What are your creations about? Growing up in a small town in the South of Sweden, in a family of five sons, meant we were mostly cooking basic Swedish house meals. My mother is an artist, and as I was growing up I thought I could have followed in her footsteps and work in the field of contemporary art. Moreover, I started to play music at an early age, and I was playing in different bands up until I started cooking. My interest in food began to develop when I saw for the first time the TV chef Keith Floyd going around the world and doing what he loved to do, that is cooking. He had a way to make culinary art more than just a way to finish a recipe. lt was the atmosphere around it that I found really interesting and romantic. So, I began cooking with friends and discovering the joy of arranging dinners, without forgetting my passions for art and music, trying to applying them - the aesthetic care for the composition owned by art, the instinctive ability to improvise, specific feature of jazz music - to what I was putting on the plate. Hosting a great evening became, and stili is, a pure pleasure to me. What is, in your opinion, the aim of a chef in the mood, as the title of a classic jazz song and as I perceive the spirit of your cuisine? I think the main aim of a chef is to balance quantity with quality. I have realized that great cuisine is all around, but combining this within timelines, costs, social and physical structures and superstructures is, to me, the real challenge. The jazz twist, that to me is always magic, lies in transforming all these aspects into an experience for our guests. Even if I have some plates of mine I have been in love with, my strongest memories are more linked to an experience, rather than to a single plate. I perceive working in the kitchen as totally comparable with working in music, either if you are a solo artist or a big band musician, playing punk or in a string quartet, in a jazz hall or on the street corner. Rehearsing. Sound-checking. Jamming. Phenomenology of a creation signed by August Lill. From the idea to the plate. Mind mapping - research - reality. First of all, I have to confess that, to me, setting is everything. I normally take a big white paper and write down all the products in season or around. I write them down in no order, just spreading out words on paper's smooth surface. From there, I just put together a sort of tag-clouds of ingredients that could fit each other, trying to locate them. Then reality comes: just because a raw materiai is in season, it doesn't necessarily mean that it will be good, so I often combine new ideas, techniques and products with recipes and techniques that I have created before. ... That is why I often think that my approach, despite a constant research, is to never end up creating every time the same plate. Do you recognize any particular feature in your cuisine? I mean, how do you think people should identify your plates? I don't think to possess any special feature, except that I like to work impromptuly, expressing whatever I am aiming to create. Kind of playing it by ear, as jazzmen do during their jam-sessions, in order to make your guests enjoy the moment. As much as I love to experience new techniques and combinations, I still want to create a proper straightforward cooking, to make people happy. That's why l'm quite attracted to low-profile cooking, meaning that I enjoy using primary products that are not really considered as fine or exclusive, and I am fond of using techniques to preserve the raw materiai in order to minimize food waste. You can do so much with very little. 20 21 pop-up chef pop-up chef
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