
And then during midsummer we don't really do that anymore
because they're not delicious anymore.
And there's really no need because there's so much other
things as well, going on.
And then the forage stuff-- it comes back again in August,
and then it's not herbs and vegetables anymore.
Then there's mushrooms and berries, mainly.
And it continues all through autumn and finishes in early
winter-- which is, more or less, now.
The red line--
it marks the time when we actually have fresh vegetables
from the garden like most restaurants would have every
day of the year, nowadays because you transport things
all around the place.
For us it's quite brief.
We try to make the most out of that time, so during that time
in the summer, everything is about showing the produce in
their [? huest, ?]
freshest form.
So you can have a chef running down to the vegetable garden
picking some peas, and more or less popping the pod straight
on the plate and serving them.
Well then in the winter--
if you look at the green line which shows the time of year
where we have to use things that are stored or prepared in
a way to keep--
it's all about something else.
Because all those storing techniques-- no matter which
you choose to use--
they will do something to the product.
It will make them less of a product.
The carrot will be less of a carrot because it's stored.
It will be different.
And that's something that we try to embrace and to
incorporate into the cooking during the winter.
So it gives a very special flavor and a very special
character to everything we do--
a large part of the year.

This is about one kilometer from the restaurant.
And this is quite typical--
how the grounds would look like where we would forage in
the spring and early summer.
So you see there's in the valley you would have
coniferous forest.
And then quite quickly as the elevation goes up, it thins
out and you have more of this low shrubs, and a lot lichens.

This is a little list of the different wild vegetables that
we often use in the restaurant.
And I'm not going to go through all of these because
there's so many.
But if someone would have a special interest in this, you
can email the restaurant and I'll send it back to you.

The vegetable gardens.
This is something that I'm very, very proud of.
It was the first year--
which is now five years ago that I work at Faviken--
I started a little vegetable plot.
And it was just like 20 square meters or something like that.
And I grew some onions, some carrots, some beets, a few
sweet peas for the summer, and a few more things.
And I realized that it's the ultimate way of seeing to you
that you have the best possible vegetables
available to you.
Because you can influence so many things just by choosing
different growing techniques and different varieties of
vegetables.
A carrot is not just a carrot--
there's like hundreds of varieties.
And within those varieties you can also affect the end result
so much by when you harvest them or how you grow them.
Two different photos from the same place.
One is in early spring when everything is on its way up.
And then one is about this time of year, when the first
snow has arrived.
This is how it would look like in the summer.
This is probably around July last year.

This is how the vegetable gardens are laid out.
They're much larger now, than when I started.
They grow a little bit every year--
become larger and larger.
And that's mainly because, for me, gardening
is a work in progress.
It's a learning process-- the whole thing.
Because there's so many things to try to
understand and to learn.
So we just add on.
As soon as I find something interesting, we
add on a new section.
And at this point, we have--
if you look to the left a little [INAUDIBLE]
there's something where it's labeled, "four part crop
rotation," which is four raised beds in which we grow
four different kinds of plants that take different nutrients
out of the soil to grow, and that has different
sensitivities for viruses and other dangerous
microorganisms.
And we rotate them every year to prevent buildup of those
microorganisms, and to prevent depletion of soil nutrients.

This is how that one looks.
It's quite straightforward.
This is like any home garden actually, this one.
The white stuff on top-- that's just to prevent the
young seedlings from frost in the summer.
We take those off in mid-June.
In the middle we have a different system which is
labeled the "six part crop rotation," which raised
uncovered beds.
And that also has strict irrigation.
And this is a more intense way of farming the land.
It gives us the possibility to raise the soil temperature.
Because see that black stuff?
It's a black cloth which we cover the soil in.
And first it prevents moisture to evaporate, but also it
raises the soil temperature.
So we are basically--
instead of having a subarctic climate-- we are somewhere
like in the south of Sweden or Denmark, where it has a much
more temperate climate.

