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Rude Food by Vir Sanghvi: The food? Chef’s kiss
The world’s best chef is beating his own records. Bjorn Frantzen now holds three Michelin stars each in Stockholm, Dubai and Singapore. How does he do it?
Which is the most critically respected and awarded restaurant in the world today? Okay, I concede that there are many ways of measuring critical acclaim, and these days, the international restaurant world has more awards than McDonald’s has French fries.
But there is one measure of quality that most chefs will tell you they respect.They may not always agree with the Michelin guide’s opinions, but they admire the gravity and the integrity of the process that goes into the awarding of stars. This is one kind of recognition you can’t buy. It doesn’t depend on how many influencers you feed or how many critics you pay off. The guide relies on anonymous but highly trained and experienced inspectors, whose opinions (at least on Japanese and Western cuisines) are widely respected.
And according to Michelin, the world’s best restaurant (and consequently, the world’s best chef) is one you have probably never heard of, and certainly is not a household name outside of foodie households.
It is called Restaurant Frantzen and is in Stockholm in Sweden. The chef is a former professional football player called Bjorn Frantzen, who looks a little like James Bond might have if he had been born and brought up in Scandinavia. And the reason you haven’t heard of him is because he avoids personal publicity and refuses to play the influencer game.
But here are the facts. Frantzen in Stockholm has three Michelin stars, the first restaurant in Sweden to win the highest ranking possible. Some years ago, Frantzen opened Zen in Singapore, a market that is as different from Stockholm as is possible to imagine. Zen won three stars too, putting Frantzen in that tiny club that only a few chefs — like Alain Ducasse and Thomas Keller— have ever been allowed to join. With two three-star restaurants at different ends of the world, Frantzen was already a phenomenon when he was invited by Dubai’s Atlantis to open another Frantzen there last year.
I first met him then and thought this was a bit of a high-risk venture for him. When you already have two restaurants with three stars in two different countries, a third fine-dining restaurant might be a bridge too far. Can any chef compete with his own record, especially when his restaurant is opening so far from his existing outposts in Stockholm and Singapore?
He called the restaurant FZN, and Atlantis moved the old Nobu (the first and most influential modern Japanese restaurant in the Middle East) upstairs to make room for Frantzen’s FZN. I went soon after it opened and thought the food was differently focused from Singapore’s Zen but very good.
The big question, of course, was: What would Michelin think? The awards were due to be announced only around six months after the restaurant opened and though Michelin has proved to be fast on its feet in recent times, often giving stars to restaurants in the year they have opened, a three-star rating is still the holy grail, and no restaurant has ever won three stars for at least a couple of years after opening.
My conclusion (which I recorded here after eating at FZN) was that Michelin would give it two stars and then wait to see if three stars were deserved.
Frequently, Michelin tells restaurants that they have won three stars in advance of the actual ceremony. Sometimes, when iconic restaurants are knocked down to two stars from three, it warns the chefs so there is no embarrassment at the event when the stars are announced. This year, it went further and made a public announcement that Chicago’s Alinea, Washington DC’s The Inn at Little Washington and New York’s Masa were losing their three stars in advance of the ceremony.
In Dubai, two days before the awards event Gwendal Poullennec, the International Director of Michelin, made a covert visit to Tresind Studio to tell the team that it would be the first Indian restaurant in the world to get three stars.
But nobody said anything to Bjorn Frantzen. When the FZN team received its invite to the ceremony, it was assumed that at best, it had won a star, and Bjorn made plans to fly down to Dubai. Optimists thought it would get two stars. But after Poullennec had finished announcing the names of the restaurants with two stars and FZN still hadn’t been mentioned, Bjorn began to wonder what was going on.
Then, just as people thought FZN might go home empty-handed, Gwendal pulled a surprise and announced that the restaurant had got three stars. Bjorn says he was extremely surprised. FZN had made history. It is the only restaurant in the world to ever have won three stars in under seven months. And Bjorn had made his own kind of history: The only chef in the world to be able to turn out cuisine worth three stars at three separate restaurants.
I ate at Zen in Singapore a few years ago, but last week, I decided to do a Frantzen blitz. I went first to FZN in Dubai. Two nights later, I went to Astoria, a large brasserie Bjorn runs in Stockholm. And the night after that I went to the mother ship, the original Frantzen in Stockholm. As you might expect the food at all of them was fabulous (I was surprised by how good Astoria was). But what struck me was how Bjorn managed to serve food at the three fine-dining restaurants that was recognisably from the same source and yet, was different at each place.
Some of this has to do with Frantzen’s peculiar mixture of rigidity and adaptability. While he sends out detailed recipes from his Stockholm test kitchen (down to such details as the exact brand of vinegar to be used) he also hires outstanding chefs and respects their inputs. Zen benefited hugely from Scottish chef Tristin Farmer’s experience, and at FZN the chef Torsten Vildgaard, who was Rene Redzepi’s right-hand man for over a decade at Noma and who ran his own Michelin-starred restaurant, has made his contribution to the food.
Though there are still no details about exactly what he plans to open in Australia, I suspect that many of Bjorn Frantzen’s plans now include larger, casual restaurants. There is a successful Studio Frantzen at Atlantis, which serves Asian-influenced but still mostly Western dishes, and though a London restaurant at Harrods may have suffered from a poor choice of location, Bjorn is actively looking for a site to open an Astoria Brasserie in London.
A couple of years ago, when I asked him if he would be the Swedish Alain Ducasse, he visibly blanched. But it’s hard to deny that there are parallels though, while Ducasse epitomes the French tradition, Frantzen has global influences: He cooked for many years in London and is fascinated by such spicy Asian flavours as Sichuan pepper.
Perhaps that is the new face of global gastronomy. Not French, not Spanish and not even Scandinavian in the foraging and fermentation sense. But global flavours on a strong classical base and an emphasis on quality over hype and influencer marketing.
From HT Brunch, December 06, 2025
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