In an interview with Vikerraadio, renowned chef and restaurant owner Orm Oja marveled at the hype around matcha, kombucha, skyr and kimchi and noted that unlike Italians, Estonians seem reluctant to take pride in their own foods. Amid all the trendiness, Oja said it's still a simple plate of ground meat gravy with mashed potatoes that warms a chef's heart.

He expressed concern over the decline of real food culture as authentic markets are being replaced by stylish Instagram hubs where house music plays, people sip IPAs, eat craft burgers in food alleys, snap photos and do everything but connect with true culinary roots.

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Every year, the National Institute for Health Development issues dietary guidelines. Do you read them?

I have to admit, I've never read them in previous years. This year, I was actually asked to read them. Public television even asked me to create a recipe — baked whitefish with tomato and capers.

I must confess, I have a discreet expression for this type of work — I call it "ball pit work." It's inspired by the startup world where 70 percent of the people work hard and the remaining 30 percent are eating pizza in the ball pit.

The outcome of the dietary guidelines reminded me of a situation where someone had to do something, so they just went ahead and did it — for the sake of doing it. The problem is that the intended audience can't actually absorb this information. If I'm not mistaken, it was 74 pages of highly scientific content, which might be fascinating for a fanatic to analyze, but we're supposed to be addressing ordinary people. Especially in this day and age, it should be half a page and easy to digest.

Until 2022, we lived without dietary guidelines and survived. Since then, they've been issued. But it seems they don't really matter to a top chef.

Yes, I always say playfully that I'm in the pleasure business. I've also cooked for top athletes in my life and I probably used a bit more butter than the guidelines recommend. They've been very happy and delivered great results and I think our collaboration will continue in that format — forever.

The media world has changed since the turn of the century. Looking back through history, I found that the first TV cooking shows and culinary competitions appeared in the media in 1999 — not in Estonia, but globally, and later on in Estonia as well. Do you remember TV chefs like Rain Käärst or Jazz?

Yes, I clearly remember Jazz, Martti Koppel and Rain. I remember pretty much all of them.

You were very young then.

I was very young, yes — probably around eight years old. Sunday mornings went like this: I'd wake up, the porridge was already made, I'd grab my bowl and rush to the TV to watch men cooking sausage gravy or making some other homely, playful dish.

As strange as it may sound, I had two show formats I followed religiously on Sundays: one was Formula 1, which aired on a Finnish channel, and the other was the TV chefs. There was something captivating about them, even back then.

In 25 years, we've reached a point where cooking has become part of the entertainment industry. Whether it's social media, a TV subscription or a streaming platform — everyone has their own cooking show or culinary competition. Has cooking really become entertainment?

I think entertainment often comes from things people would like to do, but aren't able to do themselves. The same goes for sports — it's entertaining, but the average viewer likely can't run hurdles in eight seconds.

Likewise, the average cooking show viewer probably can't replicate those recipes, but somehow, it's still enchanting. I believe one reason culinary entertainment resonates so much with people is that it's relaxing. They say that flowing water, a burning fire and watching someone else work are among the most meditative things you can experience.

If you enjoy things like that, maybe you should join the fire department — fire burns, water flows.

Water flows and others are working, yes, but in that case, you have to work too. Where's the relaxation in that? I actually arrived at the radio station half an hour early today and just watched everyone bustling around — it was a very relaxing moment in the middle of my workday.

I have to admit, I don't watch a lot of today's cooking shows. Streaming platforms do have a very specific niche that speaks to professional chefs — where highly technical recipes are made and food is discussed at a chemical level — that's the kind of content I consume. But culinary entertainment, like watching something like "MasterChef Australia" or "Culinary Wars" — I don't watch that myself, because that's essentially my job.

If you want to see how top chefs work, do you also need to be strong in chemistry and physics?

I think I'm fairly strong in those areas — within my own field. If someone asked me to start solving equations... I can't even imagine. Let's just say I'm not stepping into the defense industry anytime soon — I probably wouldn't know how to mix explosives.

But what about poisoning people?