So here, every crop grows from its own little hole.
Which it's a lot of work to do this in spring--
to actually plant everything and to set it up.
But then it's very good, because you don't have to
spend a lot of time cleaning out weeds
and things like that.
But this we've seen.
We followed this.
Now we've done this for three years, and we followed it and
we see that we actually are not able to put back all the
nutrients in the soil again that we take out.
Because this is so intense, it really produces a lot of
vegetables.
And because we don't use heavy machinery, it's all turned by
hand and it's all transported by hand.
We have a hard time putting back all the organic nutrients
in the soil again which sooner or later we're going to have
to change this practice and do something else.
And then we have my favorite--
down on the right part--
which is in between those ones.
It's a three part crop rotation.
30% of it is grown with leguminous plants which are
not harvested, but instead plowed down in
the soil every autumn.
Leguminous plants-- they have bacteria growing on the roots
which has the ability to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere.
And you turn that down every autumn, and let it rot into
the soil, and that's giving back organic nutrients.
And this one is not covered with [? claw fighter. ?]
It's covered with grass clippings which serves the
same purpose, but it's much nicer in [INAUDIBLE],
The herb gardens look like that.
The red building is the restaurant.
Kitchen would be in the middle, and then the higher
part, in the back-- that's where the dining room is on
the second floor.
The herb garden is where we produce all the fresh flowers
and herbs for the summer, but also everything that we dry
and store for the winter, in terms of seasoning and herbs.
And this is the choice that one has to do every time, when
one decides to store a vegetable.
Because there's basically two different schools of
techniques.
Either you utilize some kind of mechanism already present
in the plant that makes it keep for a long time.
Or you kill the plant off and everything within the
restricted atmosphere around the plant.

The technique that kill the plant-- they kill all the
harmful bacteria--
as I said-- in the restricted atmosphere.
And that can be for example, that you take a carrot and you
put it in the jar.
You fill the jar with some brine or water or something,
and then heat-treat the jar.
You bring it to 90 degrees And keep it at 90 degrees for at
least 10 minutes.
And that will kill or disable almost all microorganisms
within that jar.
And it can be other examples like for example pickles--
also a killing technique.

The non-killing ones that are interesting, in the way that
they use mechanisms already present in the plant.
And that is for example, all root vegetables that we use
like carrots, and beets, and things like that.
They are biannuals.
Basically their life cycle is that the first year, they will
sprout from a seed and they will grow.
During summer they will collect a lot of energy
through photosynthesis and store this as chemical energy
in the root, in the form of carbohydrates--

and that's the energy we consume.
That's what we want to use in the vegetable.

Basically it does this just because it wants to get ahead
in the race of life.
Because next spring, when it's dormant during one winter, it
will be able to sprout a flower before all
the one-year herbs.
[? See this ?] doesn't have to wait for the photosynthesis to
really get going in spring.
It can just go straightaway--
consume the energy it has in the root.
And this is something we can use if we just harvest the
plant at the right time, when it's set on hibernation, when
it decided to go hibernate for winter.
We can harvest it and we can store it in an environment
which is similar to the temperature and the humidity
and the soil-- it can be a root cell or
something like that.

And this is something that I find very interesting.
And this took me while to actually figure out--
that all the methods to prolong the shelf life or to
store vegetable-- it never makes them better.
It just makes them different.
And as I said before, a carrot is never better as a carrot
than when it was just taken out of the soil and eaten.
But everything you do with that carrot after you pick it
and take the first bite-- it will make
it less of a carrot--
which is not always a bad thing, but it's a fact.

