I
Calm down people please.
You make me feel like Eminem in that movie with the music and all this action going on.
Thank you very much Rene.
When planning this I was like okay, I'm in late on the Monday.
A few people have one foot in Alex Attila's presentation and the next in the after party.
So I don't want to spend too much time thanking people but obviously Rene, you need a big thank.
Thank you.
I have a set of balls, that's true.
One is Italian, one is Norwegian, that's true too.
I'm an Italian immigrant and in the theme of thanking I just want to really quickly say that as an Italian immigrant
in these Bunga Bunga days, it's not always easy.
But yesterday Dario Giacchini made me proud, thank you.
So what's going on?
I put a picture up there, I just want to show the state of mind in which I went into opening a restaurant.
It's a...
I didn't play much guitar but that was more or less what I was thinking.
When we opened Relay, I opened, first of all my name was Christian Pulisi, it was said.
I opened a restaurant called Relay three years ago and basically we just wanted to open a space
where we could simply cook food that could somehow please the palate and challenge the mind at the same time.
Why was it so that every creative kitchen was set up in that same fine dining environment?
There was an idea, why would we have to bear with the cost of a guy pouring water 50 times a night
just because we wanted to cook high-end food?
Water if I can get some, I would really appreciate it, thank you.
That was the Italian bowl, sorry.
Does sitting in a super Uber design chair putting expensive cutlery in your mouth make the super dining experience for you?
Well, the restaurant we wanted to create would not be the place for you.
We wanted to strip down the great meal to its essence, leaving only what would matter to us in focus.
Food, wine and having a good time.
We wanted to create a small revolution for ourselves.
We wanted to make a restaurant of our own, a place where everything would be exactly as we wanted it, like our home.
A place where luxury would not be forced upon us, where the thickness of the tablecloth would matter.
There are so many of our colleagues in the last few years could grow a beard if we wanted.
We would put Johnny Cash on the playlist, he would be strumming his guitar while we would serve our interpretation of what really great food is.
We would liberate ourselves from the obligations imposed by people's expectations of our great restaurant is.
What you can do with high-end food and most importantly, where and how you are allowed to enjoy it.
We wanted to make culinary adventures accessible for the people, people just like us.
We wanted liberty and rock and roll.
Every Kroner dollar euro comes with a price, a price of liberty and creativity.
We wanted to start off with nothing, as much liberty as possible meant having nothing.
No Kroner, no euros.
We didn't want an investor to tell us you need to put steak on a menu or do more of that Nordic stuff.
Anyways, we are talking 2009, 2010, so let's be real, people are not really throwing money at us.
The bank really liked my CV, the great ideas, but they just wished me good luck with the project.
With no money at hand, we had a look for some alternative spot for our big adventure, a way out of the city center,
something cheap, close to our own apartment in the popular district of Narbo.
I heard about these creative forces trying to clean up a street by offering low rent to creatives.
It had to be the right spot for us, I thought.
The street was interesting to say the least.
At that moment, it was known as Little Christiania, as many of you guys know for sure.
Hash was sold by the truckloads and the whole street was in these grips of these drug dealers.
The people behind the street, the good people behind the street, were raving about former normal people taking interest in the biggest spot in the street.
A spot that I soon learned was where all the drug dealing was actually going on.
Now, for you flying in from New York, Sao Paulo, all these places, Mexico City,
you think this is a luxury resort, and I can understand.
The point is, there was a small and closed criminal community here having the best of this neighborhood,
and they did not want a restaurant there.
Many suspicious eyes fell upon us as we started to have a closer look at the small but very cheap 163 square meter location.
I'll just take your hand and walk down there with a Google car.
You see the street, it's a share of graffiti that's normally everywhere,
but I don't know if you see down the street there, there's a young man paying attention.
As we come closer, you can see the Google car was not much more welcome than we were in 2009.
Pictures were not welcome at all.
A few years later, a travel blogger visiting a restaurant got stripped the camera away and destroyed it,
and I had to solve the biggest crisis ever, and she very kindly wrote everything on her blog, thank you.
You see how the young man has left his office in the corner down there, everything is well furnished.
There's a bin, there's an office chair, there's a bench, everything's ready.
He's a guard, he's looking out for cops and rival gangs,
and in 2010 the Copenhagen gang war was at its highest and he was itchy.
