Restaurant Jordnær was without a doubt the top choice for my Ment’or grant stage. I have always had a strong interest in Nordic cuisine and culture, and have followed Chef Eric Vildgaard and his wife Tina’s culinary journey for a long time. Chef Eric is an inspiration. I admire and respect the dedication and perseverance that shaped the person he is today. I had never worked in a Michelin star restaurant so when I received the grant, I knew this was my chance to go work with the best. I wanted to push myself outside of my comfort zone, and I was eager to absorb everything I could from this experience.
Restaurant Jordnær is in Gentofte, a small town outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. It is located inside a hotel where you would not expect a three-star Michelin restaurant to be. The restaurant has a beautiful, small dining room. We would spend all day prepping for the exact number of guests plus a few extra but there was no room for error. Every ingredient that comes into that restaurant is the highest quality, such as flowers flown in from Japan and fish caught the same day.
After enduring massive flight delays, I arrived late at night in Copenhagen, way later than planned. I still had to be at the restaurant very early the next morning for the first day of my stage. Luckily, I lived right upstairs from the restaurant which was extremely convenient. Tired from traveling I had mistakenly thought it was a Monday when I arrived at the restaurant. Mondays are when the restaurant is closed and used as a prep day. Imagine my surprise later when everyone began to get ready for service and was talking about the guests for Tuesday night!
When I arrived at 8:30am, the kitchen was already full steam. There was very loud music playing, but everyone was still so soft spoken, unlike in New York City where I was from. After a quick tour, I was put to work, helping the pastry team make honey twills, chocolate truffles, and butter molds. When that was all done it was staff breakfast – coffee with a spread of housemade bread from the pastry team, housemade granola, yogurt, jams, and butters. Honestly this was some of the best bread I have ever had. After breakfast we cleaned the kitchen, and I was tasked to find someone who would have jobs for me. At first, it felt like I was in the middle of the ocean trying to keep afloat. Everyone else knew exactly what and when to do their tasks. After a week or two, however, I fell into a rhythm with the rest of the team.
Some of the tasks I did during my stage included picking herbs for the turbot, the langoustine essence, the asparagus dish, and sorting and setting into containers for each table kinome leaf for the chawanmushi and the crustate snack. I also made black tarts for the tuna and caviar snack in the morning, and portioned the scallop dish sauce which was a gooseberry juice finished with droplets of rose water. Around 2pm two chefs and I would start plating 30 or so langoustine essence herbs around the gel which had to be carefully set down in a certain order and precise way. I would help fry and form white kombu for the crustate and help shape the rosette waffles and crackers for the snacks.
Not every day was the same. Sometimes I would do more things like shuck oysters, scallops, or sort through king crab or do pastry tasks. At Jordnær everyone did everything. At 4pm sharp every day, we would scrub, polish, and set the stations and the entire kitchen for dinner service. I learned quickly how to set up some of the chefs' stations for the service and exactly how and where they liked their mise en place. This was all done before the staff meal at 4:30. The Jordnær team is very diverse in cultures, so the staff meal was something new every day, and I got to experience world class dishes. After the meal, we would stack the containers from the day in pyramids so that everything dries properly, and in the morning, we can just tumble it all down and they will be in a stack facing the same direction. Around 5:20pm, a meeting would begin where we would discuss the details of each guest coming, and run through and high five Chef Eric. We then changed into dress shoes for the night, and began the final tweaks of service.
In the first few weeks of my internship, I pushed myself along the mid course stations helping with the tuna snack, the halibut garnish, scallop dish, and cold sauces. You have to really push yourself if you want to be here, or you will fall through the cracks. One perk of being small is that I was able to wriggle my way into jobs and make myself a presence for service. Eventually I saw the opportunity to work side by side with a chef de partie of the crustate station where a cracker packed with lobster mixed with green kosho, yuzu, ponzu gel, topped with trout roe, fried white kombu, wasabi flowers, and kimone was made. It was just me and the chef of that station there, and it was very fast paced. We had to get the snack out in under 2 minutes, and would joke around about who is faster. I bounced from station to station seeing who needed help, if food needed to go out to the dining room, and even helping on the pass plating the hot dishes.
I loved every minute of my days at Jordnær. I was happy and in awe of just being there, even while scrubbing garbage cans or washing dishes. I learned something new every day, whether it was a new ingredient or how to be more efficient. This team was unlike any other I have seen before, and I learned from all the chefs around me. It was also a very humbling experience being in a foreign country with a 6 hour time difference from New York. The first week of the internship was hard with the growing pains, but I just kept my head down and pushed myself, while observing how and when everyone around me moved. I tried to be a bit faster and better every single day, and I believe I succeeded. I walked in on my first day of my stage extremely insecure, and walked out more confident than ever with a new outlook and ready to take on any challenge that comes my way.