So here's a few specific techniques.
So this is how we can keep for example, broccoli, kale, and
cabbage, in a winter garden.
Because many of the brassicas--
they produce different agents in them that
keep them from freezing.
They contain a lot of sugars, and sometimes even a little
bit of alcohol.
And they keep on metabolizing.
Even though they are frozen, they keep on
metabolizing just a bit.
So it's very fascinating because if you take a broccoli
like that, that you left in the garden, on the plant, that
has been frozen for like 1 and 1/2 months, and harvest it,
and you take into your kitchen, it's still a fresh
broccoli when it defrosts.
But if you take same broccoli and you freeze it for one and
a half months, and you defrost it in the kitchen, then it's a
frozen broccoli.
I find that very fascinating.
And we just leave all those brassicas in the garden and we
keep on harvesting them until they run out or until the
moose eat them all.
Clamping.
So this is a way of using that mechanism that I talk about
earlier-- the biennal thing--
and this is probably the first way that we humans stored
vegetables in any efficient manner.
And basically what to do is that you harvest all your
roots, you bring them close to your house, you make these few
trenches, and then you put some straw between the
trenches, you put all the root vegetable there, cover it with
more straw to insulate it, and then you cover it with soil.
And this will keep a very, very steady temperature over
winter because those vegetables that are set on
hibernation-- they're not dead, they're still
metabolizing.
So they actually consume a little bit of energy and
produce a little bit of heat.
So they will keep in there from freezing-- even in our
subarctic climates--
and also the humidity, because it's placed
straight on the soil.
It will keep very, very steady and level all through winter--
which is important when you store vegetables.
The only problem with this is that you can't
really just take one.
You have to take them all out of there when you break it in
the winter which can be slightly impractical.
And that's why you have the root cellar-- which is in my
opinion, one of the best ways of storing vegetables.
It works with the same principle.
You keep a very steady and level temperature.
It's dark.
And you have the same humidity as the plant would experience
in its growing environment.
Inside the root cellar we would store our root
vegetables like this-- buried in sand.
The sand helps preventing fluctuations in temperature
and humidity even more.
So you get an even more level climate for the vegetables.

Other things which are not roots--
like for example, cabbage--
they are strictly not speaking biannuals, but they have some
of those functions anyway because it's just about
surviving for them.
Because if they would not flower the first time or they
would be able to-- under certain circumstances--
survive until next summer, and continue the life then.
That's something we also can use.
So we can harvest the cabbage when it's ripe.
We can put it in the cellar and leave it for that.
After about 6 or 8 weeks it will dry and look like
parchment paper on the outside.
It would be like a little skin.
Then after--
I would say--
2 more months, it's all moldy.
Looks horrible.
And it looks like something [? it ?]
[? was ?] throw out of your fridge straightaway if you
found it there.
But the fact is that if you just take that skin off, there
would still be a fresh and healthy cabbage on the inside
because it's layered.
And those layers-- they protect the layer underneath
from damage from bacteria.
Because the bacteria have to travel around
each bend in layers.
So it's a very long way to go for them.
And if you keep them all through winter, new little
tiny cabbages will start sprouting from the root stalk.

Oh, yeah the leek machine.
I read a report from the Swedish University of
Agriculture a few years ago which basically said that you
can store leeks for up to 290 days if you had the perfect
surrounding.
Like the perfect environment for them.
And that was 90% humidity and 0.1 degrees.
You can store them for 290 days without significant loss
of quality--
which is very interesting to me.
You have the very, very high humidity to keep them from
drying out.
And you have the very low temperature to slow down their
metabolism so they don't really change that much.
So what I did was that I bought the domestic freezer
and I tampered with the thermostat so it keeps 0.1 to
0.3 degrees Celsius.
And I filled it with a little bit of sand, and I harvested
all the leeks and then replanted them
in the sand, again.
And then I left it all through winter.
And this [? has ?]
[? stood ?] there so long so that all the other people
working on the estate-- they just saw it as sort of a
permanent installation there in the corner.
So it's covered.
When we used the leeks in the spring this is how it looked.
It was covered in all kinds of crap.

Onions and garlic.
They can be dried.

Most times when you buy onions and garlic, the leaves have
been cut when they were still green, and then you can never
store them for more than maybe two months.
Because as soon as you cut them there, you will have an
entryway for mold, spores, and bacteria.
But if you leave them--
like those garlic lying out--
exposed to UV radiation, they will die.
And they will seal themselves off, and they will wait for
next summer.
So then when these are dry, then you can cut them.
You can store for a very long time in a dry and cool
environment.
Basically you can store them for two years.

