there arent many restaurants where the chef a winner of the san pellegrino cooking cup drives you back to your hotel when youve finished his 12course tasting menu i have travelled through the swedish city of malmo and up into the unfolding countryside of sweden i am standing beneath the wet denim skies of skane in september picking herbs with berlin in his kitchen garden and being distracted by a large spider scurrying up his chef s whites hes not distracted though its 6pm an hour before service and he is bent double pursuing field sorrel in the grass with the concentration of a biggame hunter he looks at home in these fields though his background is urban i went to school in the city and didnt perform very well so the only thing i could do was join a chef s school he says and initially i just coasted playing hockey and drinking a year in a teacher took him aside they said you have to choose whether you want to be good at this and put everything else aside he says so thats what he did by his mid20 s he was head chef at the turning torso in malmo with 17 chefs under him and 30 waiters then one day he decided it was too much i felt it was all too big there was no heart i was barely cooking we were just too disconnected from the food some of my young chefs wouldnt even have known how a potato grows so i quit with the help of his parents who left their jobs at eon to work as his head waitress and sommelier he got a bank loan and opened up here in skane in a yellow house it is bleak desolate and beautiful only enclosed by the sky ingmar bergman would have adored it three years in and you can see the intimacy he feels towards his land as he combs it for herbs in summer when the soil is freer with its largesse he gets 80 per cent of his ingredients from his own three acres the remainder come from within three miles i dont send out for lobster and caviar i want diners to feel the slide of the seasons in this village here the independent