New Nordic Culinary Systems – Making Sense of Restaurant Narratives

This study of 9 Danish restaurants explores how “local” food restaurants operate, including the restaurants’ concepts, sourcing strategies, and specificities of local food preparation. The study is based on qualitative data: interviews with 8 head chefs and 1 farm manager.

The data has been analyzed through thematic coding. Two key limitations of the findings are that the coding process has been completed by one person, and that the data was collected only at only one point in time.

In this work, the topic of local food restaurants is connected with sustainable development debates, through a value chain analysis, enriched by a literature review. In the isolated field of “green restaurant” literature, dominated by quantitative investigations, some necessary qualitative description of local food restaurants is provided. Restaurant operations are identified by applying knowledge about product, functional, and process upgrading. Discovered patterns are put into dialogue with debates on local food systems, and the political consumer.

When it comes to sourcing strategies, the studied restaurants have mixed large-scale and small-scale suppliers to ensure a steady supply of vegetables. The concepts of the studied restaurants have varied, with “localness” being defined in varying ways.

When it comes to cooking processes, identified solutions to supply fluctuations have been concealing the restaurant menu or making it flexible. The adherence to “New Nordic” principles of a focus on simple, vegetable-focused dishes has been common optimization seen amongst the sample, attributed to high labor costs.

As a political consumer, the restaurants have promoted variety in vegetables, by seeking out producers who grow specialty crops, and requesting unique products from them. Despite being involved in what is grown, the respondents show less control over how it is grown. Crop production processes have largely been left to the farmers to control – a preference for organic farming methods, but mixed views on the organic certification have been identified amongst the sample.

Because of the role of the restaurant as a buyer of specialty local vegetables, the need for further research into the significance of restaurants as a purchaser of local produce is argued for. The next step would be to investigate just how important local food restaurants are in the economies of the farms that they are partnered with.