The Kitchen as a Laboratory

Twenty seats, one long counter and a whiteboard covered in supply-chain diagrams. Dov Ferreira-Lund’s restaurant in Copenhagen looks like a kitchen. It also works as a research kitchen for the regional food economy.

Dov cooked in Lisbon and Copenhagen for a decade and watched his favourite suppliers disappear one by one. He went back to university to study agricultural economics and find out why.

The menu as a forecast

Every dish is costed back to the farm. Each year the restaurant publishes an open report on the finances of every supplier it buys from, with their consent. Farmers use it to negotiate. Other chefs use it to plan.

He now advises the Nordic Council on regional food resilience and still cooks four nights a week. Guests rarely notice the economics. They notice the beetroot.

He thinks of the menu as a forecast, written months in advance with the farmers. Reading it closely, he says, tells you what the next harvest will be.