Master Chef Herr Kemppainen gets his first Michelin star

Sauli Kemppainen is one of the two Finnish Michelin-starred chefs working abroad

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By Katarina Baer
     
      His handshake is firm, his gaze drills into your eyes. There is something military-like and yet slightly mischievous about Master Chef Sauli Kemppainen.
     
This is the man who serves up Nordic dishes to connoisseurs of good food in Berlin - with no little success.
      In November, Die Quadriga, a restaurant headed by the 40-year-old Kemppainen, was awarded a Michelin star. The restaurant is a part of the Brandenburger Hof, a small luxury hotel not far away from Kurfürstendamm, the main street of Berlin's west side.
     
Kemppainen is the second Finnish chef abroad to have been awarded a star by the respected restaurant Guide Michelin.
      A Finn as the Master Chef at an exquisite kitchen in Berlin was quite a sensation in itself, while getting a Michelin star was a miracle!
      The number of Michelin-starred restaurants in the entire city is 11.
      ”We invited the cream of restaurant people in Berlin to celebrate the award with us. They all came. It was a message to me: 'Welcome to the gang'”, Kemppainen recalls.
     
Initially coming from Oulu, Kemppainen will soon have been the chef de cuisine at Die Quadriga for a year.
      The proprietors had heard of Kemppainen, who had been working at different restaurants abroad - even in Berlin - for many years.
      At first Kemppainen had to serve a trial dinner to six persons in the hotel director’s home, whereafter the proprietor, the hotel director, and the PR manager all travelled to Helsinki.
     
”We dined at the best restaurants, while I showed them where I had worked. None of them had visited Finland before, and they were dazzled to see what a great place Helsinki was”, Kemppainen noted.
      Kemppainen took the group to restaurants Savoy, Chez Dominique, Grotesk, and Särkänlinna.
      ”The only thing that they found absurd was eating crayfish with their bare hands at a price of nine euros per piece, while throwing down schnapps after every bite”, Kemppainen laughs.
     
The proprietors were looking for something new and different for their restaurant, and that is exactly what they got.
      Kemppainen brought with him the Nordic cuisine, which Die Quadriga christened Neue Nordische Küche or the new Nordic kitchen.
      There is always reindeer, cloudberries, sea-buckthorn berries, arctic raspberries, vendace roe, and Norwegian salmon on the menu.
      In addition, alcohol-free spruce-shoot sparkling wine is imported from Salla in Finnish Lapland.
      Alongside the raw materials, Sauli Kemppainen also took two colleagues, Ilkka Laasio and Matti Jämsen, over from Finland to Germany.
      The news has circulated around the country: Chancellor Angela Merkel and her party have come three times to eat Kemppainen’s delicacies.
     
One does not become a master chef by bragging about one’s accomplishments.
      Rather the reverse, it is something that workaholics are striving for.
      Before starting to work in the kitchen of Die Quadriga, Kemppainen spent three months visiting all the restaurant’s suppliers.
      ”At five o’clock in the morning I went to different places in order to see where the raw materials come from. I wanted to see from what water the pike-perch surfaces”, Kemppainen continues.
     
Kemppainen spends a lot of time at his workplace, sometimes from five in the morning until two on the following night, sometimes less.
      Any family? Kemppainen laughs again, shaking his head.
      A top kitchen is a top kitchen, regardless of where it is - in Berlin or in Helsinki.
      The concept implies merciless hierarchy and the chef’s despotism, if it comes to that.
     
”The juniors peel onions and keep their mouths shut”, Kemppainen explains.
      In Finland, colleagues are more like pals, but that is not the German way. Kemppainen is trying to introduce a more relaxed atmosphere even in the kitchen of Die Quadriga. At work he is Herr Kemppainen, but at leisure he is Sauli.
      ”Maybe one day I will be called by my first name even in the kitchen”, Kemppainen says wistfully.
     
     
Kemppainen’s favourites
     
Favourite food: Good home-made eating, for example macaroni casserole or mutton and cabbage stew.
     
Favourite restaurant at leisure in Berlin: the Chinese restaurant Hot Spot (on Eisenzahnstraße in Charlottenburg).
      ”There one can have good Chinese food that has been prepared in the right way. The wine list is incredible and so reasonably priced that it makes no sense. On Sundays the restaurant is full of celebrities and kitchen professionals”, Kemppainen notes.
      Sometimes when Kemppainen is wandering in the city, he likes to drop into a street kiosk for a Currywurst - a dish that is ”sacred” to Berliners.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 3.12.2009


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Helsinki´s annual Baltic Herring Fair gets under way (8.10.2007)
  Expensive delicacy sorted out at reindeer roundup (24.10.2006)

See also:
  Best topic of the summer: Finnish food (23.8.2005)

Links:
  Brandenburger Hof Berlin: Die Quadriga

KATARINA BAER / Helsingin Sanomat
katarina.baer@hs.fi