Pasteurizing is one of those techniques that will kill the
plant and also everything else in the surrounding area.
These tomatoes--
they are pasteurized in brine.
It's a technique that were very, very common in
households just until 50 or 60 years ago, and then people
stopped because it was so easier to buy.
People started having domestic basis freezers and things
[INAUDIBLE] so it was much easier to buy the produce from
a supermarket.
But it's a very good technique.
It'll produce an excellent result.
It can be a little bit dangerous because of the
bacteria that can survive in there which are [INAUDIBLE]
botulinum, which gives botulism, which will result in
you being dead if you eat them.
But it can be avoided very easily by respecting a few
very simple rules.
And one is that you can either keep the pH level under 3.84
because then they cannot grow.
And that can be done by adding something acidic.
You can keep the tempter under four degrees at all times
after the cooking.
And that will keep them from growing as well.
Or if you're uncertain that you have been able to do those
two factors, you can also heat the product
before eating it again.
You can heat it to 80 degrees and keep it there for five
minutes, and that will destroy all toxins as well.
Pickling in vinegar--
It's a very, very safe method of preservation.
And it works by lowering the pH level by adding some kind
of chemical agent-- for example vinegar or lemon juice
or whatever.
Very few bacteria can grow in a sour or acid environment.
Pickling by lactobacillus fermentation--
it works sort of in the same way, but instead of adding a
chemical, you try to make the lactobacilllus already
present, thrive.
And that's usually done by adding salt which suppresses
other bacterial activity which gives the lactobacillus an
unfair advantage.
And then they start growing.
And then by consuming carbohydrates they also
produce lactic acid which lowers the pH level under 3.94
in quite a short period of time.
And this can also be a little bit risky because if it takes
too long, you can have the same problem as with the
pasteurized foods--
that you have other bacteria growing as well.
And that will probably be e.coli or [INAUDIBLE]
which are not good-- any of them.
And drying herbs and mushrooms is something we do
quite a lot as well.
What's important when you're drying is to dry very, very
quickly, and in a cool temperature.
Because if you dry them in an oven, they taste like hay, or
they all taste the same, no matter what you do.
If you dry them in room temperature in your room, they
decay so much from enzymatic breakdown.
So you kind of transform the flavor a lot.
Like if you're drying mushrooms at room temperature
for a week, they taste like soy, almost.
If you do it with herbs, they lose all the green color and
all those fresh aromas.
So we use one of of these which is an industrial grade
dehydrator.
It takes about 15 liters of water away from the
atmosphere per hour.
We keep it in a room, which is more or less airtight.
It enables us to dry out about 10 kilos of herbs in more or
less two hours at 18 degrees Celsius which preserves all
the very, very fragile aromas and all the beautiful color.

Using antibacterial properties naturally present in plants is
an interesting way of working that we
haven't used that much.
And on the photo you have some lignon berries.
Lignon berries are naturally very high in benzoic acid
which is something that the food industry would add to
food to prevent mold from growing.
And basically what you can do is you can take lignon
berries, put them in a jar, cover them with water, and
then keep them for years.
They never go bad, and they change very little in texture
and flavor as well, which is interesting.
You can also put things in there.
You can put half a cabbage in the box with lignon berries.
And it will also keep for two years without much happening
with it except that is pink in the end, obviously.
Leguminous plants--
something that we use a lot.
It's very versatile.
You can use them from the first little sprout in spring
in a salad to peas and beans in the summer, and then all
the way to using the mature crop-- which has been dried,
[? trashed ?]
and stored for a long time.
Or as here-- ferment them, like you do with miso for
example, in many Asian countries.
Basically what we do is we have a dried brown bean or pea
which is steamed for a long time to kill any other
bacteria or mold growing on it.
And then we infect it with a particular mode which is
called aspergillus oryzae which, when it grows it
produces an enzyme that breaks down protein into glutamic
acid which is very savory and delicious.
So that will be like miso in the end.
But not with soybeans but with other beans.
That was it.