I haven't studied that deliberately — if anything, I'd poison them with great flavor. Culinary chemistry and food technology are definitely things that any self-respecting, technically skilled chef has to keep learning. It's an inevitable part of the job.

We've talked about local stars. But do you have any favorites among international ones: Gordon Ramsay, Joe Bastianich, Tiffany Derry, Anthony Bourdain, Manu Feildel, Colin Fassnidge, Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Fernand Point, Ferran Adrià?

Maybe three of them were truly, truly great, deeply technical chefs before they became TV personalities — like Ferran Adrià and Ramsay. The rest have mostly been great performers who are strongly connected to food.

To circle back to the previous question for a moment: the other day I was reading a 25-page dissertation about how to make pasta sauce. The sauce consists of black pepper, Pecorino Romano cheese and water. Making it is incredibly complex because it involves a very specific physical and chemical process. It was absurdly ridiculous to find myself studying something like that.

Let's tie these two topics together. We began with the dietary guidelines issued by the National Institute for Health Development, but similar guidelines also come out of the United States, Sweden and elsewhere. On the other side, there's cooking and culinary shows, entertainment, social media and blogs. What influences what we like and don't like? Are we more influenced by what the National Institute for Health Development puts out or by what we see on TV?

Unfortunately, people are largely influenced by what they see on their phone screens. Don't get me wrong — I don't have medical expertise, but if you look at the "new" food pyramid from the U.S., it's essentially the old pyramid flipped completely upside down: you're advised to eat butter, steak and drink raw milk for breakfast... That kind of keto-style diet was already being promoted five to ten years ago by young, ultra-fit fitness influencers on social media: eat as much protein as you can, build muscle and that's the key to eternal life. But we don't really know if it is

I'm meeting with Dr. Viigimaa next week and I'll ask him what he thinks about all of this.

As a consumer, I'm a little scared — if someone eats egg yolks, beef and a stick of butter every morning, I can't imagine what their cholesterol levels are going to look like.

It seems to me that a lot of serious issues are being decided at the national level not based on what's actually right or what people need to be educated about, but based on what's already trending on social media — like, "let's design the pyramid this way because people are eating like that anyway." The same way politicians are doing TikTok dances — because it works, so let's do it. They could just act statesmanlike — but no, they have to dance on TikTok.

It feels like the same thing is happening with nutrition: since the entire social media landscape is doing it, we'll do it too and say this is the right thing. But 20 years from now, we'll redesign the pyramid again because by then, there will be some new trend.

You have a restaurant that serves Italian food. That includes a lot of wheat — pasta, bread and so on. Is that healthy?

I said right from the start that I'm not in the health business, but the question of whether something is healthy mostly comes down to quantity. If someone eats pasta three times a day, I can assure you — there's nothing healthy about that. But if it's once a week or even once a day — by all means, go ahead.

Let's look at the two longest-living populations: Italians and Japanese. They have very different diets, but one thing they have in common is seafood. Health isn't only about what you put in your mouth — it's also about your social connections, your hard-earned standard of living, your fitness habits. Saying that cream isn't healthy would just be unfairly blaming the cream.

In Sardinia, the oldest-living Italians eat pasta once a day; for breakfast, they have a cookie and coffee. And the cookie is, of course, made with plenty of sugar and butter. But they all live happily — they walk a lot, consume things in smart amounts, likely have a glass of red wine a day and eat good fats.

I've never once felt that the food we prepare is somehow wildly unhealthy. It's people's habits that make things unhealthy and that's something we each get to decide for ourselves in a free world.

Hosting "MasterChef Estonia" and promoting the idea of watching others cook — aren't you worried that you're creating competition for yourself? That people will stop going to restaurants and start making fancy dishes at home instead?

I'd be happy if people cooked at home. Walk around London or Paris and step into the food sections of major shopping centers — they're packed wall to wall with ready-made meals in boxes. Apartments don't even have kitchens anymore. I think it's unhealthy when people stop cooking altogether.

Among the U.S. dietary guidelines was a recommendation to avoid processed foods. Would you say the same?

Yes, absolutely. I just believe that any kind of doing-it-yourself is a positive thing. If a person goes and picks up the newspaper from the mailbox instead of lying in bed scrolling news on their phone until 2 p.m. — that's already something.

