In May, Carsten sat down for lunch with Tim Adams from @theguardian at a newly opened @brutalisten - “I really got fed up with mayonnaise culture,” Carsten Höller says. “Traditional Swedish cooking is very nice but everything comes with some kind of creamy sauce. The aim here is to get rid of that. To dig down into the taste of a given ingredient.” Thoughts tend to race through Höller once they start. “It is the opposite of alchemy, you know,” he goes on. “Most chefs think they can create gold by combining lots of things to create something better. The principle here is that the gold is already there, you just have to trust in it.” - Höller has enjoyed choosing restaurant suppliers with Eriksson (@ravaran); they are nearly all multigenerational family farmers, with an obsession for the singularity of certain products. The pork comes from a couple who have a smallholding “on a nature reserve in the middle of nowhere without a phone”. The farm has a lake, and the pigs swim every day. Höller believes you can taste those aquatic laps in the cured ham. - Alongside the restaurant he explains how he is currently working on a long-term sleep project with some researchers at MIT. Part of it involves some prototype dream-stimulating pyjamas. He has plans to open a roadside motel in the US, where each identical room offers you a different kind of nocturnal vacation. He sees no real distinction between the two ventures, sensing a shared sensibility between artists and chefs. “At the beginning of the last century,” he suggests, “you had all these art movements, surrealism and cubism and futurism, now I think some of that incredible avant garde is in cooking: you have molecular cuisine. All these theatrical experiences, Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adria ...”