JEFFREY FREEBURG: All right.
Thank you.
MAGNUS NILSSON: Thank you.

JEFFREY FREEBURG: Definitely the most unique
chef we've had here.
No, seriously.
But how did you get started with this process?
I mean when you opened your restaurant did you have all
these things in place or--
MAGNUS NILSSON: No, no.
Definitely not.
not.
But many of them--
I saw them being used when I grew up in this area which has
been very good at keeping its old traditions.
And I never learned them back then, but I saw them, and I
got interested in them, and started learning about them.
Started implementing them in our environment.
JEFFREY FREEBURG: Yeah, so is your restaurant pretty much
100% sustainable?
MAGNUS NILSSON: Depends on how you see it. our customers are
not because most of our customers are flying from all
over the world.
JEFFREY FREEBURG: OK, that's a good answer.
So I ask every chef that comes to Google this question--
what do you think the kitchen of the future is going to be
like in let's say, 50 years?
Are we going to be only cooking on electric--
or what do you think?
MAGNUS NILSSON: Well I already cook on electric, actually.
But I think that's obviously impossible to answer.
And I think you can only say what you hope for it to be.
And I hope for it to be much more diverse than it is today.
I hope for people to look more within what they
have in their area.
To be more focused on what possibilities and difficulties
they have, and what really interests them, rather than
looking on what everyone else is doing.
Because that's something that's very common today.
JEFFREY FREEBURG: Yeah, good answer.
So I heard that you actually didn't want to start a
restaurant before you started this-- is that correct?
MAGNUS NILSSON: For a while I stopped cooking-- yeah.
And I studied wine.
JEFFREY FREEBURG: So why did you decide to
go back and do this?
MAGNUS NILSSON: Basically I lived in France for a while,
and then I moved back to Sweden, and I stopped cooking
because it was not so pleasant.
Everything looked like what my [INAUDIBLE] in
Boston, but less good.
Because I was less good than him, and the produce I had at
hand was much less good than what he had in France.
So that's why I stopped cooking and I
started studying wine.
Because my idea was to become a wine writer.
And after finishing that I was offered a 3 month job at
Faviken, working with the family who owns the estate to
more or less work with the wine cellar.
And buy some wine, teach them how to administer the wine
cellar, and then go on.
And then I stayed.
JEFFREY FREEBURG: So I heard that you wrote the book in a
very short amount of time--
4 months--
how was that?
MAGNUS NILSSON: I started a little bit earlier, but then
it was very interesting.
I had a lot of things that I wanted to say, apparently.
JEFFREY FREEBURG: Yeah, it's a beautiful book, by the way.
All right, well, I want to open it up to Googler
questions so please, if you have a question,
step up to the mic.
Don't all rush at the same time, please.
MAGNUS NILSSON: All 15 of you.
AUDIENCE: So since you're a wine guy--
I mean, wine and beer are essentially
ways of also storing--
MAGNUS NILSSON: Definitely.
AUDIENCE: --foods.
So do you have plans of going in that direction as well?
MAGNUS NILSSON: It's funny you're asking because I
actually just brought a brewery like two months ago.
And it's being dismantled right now, and it's going to
be shipped to Faviken.
And this winter we're going to learn how to use it.
And then next year, we--
I already ordered the barley that we're going
to plant and grow.
Hopefully it's going to be a very
interesting learning process.
AUDIENCE: So you're very focused on cooking locally and
eating locally.
But what is it about the area around Faviken that you find
most exciting?
MAGNUS NILSSON: I don't know.
I think I find it exciting because I grew up there.
I spent a large part of my life there, and I thought I
knew everything about it.
And then when I got back after being away a while, and
started working there, and started working this way, I
realized that I knew very little about this area.
And there's still so much left to understand and to discover
and to learn about--
which is fascinating.