If someone cooks for themselves, there can't be anything wrong with that, especially if they're using fresh ingredients.

That also applies to flour: flour can be ultra-refined and stripped of nutrients, but it can also be very nutrient-rich. It's a matter of choice which one you use. The whiter the flour, the less it contains. The more whole grain it includes, the more fiber and health benefits it offers and the less cholesterol. Eat whole grain oats and be happy!

At some point, people started criticizing what places like Hesburger and McDonald's serve, even though they're called restaurants. The situation got especially amusing when the exact same food started appearing on street corners, but was then called "street food" and seen as trendy. It's just a different label, even though it's essentially the same thing — fries are fries. What's your take on that?

Things naturally tend to change over time. If you study McDonald's history, it actually started as a drive-in restaurant — people drove up in their cars and servers on roller skates brought the food right to them.

Food cultures and cuisines vary around the world. In America, it was a drive-in restaurant serving food typical for the western states: burgers and fries. At some point, it became a large franchise and chain. With that kind of growth, you lose the image of a grandma in the kitchen shaping burger patties by hand — now they come from central warehouses and have to last longer and so on. In part, it's an evolutionary story — how McDonald's turned from a restaurant into a fast-food chain or something else entirely. That's just the organic course of things.

As for street food — yes, "street food" really is a funny term.

Just as funny as "artisanal sandwich."

I agree 100 percent. Or when someone calls their beer a craft beer...

There's a company called BrewDog that passed the billion-dollar mark five years ago. That puts them far ahead of our local A. Le Coq or Saku, yet somehow BrewDog is still considered craft beer, while Saku is just beer. Where's the logic? Or maybe there are just a whole lot of people inside that billion-dollar company doing artisanal work. I'd really like someone to explain that to me.

But street food originally comes from the heart of cultural centers — if you walk around Manhattan or Marrakech, there are people selling food right on the street. Here, that wasn't the case, because under the Soviet system, selling food on the street wasn't allowed. The only "street food" was the copper cup chained to the soda machine — you could get kvass there, I think. That was our version of a street drink.

Now that it's finally possible to serve food on the street, the terms uulitsasöök or street food have emerged and that's probably where the whole expression comes from.

Café, bistro, restaurant, canteen, buffet — how do you tell the difference? Or is it like with McDonald's: if the owners label it a "fast-food restaurant," then it's a restaurant?

All of those words have roots and original meanings. A bistro, for example, is a restaurant with simpler food and always with a French influence.

Supposedly, the word came from Alexander II's occupation of Paris.

Yes — "bistro, bistro," meaning "quickly, quickly." My grandmother told me that story when I was 12. Every one of these terms has its own backstory. But to me, they're all still restaurants in the broader sense. That's the ABC of food terminology hygiene — a restaurant is a place where you can get food. Whether it's a fast-food restaurant or has some other prefix, it's still a restaurant. Then you have fine dining restaurants and even a buffet is, in the end, a restaurant. "Restaurant" is a universal term.

Even a home restaurant counts. If you have a card terminal at home and invite ten friends over, suddenly you've got a home restaurant.

Is it the same as a place like NOA Chef's Hall or 180°? Probably not. But the host should still have the right to feel dignified about it.

How do you seek out flavors? You're about to open your fourth food establishment — you must follow some trend to give it a name, a concept, a class, a flavor. There has to be some dominant trend because at the end of the day, you're also an entrepreneur, not just a chef.

I've taken a pretty selfish path and don't really chase trends. I go after what I personally like and most of my inspiration comes from travel. Each of my food establishments has flown a different flag: a pizzeria, a Korean spot, Italian and now a Mexican place. I used to do deep fine dining before.

For a demanding palate.

Yes, I used to work in places with fixed menus, offering only signature cuisine. Back then, inspiration came from much simpler places — every dish had a story behind it, whether it was a memory, a life experience or something drawn from nature.

Today, I serve dishes that are fundamental to the country whose cuisine I'm offering. The selfish part comes from the fact that four or five years ago, I was tired as a chef — tired of trying to speak to fine dining customers and constantly creating things from scratch at a deep level. I wanted to start learning again, not just keep creating.

