Nicolai Nørregaard has spent nearly two decades trying to prove that a restaurant can pursue excellence without making its employees miserable.
That philosophy has just earned Kadeau, the Copenhagen restaurant he runs with his longtime business partner Rasmus Kofoed, its third Michelin star. For Nørregaard, however, the achievement is about more than another accolade. It is evidence that a restaurant rooted in the New Nordic tradition can strive for the highest standards without relying on the culture of intimidation that has long been associated with professional kitchens.
“Our basic goal from the beginning was to become one of the best restaurants in the world without ruining people’s lives,” Nørregaard says. “We wanted to show that you can do it without making chefs work excessive hours, without shouting at them and, basically, without being a bully.”
His philosophy is partly shaped by where he grew up.
Born in 1979 on Bornholm, the small Danish island in the Baltic Sea, Nørregaard grew up in a place that is technically Danish but geographically closer to Sweden, Poland and Germany. The island has changed hands repeatedly throughout history, was occupied by Germany during the Second World War and came under Soviet control immediately afterwards.
That history helped create a strong sense of community among its inhabitants, Nørregaard says, something he sees as a natural response to the pressures faced by a small, isolated population.
He was born in a fishing port famous for herring and salting. For centuries, fishing had been the backbone of Bornholm’s economy, followed later by the island’s distinctive tradition of smoked fish.
“My childhood smelled of smoke,” he recalls.
But the world he grew up in was already disappearing. During the 1980s, Bornholm’s fishing industry collapsed. Nørregaard remembers an economic and social crisis in which people who had made money during the industry’s better years quickly spent it, leaving behind little lasting cultural or economic capital.
Yet the island also gave him something that would later become central to his cooking: an intimate relationship with nature and preservation.
His family had worked with fish smoking and butchery, and he learned from them how to preserve food for the long Scandinavian winters. His great-grandfather had been a butcher, while an uncle ran a smokehouse where Nørregaard worked during the summers.
His parents divorced when he was four, and he was raised by his mother. His father, an ambitious man who eventually became a journalist, moved to Copenhagen. But it was his uncle who had perhaps the greatest influence on his eventual career in food.
As a teenager, however, Nørregaard did not initially imagine becoming a chef.
At 16, he took a job as a bellboy at Copenhagen’s Hotel d’Angleterre, one of Denmark’s most prestigious hotels. The tips were generous, and for a while he abandoned music and considered a range of creative careers, including painting, architecture and design.
Then friends working at a hotel near his home invited him to work there during the summer.
That is where he met Rasmus Kofoed, a childhood friend who would eventually become his business partner. The two began talking about opening their own restaurant, discussing everything from the kitchen and business plan to the interior design.
In 2007, they got their chance.
A small café on the southern part of Bornholm went up for sale after they had noticed its potential while working there. They bought it and transformed it into Kadeau.
The name itself reflected what they wanted the restaurant to represent. They were interested in combining local ingredients and traditions with a more classical French culinary sensibility. The word “kadeau” also carries a meaning in Danish associated with gratitude.
That idea of gratitude — towards nature, local producers and the island itself — became central to the restaurant’s identity.
Kadeau was founded just as the New Nordic movement was beginning to reshape Scandinavian cuisine. René Redzepi’s New Nordic Manifesto had been published three years earlier, setting out principles centred on local ingredients, seasonality, sustainability and a close relationship with the natural environment.
Nørregaard says Kadeau was not initially part of that movement in any formal sense. Noma was still relatively young when Kadeau opened, and Redzepi’s project had yet to achieve the global influence it would later acquire.
But when he read the manifesto, much of it felt familiar.
“I recognised a lot of the ideas about our relationship with nature and the importance of local products,” he says. “I thought we could take those ideas and make them our own, in the context of Bornholm.”
The island provided an unusually rich setting for that experiment.
Bornholm sits at the meeting point of two tectonic plates, and its landscape changes dramatically from south to north. The south is flatter and more pastoral, while the north is characterised by rocks, cliffs, caves and rugged terrain.
Its position in the Baltic also gives the island a distinctive climate. Summers are relatively long, and the island can support plants and fruits that are unusual elsewhere in Scandinavia.
In 2007, Nørregaard and his team began systematically exploring the island for wild herbs, berries and other ingredients.
The restaurant’s identity grew directly out of that landscape.
