Its been 5 years
Photo credit, P.A. Jorgensen.
Today it is officially 5 years ago we opened Relæ to the public.
Its been an insane journey. Professionally it has been so profoundly rewarding that I can't think of what more we could have done in those 5 years. As a matter of fact, I can't believe how our little baby grew up to be a great and strong family in such a short time. Now counting Manfreds, Bæst, Mirabelle and Vinikultur we are an ensemble of 80+ cooks, somm’s, dishwashers, administrators, accountants and more.
“But five years is nothing but a moment in the great careers of the greatest”, you might rightfully think. Nobody even knew who Ferran was when he was 5 years into his journey with El Bulli. - Probably not. Once Ferran and the crew where on top of the world they closed down around year 24-25. But El Bulli might not even be the right example to prove my point. The more classic restaurants, less focused on the art of pushing the envelope, might last even longer. Bocuse has been rolling for more than 50 years by now. The Guerards and the Michel Bras are other examples of family run restaurants that stretch for several decades.
When we opened up here in the midst of the financial crisis we were just hoping for surviving the first weeks. We tried to just get rolling without taking too big financial obligations upon ourselves (no one would even consider throwing us a bone of a loan back then anyways). I was expecting a good few years of total anonymity, just struggling to get through the weeks only affording to get the trash picked up by the end. We started off without a dishwasher, believing we couldn't afford it. But reality showed to be very different - I should have sensed it while giving a good number of interviews before we even opened up. We started off with a smash, got all the attention and had the ball rolling - fast - from the very beginning. Full restaurant and off you go.
But handling that is not any less challenging than handling the slow long stretch of building up a cuisine without anyone actually caring. I think we got really lucky and I was really stubborn. My stubbornness made me so dedicated to not apply to the foraging new-Nordic-kinda-style because I didn't wanna look anything like noma. I wanted us to be our own and really going in search of that own direction of ours, combined with all the attention we were getting from the beginning made us believe in our own project and carry on at full speed.
I’m proud of the way things turned out. I know we were extremely lucky with a few high-risk bets we were taking in the beginning but I also know how much hard work and dedication it has taken to amass all this success in these few years. It makes me proud that I genuinely feel that we are doing our own thing. That the food we do makes sense and is the sum of our experiences, ideas, needs, limitations and imaginations.
I think many restaurants today start off with a bang. Communications are traveling at super-sonic speed and before you have installed the stovetop of your future restaurant bloggers, critics and peers have been following you on Instagram for ages. They are just waiting for you to open up before they come running. I am still trying hard to understand whether that is good or not. We were good, we got lucky - and successful. But some quiet time to figure out where we wanted to go could have been useful after all. We did well at playing the ball very fast from the very beginning but I believe that it could easily have gone another way.
We have evolved a lot in these five years. We came off being quite anti-fine dining with hardcore natural wines and loud music in the restaurant. Today we have matured to the point of improving the acoustics of the restaurant so that we could listen to the music we actually enjoy - instead of making a point. And more or less stop pushing the natural wine movement and just picking the wines we enjoy drinking (that happens to be conceived with very low intervention). It feels so good today to be able to cook the food we feel ours and do so in a financially and socially sustainable way. In the end I feel I get to see my kid grow up while I do what I love doing the most. To be in this situation is something truly worth celebrating.
At this point the challenge is to understand where to go next. We spent the first years in searching for the direction to pick up and I guess that the feeling of being confident, proud and enjoying what we have here today is a sign that we picked the right one. We have gone from restlessly searching for what could become ours to simply twisting and turning what we have over and over again, making it better, sharper, more refined and picking up small, but significant, new things in that process.
The last few weeks we have been working towards presenting our original menu around our anniversary. The process and the output of that really shows where we are today - in every sense. Some dishes have a more refined outlook, the preparations have become sharper and more refined. Some dishes are not even tweaked one bit - we don’t feel the urge to change what still works perfectly to our taste. A perspective we could only achieve with time and maturity.
Actually, it might be that todays challenge is not to figure out where to go next but really to enjoy what we have come to. That doesn't mean to let the place stagnate and get boring for everyone. But to enjoy what we do because I feel we can allow ourselves to. This fast-paced celebrity-driven constantly instagrammed moment of gastronomy doesn't leave much room for just shutting up and doing what you like to do. Its always about the next thing. Our first handful of years came out our way helping us establish the restaurant and its cuisine. Now it might be time to just slow down that ball and pushing it forward at our own pace.
It is time to celebrate, not just our five years today. But every day that follows it and the privilege every one of those days gives us to enjoy what we do.
A big thanks to everyone working extremely hard so far and making Relæ what it is; my dream restaurant.