Right now, I'm in a culinary phase where I choose a cuisine and start learning it from the ground up — the history of that cuisine and country and the culture of its people.

In addition to physics and chemistry, you also have to know...

Now I want to be an anthropologist too. With the Mexican restaurant, it was simple — we flew there, explored, ate and brought in local guides who told us about everyday life, traditional foods and celebratory dishes. Then we began learning how to make them.

These days, I'm more interested in developing myself than catering to the customer.

There's one dish that's very difficult to offer in Estonia — Central Asian plov, which needs to be slow-cooked for six to seven hours. There are probably many other dishes around the world that restaurant owners won't offer for economic reasons.

Ingredient limitations always come into play. Yes, we live in a coastal country and we do have air connections, but our airport is about the size of an average liquor store. Nothing comes to us directly.

If you're in London, Berlin or Stockholm, you can get any ingredient you want — which already gives the customer a much more authentic taste experience. Flying in ultra-premium tuna to Estonia is a massive special order. Sure, you can get it here — I'm not saying it's impossible — but the final cost is absurd.

Assuming it hasn't been deep-frozen.

Exactly. It gets so absurd in the end that no one ends up buying it — people just aren't willing to spend that kind of money. You can do it, it's possible, but it just doesn't make economic sense.

Since we're on the topic of ingredients — it's been said that there are only about ten farms in Estonia capable of supplying local produce that meets the standards of top chefs. Is that what fine dining is?

I'd say that figure is more or less accurate — maybe there are a few more than ten, but the real issue is that there just aren't many. Ideally, it should be normal for all restaurants to use Estonian potatoes, parsley and locally sourced lamb, beef, pork or chicken.

When it comes to fresh vegetables, unfortunately, our growing season is short — you only get tomatoes for about three months a year and it's the same with strawberries.

The truth is, there are very few farmers who go to the effort of doing this and I think just as few chefs are willing to engage with it. Dealing with supply chains and price negotiations is a hassle and that's why it often just doesn't get done.

So the urban legend about the head chef going to the market early in the morning to sniff and touch the produce...

No, that's not an urban legend. I've done it myself — when I worked at NOA Chef's Hall, it was part of our daily routine. We'd go to the Central Market (Keskturg), touch, examine and gently stroke the produce.

Now, I don't know whose conscience I should appeal to, but I've long wanted to say publicly: five years ago, the Central Market was practically the only market in Tallinn where you could experience what a real market should feel like. You could buy morels, porcini and all kinds of seasonal goodies from elderly women. It was exactly what a market should be — the floor was a bit grimy, some guy was smoking in the corner and you could get an excellent cheburek from the side of the market. You did your shopping, paid and went your way — everyone was happy.

Today, markets have been turned into Instagram products. If you go to the Central Market now, many of those women are no longer there because everyone has to meet a bunch of regulations. House music plays from speakers, there's a fancy roof overhead and of course, every "proper" food market has to have a food alley where ten different vendors sell that ever-present "street food."

Honestly, I'm deeply saddened that if I want to get duck eggs from someone's backyard — even just for personal use — I can't anymore.

Definitely not from a store.

Exactly — definitely not from a store. The real market trade has been phased out and I'm 100 percent convinced that the Central Market will eventually turn into a cool glass building full of artisanal sandwiches and overpriced tomatoes for Finnish tourists to gawk at in stacks.

The market — as in the real thing, a bazaar where you can find anything — that's sadly disappearing. And that severely limits chefs who are real market enthusiasts. [Tõnis] Siigur is an old market legend who knows all the little old ladies there — he's the one who helped me reconnect with those who'll pick the most beautiful wild strawberries just for you.

That's actually one of the coolest parts of this job: being able to get things that no one else can source for you. But once all those grannies are cleared out of the market — largely because of bureaucracy, which these 75-year-old women will likely never learn to navigate — you're actively destroying food culture and replacing it with a kind of food alley where someone's selling barbecue ribs that have nothing to do with what we might consider our national identity.