So of course we thought, let's make a restaurant there.
There you go.
Love at first sight.
That's me.
Was that not polite?
I mean, it's beautiful, it's pretty.
It used to be a biker's club and it used to be rented out for parties and such in the weekends,
but it was completely deserted throughout the week.
I wonder why.
It was a perfect spot for shady business to go on and apparently for some, even better for a restaurant.
Soon construction would get going and we managed to turn what you see here into this.
That's Kim, my partner, he's not taking a dump in the corner, he's just looking at the glasses.
This is a young man dreaming of a kitchen, and that's a young man in his kitchen.
This was about a year later than the previous picture.
We managed to squeeze about 40 seats into these rooms after nine months of construction, also one year.
Looks like that.
We had the setting ready, the lease was low, possibilities endless.
We were ready.
We realized we only wanted to offer a focus menu.
We didn't want to impose ourselves on the entirety of a guest night out.
You should be able to just come in and enjoy great food and get the hell out of there.
Why couldn't high-end gastronomy be in that context?
Just a shorter one.
We would keep the tables for about two and a half hours so we could do two seatings,
letting us price the menu obviously lower.
We wanted prices to be as low as we could possibly afford.
Not to compete with colleagues, but to be able to give the guest a relaxed approach to dining with us.
High price for me means high expectations.
High expectations mean less room for surprises.
We offered the initial menu of 325 kroner for the four courses, that's including 25% Danish VAT.
If you remove that, it's 260 kroner, and to make it all make sense to you, it's about 45 dollars.
Service-wise, we cut down everything, but the smile we approach the guest with.
That comes from within and has no price.
Gone were all technicalities, the pouring water, the removing crumbs, showing you to the toilet.
We would want to leave the guest as much as possible to themselves, not taking up their whole night.
Leaving them to enjoy themselves.
To save time, which was crucial, we put all our cutlery, menus and napkins in a drawer underneath the table
for the guests to take care of themselves.
This was very costly for us, even though the quality was shit.
But it did so that we could do a service of up to 85 guests with just about two or three waiters.
It changed everything for us.
In addition to this, we had all the food to be served by the chefs,
letting the waiters focus on keeping the guests happy and supply them with wine and copious amounts.
You have to remember that the average wage in Copenhagen is very high,
workforce being expensive and tricky to get of high quality, really tricky.
We wanted to reduce the work we had to perform to the absolute minimum.
Do it yourself, just makes sense.
The kitchen was left to be very open, for me one of the most important factors when looking for a spot.
I wanted the guests to be greeted by the chefs and the chefs to be able to control who was coming and going.
From the positioning of the kitchen, we're able to see who's coming in and make eye contact.
What for me is the key to great hospitality.
The chefs pick up the phone if it rings, the kitchen salutes whoever leaves the restaurant.
In the end, transparency is something that gets people to understand what it is you do.
We had no money and we were not intending to try and hide it.
The tables were made of veneer, the chairs, second hand as you can see.
The toilets were decorated as much as the staff ones, which means not at all.
We supplied the guests with the cheapest possible paper to wipe their hands
and almost made an extra effort to make a point with how bad the restaurants would look like.
All the focus would be on the food and the wine.
The speakers roaring Johnny Cash, The Who, Velvet Underground, were of such bad quality that we had loads of complaints about the music.
But we didn't care.
It was our own thing, our house, our own music, and we decided how loud we would play it.
I would say that the artwork says a thousand words.
The beginning was an easy, I must say.
To have to get people to understand what we really wanted.
The restaurant was full, full, full, full.
But that's not success.
Even after spending almost a year before the opening, blogging about what this dream of ours was all about,
the concept, the ideas, the philosophy, all the construction going on.
The soft opening showed us what mistakes we already had made
and that the gangs would not just leave us to us just like that.
For the first month, we had a big worn out couch sitting just in front of that window there at the entrance
for the boys to hang out in.
I remember clearly, I don't know if he does,
Peter Crainer coming to our soft opening, Peter Crainer is the director of NOMA,
he's all happy all the time, I don't know where he is.
I was just standing from this position, that's why I took this picture.
I was standing here, I was looking out in that window, the rain was pouring down.
Peter Crainer, invited to the soft opening, came in a taxi, came out of the taxi, all happy, as he always is.