AUDIENCE: So you told us a lot about vegetables, but so
what's your approach to fish and meats?
MAGNUS NILSSON: So that's like two more talks.
But I can do it very, very briefly.
With fish--
all the fish that we work with-- it comes
from the same company.
It's family owned, and it's on the coastline in Norway about
2 hours from the restaurant.
All the fish is cough on hook and line.
And we work with species that are red-listed which is
slightly controversial today in restaurants Because I think
that the problem is not the fact that there's very little
of some fish.
The problem is the way that they are fished.
And I like to support this company which fishes in a way
that if everyone fished like them, we would have very
little of the problems we have at the
world's fish docks today.
So we work with them.
And then we work with a few small fishery businesses in
the area, as well as supply freshwater fish.
For meat--
all the meat comes from people we know.
There are a few farms that we work with in the area.
And we have sheeps on the estate.
And I also live on a farm where I have
sheeps, poultry and bees.
So some of the stuff comes from there as well.
And what's different in the way that we work with meat is
that the only buy whole animals.
And you buy them when they're alive.
We pay the farmer--
when he has something he calls me, and we go there--
either me or someone else from the kitchen.
We look at the animal, and then we decide if we're going
to buy it or not.
But if we buy it, we buy it there and then.
And that's about six months before it goes to the
slaughterhouse.
And then we pay them a premium to take care of the animal in
a way that we like in the end.
And then we take it to the slaughterhouse.
And we take care of that whole logistical process to secure
the quality that we want.

JEFFREY FREEBURG: So I love your whole approach.
What does your restaurant look like in a year?
Are you going to be doing more covers--
MAGNUS NILSSON: No, it's going to be the same but it's going
to be much better.
JEFFREY FREEBURG: And how is it going to be better?
MAGNUS NILSSON: We've developed during the last two
or three years we've developed a system which we work within
which I'm finally quite happy with.
The format and logistical system surrounding the
restaurant, the way we work with produce,
and all that stuff.
And now the really fun part has just begun.
And that's when we start to develop within this system.
So that's going to be a very interesting.
There's so much to do yet.
JEFFREY FREEBURG: Yeah, very impressive.

AUDIENCE: Do you have any favorite
restaurants in San Francisco?
I've never been to San Francisco.
I came like midday today, and I'm going
into the city tonight.
But I'm going to cook at Qua the day after tomorrow.

Which is going to be very interesting.
I've never been to California before.
JEFFREY FREEBURG: Well you came in a good week.
So what are some of your favorite
restaurants in America?
Do you have any?
MAGNUS NILSSON: Oh, that's so difficult to answer.
There are so many good restaurants and they are so
different from each other.
So I don't think I have a good answer there.
AUDIENCE: Seems like you really pride yourself on being
different--
and you said, strange--
and not really looking out at other people and
what they're doing.
So what is your creative process like?
And where do you get you're new ideas from?
MAGNUS NILSSON: I think that the most important thing when
you're working any professional craft where
there's an amount of creativity involved is to
master your skills.
Like to really, really understand and master your
techniques that you use.
Because that enables you to be-- at least enables me-- to
be intuitive.
And that's how I work.
The creative process is very intuitive.
And then I might get interested in the subject and
I just go all in for that and I contact all the people that
know the most about this subject.
And I start researching it myself, and I start working
with it and trying to understand it.
But that's not for me, the creative part.
That's just creating the tool or producing the tool to be
creative in the end.
That was a very strange answer, but anyhow.
JEFFREY FREEBURG: So how hard is it to get into your
restaurant?
MAGNUS NILSSON: We take reservations 90 days ahead at
the maximum.
So if you want to come to the restaurant just
[? hang on lock ?] when the reservations open, and there
shouldn't be much of a problem.
JEFFREY FREEBURG: OK.
All right, great.
Any more questions?
OK, he'll be up here to sign the books if anyone wants
their cookbook signed.
So, thank you very much.
Thanks for coming.
MAGNUS NILSSON: Yeah, thanks for having me here.