Sure, those craft burgers and all that stuff are tasty and probably great, but in the end, the market as a concept disappears. It turns into a stylish hangout spot where people go to snap cool photos, drink hoppy IPAs and do other "fun" things. To me, that's just bleak.

It probably doesn't make much sense to ask how you rate the selection in our larger grocery stores — whether it's good enough for someone to make something high-quality at home, let alone for a top chef to walk in and whip something up?

I don't want to give the wrong impression. I'm not saying the products aren't high-quality. If I go to the market next to the train station [Balti Jaama turg], I can always find quality goods there. I can get quality products at Kaubamaja or Stockmann as well.

But they're definitely not the same products I could get 35 percent cheaper from the elderly ladies at the Central Market. The quality is still there, but the prices are ridiculous and the products are often not from Estonia.

You've said that you can tell from a photo whether a place is worth visiting or not. Do you stand by that?

Yes.

Both in Estonia and abroad?

Yes.

You've also said that there are about ten top restaurants in Estonia — places you genuinely enjoy going to.

Yes. There are maybe five that are truly at the top in terms of both price point and technical quality. And then there are another five to seven places where I go from time to time for a casual meal.

There's a little spot called Siiam by the Pärnu maantee overpass, where there's a plastic tablecloth and a radiator in the corner. You walk in and can barely breathe because the pan is always filled with chili, but the Thai food is so incredible that the flavor alone — along with the chili fumes — brings tears to your eyes. You eat off a paper plate and everyone's happy. I really like places like that, too.

Before coming on the show, did you eat at our building's "staff canteen"?

Absolutely.

Are you still alive?

I'm alive — and I've got a decent helping of buckwheat with a pork schnitzel and a fried egg in my stomach. I ate it, had about 20 minutes to spare, pulled my hat down over my eyes, let my thoughts wander and took a quick nap. That's actually a habit I picked up from Mart Juur — who, as it happens, was just walking in the door at the time — a little power nap. It was lovely. And in that moment, I found myself thinking about cafeteria food in general.

There's something about those gravy-and-cutlet places — it's not necessarily a culinary experience you go seeking out, of course, and they're probably not aiming to offer one either — but eating there always brings something back to you. When I eat a cutlet with flour-based gravy, I remember being at our summer cottage in Lohusalu where my grandmother would make that exact kind of simple home-cooked lunch. Afterward, I'd run barefoot through the woods.

That always comes back to me. Food really amplifies memories and good emotions. Let's leave aside those mornings when you're in a rush, eating cottage cheese out of a plastic cup with a spoon, but conscious eating — I always want it to remind me of something.

So even in a top chef's life, there's a place for boiled or mashed potatoes and ground meat gravy?

Yesterday I catered an event for a high-end car brand. Before that, we had our daily family meal at the restaurant — at four o'clock, the food is prepared, the whole restaurant team eats together and then we get ready for dinner service. That day, they made ground meat gravy and mashed potatoes — not just plain mashed potatoes, but with a bit of onion, which had been sautéed beforehand.

That's chef's valerian! They go crazy when there's a pot of simmering ground meat sauce and mashed potatoes. It's because when you're surrounded by the smell of truffles and black caviar every day, these kinds of dishes just warm your soul.

You're sitting there with five other top chefs, everyone eating mashed potatoes and swapping stories from their childhood — there's something so heartwarming about it. I went back for seconds and my eyes were bright.

You've said you hope every Estonian goes out to eat at least once a week. Has that dream come true? It's not something you can really ask everyone.

That's a massive statistic, of course — we've had trouble even completing the census in recent years, let alone figuring out numbers like that. But I do feel that Estonians are eating out quite a bit. Maybe they eat slightly less than before in terms of quantity, but they still go and support restaurants.

Why have I said that? Not because there's some huge restaurant industry agenda behind it. For all I care, an Estonian could just as well go to the theater, a museum or take a walk with their family once a week. Just something where you're with your friends, loved ones or acquaintances, taking the edge off and enjoying the moment.

A restaurant just happens to be a very dignified and simple way to do that: you have a glass of wine, a meal and talk about life and everything else — flavors, the future, the past. It's simply a positive experience.