Pouring down him and his wife, Randy, turning the corner.
And when he turned the corner, that's when his smile faded away
because in that doorway that has two steps you walk down to before you enter,
were two drug dealers to make sure that they would not be standing in the rain,
they were basically just blocking our entrance.
And they had a good appetite, so they were eating Thai food out of the takeaway containers
as Peter Crainer lost his moment of happiness, turning the corner,
they would just switch over so he and his wife could just slide through.
That was one of the many nights that we would go back into the back kitchen
and punch the shit out of something.
A very important Australian journalist came to Copenhagen in the east of 11
and Renee said, you had to meet him, you had to meet him, you had to meet him.
The restaurant was closed because it was Easter.
I invited him for coffee down at the coffee collective, further down the street.
He just went on about wanting to see the restaurant, he wanted to see the restaurant.
I was like, fuck.
The place has been closed for a few days, I have no clue what we're walking into.
But in the end, obviously, it made sense that I had to show the guy what restaurant we were talking about.
As I walked him down, it was living up to my worst expectations.
Outside, you had hoodlums, smoking joints, bitches hanging out, fighting dogs,
even the watering bowl for the fighting dogs.
As I walked by, and they obviously because they know me from walking by them every day,
they would say, how are you doing?
I would just pretend that this was everyday life in Copenhagen.
We went on for about one and a half year of an open restaurant in this situation.
Re-reading all the reviews we had, obviously in the first month of the opening,
not one did not mention or pick up the story about us opening up a restaurant
that obviously wasn't going on in front of us.
Cash was counted in that doorway you saw before.
When these guys made a sale, they would walk down the two stairs,
towards the restaurant, they would count money to make sure that they counted right, I guess,
and then go out. That would happen maybe 35 times a day.
While the guests sitting down wondering, what's the tipping policy here?
This is Lisa.
She clearly remembers her first day starging with us.
That night, a kid got shot down the street.
So, as she was prepping in the back, doing some stupid things,
the body of this guy came running to the back entrance with blood on his face,
blood on his hands, asking for towels, asking for help.
She told me recently that she considered not coming back.
It was just too fucking scary.
Thank God the kid survived, and Lisa came back, she's now one of the sous chefs.
By the way, I want to take a second helping out the police here.
One of the ladies, I guess by now a former neighbor, was in the newspaper the other day
and they really want to have a talk with him.
He stabbed the guy about 27 times for about a month ago.
So, if you were on your way down the years to get to see him, just give him a call will you?
We work really hard those days, we just try to focus,
never mind these guys will move on, they will leave, there's no point in them staying here.
We just cook food, I was proud of him from the first day.
We open up membranes across the street, expanding our facilities,
making it possible for us to cook up bigger volumes, letting us get higher quality produce,
making more positive traffic on Yersburgill.
But this street was on its move though, that you could feel.
The same way we would feel hostility, we would also feel support and people ready to ally themselves with us.
They knew that what we were doing could give a push to the street and make a change.
The coffee collective down the street helped us set up a coffee program and filtration systems,
brewing a cup of coffee second to none in Copenhagen from our opening day in August 10.
We would since use the purifying system that they installed for us to clean the water we used
in all our stock sources and preparations, bringing us the next step.
Julie and Inge had shortly opened their respective pottery shops in the street
and they would barter us with plates and tableware.
Stefan from Terroristen would set us up with some of his Italian wines,
completing our wine list only featuring natural wines.
Our food would conquer the street and then the whole city, our certain it would.
I knew that if we ever got too dangerous, our financial setup with liberty in mind
would let everybody just leave the knives on the fucking cutting board and get the hell out of there.
Our menu price was low, our ambitions were high and liberty was ours.
We would want to cook food simply but interestingly leaving people with something to remember.
With our past at NOMA we knew, we just knew that everybody would be ready to call us a NOMA light.
That we would just spin off some of the new Nordic stuff and make it cheaper.
So we restricted ourselves to not do some of those things that's so typical for the new Nordic wave of the moment,
not NOMA, the wave that came after.
I often use the example of us acting as teenagers not wanting to look like their parents.
That would mean no foraging.
I don't even know who this guy is, I just pulled him down from Google.
I hope he's not sitting here.
I don't want to be disrespectful in any way but our restaurant was as open as it can get.
There would be nothing authentic about me foraging.