In 2011, Nørregaard and Kofoed opened a second Kadeau in Copenhagen. The move was not initially driven by ambitions to establish themselves in what would later become one of Europe’s most important gastronomic capitals.
It was, in part, a family decision.
Both men had become fathers the previous year, and their wives were living in Copenhagen. When the summer season in Bornholm ended, they packed their plates, ceramics and cash register into a car and opened the Copenhagen restaurant within a week.
Three days later, one of Denmark’s most influential food critics walked through the door.
The review was highly positive and helped propel the restaurant to another level. Within a year, Kadeau had moved to a more attractive location, and later to an even better one.
Today, the Copenhagen restaurant operates year-round, while the original Bornholm location remains seasonal.
Nørregaard has also spent the past three years running Dune, a glamping project where guests can stay close to the sea under the night sky.
But the restaurant business remains the heart of his work — and increasingly, so does the question of how the industry should treat the people who work in it.
Kadeau’s kitchens employ people from around the world. Its head chef, Kyumin Hahn, is a Korean-Canadian. For Nørregaard, the international nature of the kitchen workforce is also a reminder of Denmark’s wider immigration dilemma.
He argues that Denmark’s restrictive immigration policies are making it increasingly difficult for industries to recruit skilled workers, from restaurant professionals to doctors and lawyers.
“We have a very bad reputation, and that’s genuinely sad,” he says.
Inside Kadeau, meanwhile, the aim is to create a very different kind of workplace.
Nørregaard remembers working in large hotels as a young man and witnessing chefs screaming at one another, with pans and even knives sometimes flying through the air.
He found the culture so disturbing that he once told himself he would never become a chef.
He acknowledges that running a high-level restaurant inevitably creates pressure. New menu development can be exhausting, and service itself demands speed, discipline and precision.
But pressure, he argues, does not have to become abuse.
Kadeau employees work three days one week and four the next, averaging around 40 to 42 hours. That is slightly above Denmark’s standard working week of 38 hours, but well below the punishing schedules that have historically been common in elite restaurants.
The contrast has inevitably brought Nørregaard into the wider debate surrounding Noma and René Redzepi, whose restaurant helped define modern New Nordic cuisine but has also faced allegations from former employees concerning its workplace culture.
Nørregaard is careful not to pass judgement on an environment he did not experience himself.
“I think I am one of the few chefs who never worked at Noma,” he says.
But he acknowledges that Redzepi himself has spoken publicly about having been excessively harsh and emotional as a leader, and about the need to change.
Nørregaard believes Redzepi was right to step away from the restaurant’s traditional model.
“He is one of the most important chefs in the world, one of the people who has left a mark on the history of gastronomy,” he says. “I can understand how enormous pressure can make people more aggressive. But I am not like that.”
In two decades, Nørregaard says, he has never shouted at an employee.
That does not mean Kadeau is a relaxed kitchen where everyone spends service laughing.
At this level of cooking, expectations are extremely high. Instructions have to be clear, mistakes have to be corrected immediately and everything moves at speed because diners are waiting.
Nørregaard compares the experience to professional sport.
“You cannot expect people to laugh and have fun all the time in a kitchen where the performance level is so high,” he says. “But you can still treat people properly.”
Kadeau’s third Michelin star in Copenhagen has now provided a powerful validation of that approach.
The Bornholm restaurant, however, has remained at one star.
Nørregaard is not particularly interested in speculating about Michelin’s reasoning. The food at the two restaurants is fundamentally similar, he says, although the Copenhagen kitchen’s dishes are somewhat more complex and technical.
On Bornholm, the landscape does some of the work.
The sea, the rocks and the surrounding wilderness provide an atmosphere that cannot be replicated in a city. In Copenhagen, Nørregaard says, the restaurant has to compensate through the food itself.
The next stage of Kadeau’s evolution may involve another move.
A few weeks before receiving the third star, Nørregaard says, he would have given a straightforward answer when asked about his next ambition: three Michelin stars.
Now that the goal has been achieved, he is still absorbing what happened.
But the direction is becoming clearer.
After more than a decade in its current Copenhagen location, he and Kofoed are considering moving the restaurant again — this time to a site that could also include accommodation.
For Nørregaard, that would fit naturally with the philosophy that has guided Kadeau from the beginning: creating a complete experience around food, place and hospitality, while building a business that does not depend on burning out the people who make it possible.
“It’s time to evolve again,” he says.
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