‘I lived in big cities that inspired me in other ways, but this is different’

In the highlands of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, 2,300m above sea level where time slows down, Zacapa Rum is aged to perfection in the mystical House Above the Clouds. A work of art, and an expression of patience, richness, quality and master blending, it embodies The Art of Slow — a philosophy of savouring the moments that matter, and discovering the amazing things that happen when we take the opportunity to reconnect.

In this series, we celebrate the outliers of creative gastronomy from around the world who’ve taken the time to slow down and reconnect with their craft — sharing the stories of the inspiration this has brought them. Through spending time getting to know the chefs and hear their stories, our writers uncover the moments of realisation and reconnection that set them on the path of discovery.
After more than a decade working in some of Scandinavia’s top kitchens, Bosnian-born chef Edin Dzemat has chosen to leave the bustle of the city to launch a restaurant in a tiny village in rural Sweden. But he’s still thinking big, and has set himself a lofty challenge: to win Sweden’s first triple Michelin star. Ben Thompson learns how this quest for glory has led Dzemat back to his culinary roots.

Edin Dzemat has to apologise more than once during our conversation over a shaky phone connection from Sweden. He is driving through the forest in the middle of a blizzard, and the towering pines and relentless snow and wind cause havoc for mobile reception.
But this is all part of life nowadays for the 33-year-old chef. After more than a decade spent in kitchens in the trendy cities of Gothenburg and Copenhagen, Dzemat is relocating to the tiny town of Kosta in Småland, which has a population of just 884. He has an audacious plan: to be the first chef in Sweden to get three Michelin stars.
Dzemat is no stranger to Kosta: since 2016, he has managed the kitchen at the Kosta Boda Art Hotel. But in 2018, he plans to open a restaurant, dzeMAT, with his business partner of nine years, Torsten Jansson. He finds life in the countryside refreshing, not least because of the change of pace.
Origins
H e began his training in his teens as chef of a traditional Swedish restaurant, regularly serving 500 hungry Swedes every lunchtime in his home village of Gislaved. From there, he joined what is arguably Scandinavia’s most renowned restaurant, Noma, in Copenhagen, the first in the region to gain two Michelin stars.

Dzemat branched out on his own in 2010 with the Linnea Art Restaurant, in Gothenburg, and between 2013 and 2015 he was captain of the Swedish team in the Culinary Olympics. In 2016, he clinched first place in the country’s most prestigious national cooking competition, the Kockarnas Kamp.
In fact, the Bosnian-born chef has been on the go since he was 15 years old. When he hasn’t been fighting it out in the kitchen of some of Scandinavia’s finest restaurants, he has been competing in international tournaments. He is 33, but his career would be impressive for a chef ten years his senior.
For a chef who is now so strongly associated with the most cutting edge of Nordic cuisine, Dzemat had a culinary baptism of fire when, aged 11, he moved to Sweden from war-torn Bosnia. As a kid growing up in Bosnia, he adored breakfasts of pancakes and jam; when he arrived in Sweden he noted that Swedes prefer to slather the sweet fruit preserve all over their meat.
‘This was a catastrophe for me,’ he laughs. ‘They eat jam with meatballs. This is traditional Swedish cuisine. For us it was like: “Wow, these people are crazy,”’ he says.
But Dzemat didn’t just get used to Swedish food — he began to love it. At Noma, of course, he would learn to master it. Yet when he talks about his most important job, he’s referring to his time at the village restaurant back in Gislaved. It was there he learnt to handle the pressure of preparing 500 plates of traditional food — it is that same energy that today he injects into serving 40 or 50 customers per evening.
‘It was my first job, and one of the most important I had,’ he says.
In the cities, his creative process would begin when the refrigerated food truck turned up outside the restaurant, packed with fish, meat and vegetables from elsewhere in the country. It was fresh, of course, but it wasn’t that fresh.
‘Now we have our own fisherman who fishes for us. We have our own garden, our own cows. We work really, really close to nature, and that forms the whole process for our food,’ he enthuses.
‘I have been close to food all my life,’ he says, recalling his earliest years on the farm. ‘I always had a love of food, and not just eating it — also everything around it, from planting vegetables to looking after the animals and catching fish.’