That leads to working with people and working with people is difficult. I mean in the kitchen and service side, not the guests. It would be easier if everything were cheaper — lower VAT on food and lower labor taxes. That's something your colleagues and the industry association constantly bring up. Do you agree that lower VAT or labor taxes would help develop restaurant and food culture in Estonia?

I entered this business at a funny time. When I started cooking, we had just come out of the financial crisis.

That time wasn't funny for a lot of people.

Throughout my entire professional career, there's been some kind of problem every single year: the financial crisis, COVID, tax hikes, wars. There's always something.

I can't even imagine what Estonia's restaurant business looked like when everything was rosy and people were just spending money. I don't think I've ever seen that so-called "good time." If it ever happens, I'll personally reach out to you and say, "Damn, now it's amazing — I bought three Mercs and two houses, don't need to work a single day more and I'm moving to Thailand!" But I doubt that's going to happen in my lifetime.

Would a VAT reduction help? Absolutely. But I'm a bit of a humanist and I'd say — even though there are certainly things that could be done in business and specifically in this sector to improve the dynamics and help us survive and thrive — there are other problems in this country that are probably worth addressing a lot more urgently.

So you don't see any urgent issues in your sector that need a rapid fix and would suddenly bring happiness to your doorstep?

I'd like to believe I'm someone who tries to see both the good and the bad in things — fairly.

I've never publicly spoken about my family life in the media, but the tone of this interview feels right, so I'll say this: my father, who has since passed away, was disabled — he was in a wheelchair. It was extremely difficult for him to manage many everyday tasks. And when I saw the level of state support for people like him — it was practically nonexistent. He had to deal with endless bureaucracy just to get someone to repair his wheelchair. That's a real problem — one that affects real people and urgently needs fixing.

What's not a real problem is some guy driving an Audi to a restaurant and complaining that his steak costs two euros more. That's a problem for good times.

As someone who believes that everyone deserves a dignified life and even though I work in the restaurant business myself, I don't want to push too hard for this sector. I don't want to be the spokesperson for the restaurant industry, even though I've been asked to take on that role many times.

To come and lament the situation.

Right — "everyone knows you, maybe you can push for some kind of change." But this isn't the first thing I'd try to change in life.

If I were given five things to fix in this country, the restaurant industry's problems wouldn't even make the top 25.

But food culture is part of culture.

Of course it is, but the real problem is when a low-income family can no longer afford to buy food from the store. That's what we should address first. My previous answer was only about the restaurant side.

Logic tells me that competition should drive prices down, but we've ended up in some kind of deep social paradox or phenomenon where you drive out to Viimsi and there are four supermarkets within a square kilometer, all in shopping centers...

... and they're all open until 10 p.m.

They're all open until 10 p.m. and one is more expensive than the next. That's confusing to me — how is that even possible?

So what amazes you isn't David Copperfield's magic, but this — how can it be that the same product has such different prices in different stores? Ingredient prices. You've been to Mexico, you've traveled around Europe and compared prices. I honestly don't quite understand, even when comparing countries with a similar standard of living, why in some places here prices are just so inflated.

I'd gladly invite economist Peeter Koppel to join this conversation as a co-commentator.

Or Indrek Kasela — "four euros for a coffee, are you out of your mind?"

Indrek Kasela would be a great option too, of course.

Why are certain things more expensive in our restaurants? That I know very well. For example, when I order mortadella to Estonia...

What's that?

It's an Italian sausage — technically, it's a cooked sausage, but made in Italy. It looks a bit fancier than our local baloney or doktorivorst. For the local consumer here, mortadella is seen as something exotic: discreet, elegant, refined. But for an Italian, mortadella is just something you slap between two slices of bread and take with you for a quick bite. On the Italian market, mortadella costs about the same as doktorivorst does here. But to get it to Estonia...

That already tacks a serious premium onto the price. The transporter wants to get paid, the importer wants to make a margin. In reality, the restaurant is the last link in the chain — applying the smallest markup — yet it's the first to get blamed. No one goes to yell at the logistics company or the wholesaler when something is expensive.

Then why don't you just use doktorivorst instead?