I'm a cook and I feel close to nature when I cook, not when I forage.
No swishing.
No exaggerated use of herbs.
We didn't have time to pick perfect leaves of anything.
We were busy with three people.
We would make purees out of the herbs and focus on their flavor more than the aesthetics.
My Italian heritage also called for the use of olive oil and chovies, breadcrumbs, citrics.
Once and for all, Relay is not a Nordic restaurant.
With these limitations, we worked on creating an identity for ourselves.
My main goal with the cooking at Relay was fundamentally the same as NOMAs.
Maybe the most important gift Rene gave me was to say,
if a guest eats here with his eyes closed, he must know where he is eating.
Well, that is exactly what I want people to feel while eating at Relay,
that it is unique and it's good and it's bad.
We would constrain ourselves to a maximum of three to four components on every dish,
leaving the food naked and powerful.
We would cut the food to the bone in the same way as we did with the restaurant.
To keep our cars low and quality high, we would focus on vegetables all through the menu,
offering a vegetarian menu, but also keeping the omnivorous menu very much based on the greens.
We would roast carrots with the seaweed and black currants.
We would roll up baked salaria with black olive sauce and more seaweed.
We would pickle mackerel, serve it with cauliflower, everything simple.
I would any day prefer that a guest would appreciate two of the dishes,
hate one and be absolutely blown away by the fourth.
Much more than just eating four dishes that wouldn't make a difference in any way.
But just to give you a quick idea of what it really means,
how people experience the food we do,
I just gathered up what I could find of our food on Instagram.
Let's call this a quickie.
All right.
Yeah.
I had to scroll through a lot of those teddy pictures before we got to the food
when I was on Instagram looking for this.
Time passed by and we've worked hard day after day.
We experienced great successes.
I've been blessed with the best team I could ever dream for.
This is my opportunity to thank them for believing in me,
even when my family thinks I was going nuts.
Thank you.
Our initial reviews were pretty positive,
even though I feel most reviewers lost a lot of the points.
Our choice of going all natural on the wines
is maybe challenged them a bit too much back then.
In 2012,
to the great surprise to everyone, including ourselves,
we received a Michelin star and sort of jumped onto that list.
We've been extremely successful,
proving to ourselves that putting high-end food
in a more simple, easygoing and dynamic context
is what people want and what we absolutely love doing.
For me,
fine dining in its classical meaning might not be that quite yet,
but it is facing extinction.
My generation will move on.
But what now?
Our great success experience by releasing ourselves
from the fine dining scene
has inspired friends and former colleagues to do the same,
and seeing us having so much fun while we were doing it
must have done something to them.
And we all have much more fun now.
Where do we go from here?
Our cooking has developed so incredibly much since the beginning.
We went from being four guys
who now do service with nine or 12 guys in the kitchen,
and it's tight.
We set up a test kitchen, studio, lab,
call it what you want,
in connection to the kitchen,
creatively and in peace and quiet from all kinds of people,
customers, the daily stress of the kitchen,
we can just focus.
Here, John, Tam, my sous chef and myself
work full-time on moving on with the menu,
often bringing in the sommelier to balance our dishes,
to challenge us and find the perfect match
between wine and food.
We started to calm down,
to realize what work we're doing
and what to really focus on.
Our produce has improved steadily from day one
as we gained experience
and pushed ourselves to get better and better.
We switched the balance away from focusing
only on creativity
and letting nature be more creative,
letting produce stand more on its own.
A friend told me recently after dining with us,
you've changed.
I disagree.
We've just gotten better and better.
Our focus on a three-four component dish
has reduced to, say, two, two and a half.
Our criteria on produce have improved to the point
that we, some time ago, picked up the ambition
of being the first organic certified
Michelin-starred restaurant in the world.
At recognition, we received this May
and we obviously celebrated with a barbecue in the rain.
That's how demigrally it is, not like these days.
With our evolution in cooking and our focus on produce,
we seem to have found a new level of maturity
we didn't have before.
We went from being restless, wanting new dishes on the menu,
new ideas all the time to let produce come first
and the site went to go on the menu.
We would be more sensible to every detail
as we've been slowly building our own identity.
I've been asking myself, why?
Why this need to slow down, trying to understand more?
I don't know why, but maybe these guys
might be a part of the answer.