That kind of proximity to nature is in Dzemat’s blood. Before moving to Sweden in 1996, he still remembers how his mother and grandfather would milk their cows every morning at the family farm outside the city of Mostar.
To this day, his mother refuses to buy bread from the supermarket. She spends many hours baking her own, despite the fact that freshly made bread is available from every Swedish corner shop. That has been a valuable lesson for Dzemat, and he is now finally able — like his mother — to take his time.

Innovation
‘I have my own style and philosophy, but I think I can push it to the next level,’ he says. ‘Now I have the opportunity to follow the beet, for example, from when you put it in the earth. I decide when I want to pick it, what size, what flavour.’
His next venture may well be his most challenging. There are dozens of restaurants worldwide that have achieved triple Michelin-star status, including 11 in London, 26 in Japan and 28 in France. There are none in Sweden, but, in 2016, Maaemo in Oslo and Geranium in Copenhagen were both awarded three stars. Contentiously, Noma has only ever been awarded two.
Dzemat and Jansson may be helped by a change in the way that the Michelin guides are structured. In the past, the guide focused on individual cities, but in its new format it will encompass the entire Nordic region. Kosta may be a tiny village in the middle of rural Sweden, but it has just as much weight as Oslo, Gothenburg, Copenhagen or Stockholm.
‘We want to be the best,’ says Dzemat, unapologetically. ‘We want to be the first three Michelin stars in Sweden — and is that tough? Yeah. But if we do something, we want to make the best of it. We don’t go into it just to be good, but to be the best.’

Dzemat may have spent his entire career inventing and preparing Swedish food, but one of his main innovations has been the way he has drawn from Bosnian cuisine, particularly its street food. He is regularly feted in the Bosnian press and compared affectionately with Zlatan Ibrahimović, the Swedish footballer whose father was Bosnian. For both Swedes and fellow Bosnians, Dzemat is seen as doing for cooking what Ibrahimović has done for football.
‘A lot of Bosnian people are really proud of me, and every day I have Bosnian families to come and eat at my restaurant. It is really important for me. I feel Swedish now, of course. I love Sweden and Swedish people, and I will always be thankful because they gave us a second chance,’ he says.
‘But my name is Edin — it’s not Jonas. I am always going to have Bosnian in me. You never forget where you come from.’
Influence
T hat runs both ways: many of the staff in his kitchens are of Bosnian heritage and every year Dzemat returns to Bosnia to train young chefs. He is involved in the GastroID centre, which provides training in the hospitality industry for young people, and is funded jointly by the Swiss government and Tofi, a professional kitchen equipment company based in Sarajevo. His hope is that more young Bosnians go out into the world as chefs. ‘I want to give something back to that country,’ he says.
As for his next venture, Dzemat hopes that running a restaurant in a small town in the Swedish countryside will give him an edge. In many ways he is going back to the beginning: to his upbringing on a farm near Mostav, milking cows and chasing chickens, and to the first time he tasted Swedish food, in a small village thousands of miles from home.

He believes that during the past two decades he has already created his own style, his own philosophy, and he has been recognised for it. But now it’s time to get back to nature, away from the cities. No longer will ingredients turn up in the back of a refrigerated lorry. Instead they will come straight from the garden — from the ground.
When he talks about it, the excitement is palpable. He is embarking on a new adventure. He is inspired.
‘I lived in big cities and that inspired me in other ways, but this is different. Now, you breathe the food, you breathe everything because you are so close to it.’
‘I love fishing and hunting and I have the great opportunity to do that now. I get inspired by this type of life.’
So that’s the next step for Edin Dzemat. He’s been a celebrated young chef, winning awards and working at some of the world’s most famous restaurants. He’s been at the highest level of Nordic cuisine. And now, to reach the stars (three of them, no less), he has come back to the earth.


