EVENT COST: 50, DKK-
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It is such a joy and privilege to be able to welcome our friend, Matt Orlando, chef of restaurant Esse, back to Books & Company, this time for a talk on cooking, agriculture, and food systems, and how we engage in our world in a state of awareness around how we eat?
We can’t wait to hear what one the most innovative and thoughtful chefs in Denmark thinks about the food universes we currently find ourselves in.
Please note that this event takes place on a Monday (the day, Esse is closed:-)
About Matthew Orlando
The California native cut his teeth in some of the world's most decorated kitchens including Noma, Le Bernardin, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons and Per Se. Matt met Noma’s Rene Redzepi while working at The Fat Duck in 2005. This encounter led to a two-year Sous Chef Position at Noma before Matt returned to New York City to become Sous Chef at Thomas Keller’s three-Michelin-star Per Se. After three years, he returned to Noma as the restaurant’s first Chef de Cuisine, where he stayed for three years before leaving to open Amass.
Over ten years, Amass became a beacon of light in the industry. Along with his wife Julie, Matt led the way in how to approach running a restaurant with a circular mindset. Amass was voted most sustainable restaurant in northern Europe two years in a row and was #62 and #81 on the top 50”s 100 best restaurants in the world. Amass kickstarted a movement within the industry to move forward in a way that takes into consideration not only how we engage with products, but also how we engage with the producers and systems that we operate in. In short, how do we decrease our impact across the board with using deliciousness and creativity as our foundation.
Matt says “ I can talk to you and give you a bunch of data that doesn’t make sense unless you are really engaged in this space, or I can feed you a delicious bite of food and use that as a starting point for our conversation.” Deliciousness is the driver.
In 2022, Matt shifted his focus to SE Asia to open AIR in Singapore. AIR stands for Awareness, Impact, Responsibility. This is where he applied his penchant for conscious cooking to a tropical palate of ingredients. It encompassed a restaurant, research space and educational center. Education was at the core of all operations. The questions and topics that were addressed were centered around food. Where, by whom, and how is our food produced. AIR was voted one of TIME magazine’s top 100 places on the planet in 2024.
At the end of 2024, Matt returned to Copenhagen and along with wife Julie opened their dream restaurant, ESSE. Meaning “to be or to self-reflect”, ESSE is the project that takes the last 13 years and compresses it into an experience that clearly expresses the circular cuisine that has been at the core of the ethos that Matt has been championing. With deliciousness as the driver and through an open-source system, Matt and his team use the restaurant as a platform to push the industry in a direction that takes into consideration the daily choices made when running a restaurant. After 8 months of operations, ESSE received its first Michelin Star.
Matt is also co-founder of Endless Food co. in Copenhagen, where he and is founding partners Max Bogennman and Christian Bach are looking at the potential for new flavors in the side-streams coming from industrial food production. With a couple products being produced at Scale, their newest product is THIC. It is a “chocolate” product made from the pressings of oat milk production. THIC is currently on the market and is being used by a dozen restaurants, bakeries and cafes, as well as the largest organic granola producer in Germany.
Photo shared with written permission.