Claus Meyer

My ambition was not to build a world-class restaurant.

My ambition was to truly impact the everyday cooking culture in Denmark and why not in the Nordics.

My upbringing was in the 1960s, 1970s, and a typical meal in my childhood would be a cheap piece of meat, breaded not once, but two or three times, and then deep fried in cheap margarine.

And it would typically be served with a good amount of vegetables pre-boiled five, six years before in Eastern Europe, and then boiled once more to death in our kitchen.

I mean, more or less, yes.

I have no memory of my father.

loving me or even appreciating me.

And they got divorced when I was either 13 or 14 years old.

And my mother, as a result of that, became an alcoholic.

They treated me like a son, and I realized that they had always wanted to have a son.

So we were an incredible match, and Guy became like a spiritual father to me.

It is in Gascony, in Agen, that I really get to understand the French concept of terroir, that you eat food that is deeply integrated in the history and the climate conditions of a certain place.

And also I saw, I mean, how much attention these two people were paying to the daily meals.

This pastry shop was like a wizard's workshop.

They would feed me the most amazing stuff from morning to the afternoon.

And I just asked myself, what the hell is going on?

I mean, why?

This is supposed to be...

an underdeveloped sort of rural part of France, whereas Denmark is supposed to represent the future.

So it really puzzled me how we could somehow be having given up on the beauty of life and the joy of everyday living that I got a glimpse of in Gascony.