This is by far the best pork I've tasted
and after cooking it, trying it and saving it for the first time,
it has been a relays on Manfred's menu.
I just can't let it go.
The synergy between the two restaurants
and the thorough planning has given us the possibility
to serve, for me, the greatest luxury
I could possibly find on both sides of the streets
still keeping our prices, just by planning.
I realized that so much for being thought of as the restaurant
using only the humblest ingredients,
we put the most expensive piece of pork on the plate every day.
Working with produce at this level,
I started to understand that we are taking so many steps
since we first started roasting carrots.
You have become time to challenge your own initial ideas.
We might have been right to begin with, I think we were.
But does that make it the only truth?
Most importantly, do people get it?
Do they understand the work we put in these
so seemingly simple dishes?
Does the music really have to be that scratchy?
Could we buy some speakers maybe with it?
Keep the music loud but essentially high on quality.
What if we bought some paper for the restroom
that didn't reach leaving burn marks?
At some point it felt
that we were almost working against ourselves deliberately
and that the worn-out toilets and wobbly tables
became furniture that started taking up focus again.
That's what we not wanted.
The gap between the quality of the food and the restaurant
had grown so much that it started taking focus away
from the food and the wine.
We were closed for a month here in July
and we thought we would use that time to let Relay grow up a bit.
Venere was changed into solid oak
and proper background for the quality we would serve on the plate.
Product to product, you do not get higher quality
in any other restaurant in the city.
The we choose not to base our kitchen on prime cuts.
The foie, the caviar, as a creative restriction
does not make us a cheap restaurant.
It makes us a different one.
In the end it comes down to a question of communication.
When we initially opened I believe the true gastronomy
could speak its language anywhere
and I do still firmly believe that
and many of you here are living proof of that.
I have also come to learn that far most of our guests
really need a helping hand.
Most won't taste the difference
whether we drive the car up north to pick up cart from the boat daily
assuring our freshness and quality
or we just get it through the wholesaler several days after.
I have understood that we need to communicate these things
not only by telling far too long stories at the table
but also by just keeping that same thin red line
all over the guest's experience.
And an interior trying to send the same message
as our cooking philosophy really helps us with that.
It is no longer in contrast with our cooking
but in harmony.
We experience actually far more of our guests
really getting it now.
We know that after just two months.
Really understanding the flavors, the quality,
the hard work put behind it.
The complexity we put into simplicity.
Nobody complains about the music anymore.
Almost.
I hope that soon we can start dreaming about
moving up from our trip advisor's 736 ranking in Copenhagen.
Now you're wondering
did we remove the drawers and start pouring water?
No.
We just build it straight into the wood.
Thank you.
They picked up another level
because we now know exactly what it is we want from them.
The restrooms had a paint job.
The paper got softer.
Teddy, he's still there.
He just got another background.
For me the most satisfying part about this evolution of ours
and improvement is that it was financed by our own hard work
and our guts to believe that veneer was good enough to begin with.
If the food was good enough and the ideas were clear enough.
The creativity can actually work wonders.
We realize by now that we might as well take it as far as we can.
Do the best possible restaurant within our ideas and philosophy
instead of focusing so much on an anti-this and anti-that restaurant.
No need to fight the picture of fine dining as a cold and pretentious space.
It will slowly become obsolete on its own.
Alain Ducasse was talking about hairloom varieties and children today.
Our values has changed.
What about the street?
We do see a few dodgy characters from time to time.
A few tattooed faces.
But the street belongs to us now.
The fact that I've seen so many of these faces in this crowd on Years for Girl
really proves the point.
On a regular Saturday we bring through about 300 guests through Relay and Manfred's.
Many of them on Fixie Bikes.
Since we opened from before and until now,
more than 40 shops have popped up doing everything from pottery, porridge, bread and gastronomy.
Many of them sharing our organic lifestyle.
Most importantly, the streets are safe.
Not known for crime anymore, but for its great initiatives.
I can now officially claim that our doorway is finally free for everybody to walk in and have a great night.
It takes a lot of willpower to challenge the conventions around you.
I believe it takes much more courage, guts, call it what you want to kill your darlings.
To challenge your own ideas.
But at one point that is the next step for all of us.
As a teenager, you question your parents.
You question the generations before you.
When you grow up, you question yourself. Thank you.