That's where a social question comes in: is there anyone out there promoting doktorivorst on Instagram, wearing cool clothes, adding a trendy filter and saying, "This is my morning routine — I make myself a little bowl of muesli and a baloney sandwich"?

It seems we haven't reached that point culturally. Which, by the way, is pretty funny.

And wait until you try maksavorst (liver sausage)!

Exactly. I think there's a bit of cultural shame hiding in all this. As Estonians, we're just not proud of certain things. An Italian is proud of their version of baloney, but an Estonian isn't proud of ours. There's a certain awkwardness. I don't know why that is.

Elsewhere in the world, raw ingredients are significantly cheaper and, of course, the food industries are massively larger — they have enough for themselves and for export. It's also a matter of scale: take the folks at Nopri [farm], for example — they make excellent products, but it's incredibly difficult for them to break into large markets and successfully expand their business.

Nopri products and many Estonian farm goods are excellent. At some markets, you even know the seller who'll honestly tell you where something came from and whether they recommend it. So in truth, everything is here, but we just can't compete in terms of volume.

And that's exactly the big problem in our country — we can't produce volume.

That talk about baloney makes me wonder: are there things that are just overhyped? I looked at the menus at your restaurants — there's a bit of truffle there. There was a time when truffle was being added to everything. Is there anything else that's gone too far? There's a matcha craze going on now.

Yeah, the matcha craze is definitely happening. At one point, everyone was eating poke bowls and then came the skyr yogurt trend — like it was something dramatically different from the yogurt we've been eating for decades. It's just that the label says skyr.

It reminds me of a particular precedent. There's that ice cream brand Häagen-Dazs. It's an American brand, but they named it Häagen-Dazs because Denmark sounded more trustworthy. It was just smart PR.

I feel like a lot of dairy products and kombucha... I mean, that tea fungus was stinking up my mom's kitchen for as long as I can remember, but once someone slapped the name kombucha on it, everyone suddenly started drinking it.

Sometimes people are just foolish creatures and that's never going to change.

Eat sauerkraut, not kimchi.

Kimchi is sauerkraut — it's just got chili flakes added. The entire fermentation process from start to finish is basically identical.

As for truffles and caviar, those have always been luxury goods. People are drawn to luxury items, like Wagyu beef or whatever the latest trend may be.

We don't serve truffles in restaurants that aren't tied to Italian cuisine. You won't find them in our Mexican or Korean spots.

But if you ask me what feels trendy and a bit silly right now, the first thing that comes to mind is the matcha phenomenon. People are making matcha lattes and all sorts of other things. And I get the feeling that not a single place is serving matcha the way it's actually meant to be consumed.

I don't actually know how it's supposed to be drunk.

It's traditionally mixed with water using a special matcha whisk and there's a whole ceremonial process around it — that's how it's meant to be consumed. But instead, you'll find matcha cheesecake, matcha lattes, matcha snack bars...

As we know, matcha has a slightly dusty taste — it's kind of like raw turmeric. There's nothing inherently beautiful about the flavor; it's actually a fairly odd-tasting thing. But still, people are desperate to shove it into cheesecake...

Personally, I wouldn't. I have a lot of respect for matcha, but only when it's drunk the way it's meant to be.

Is there something in Estonia that we've underestimated — something we could promote more to become the next Denmark or the next skyr?

I've always said that our dairy industry is very strong. We don't need to keep repeating the black bread and sprat story — that's already in our DNA, we don't need to emphasize it too much.

The third word in the Constitution might as well be "sour cream."

Our dairy products. Just lay out everything from Nopri — their cream cheeses, yogurts, curds. We're a dairy nation.

Luckily, we don't have as many lactose-intolerant people as some of our neighbors and for those who are, I'd politely ask them to tough it out.

I truly believe cheese is something we excel at. The variety of cheeses made by our farms — like the ones from Andre Farm — are world-class, even by global standards.

Have you or do you plan to take part in the battles between omnivores and vegans?

No, I can't be bothered with other people's problems.

But for a while, it was a really fundamental issue.

In good times, people feel the need to fight hard for all kinds of principles — often ones that don't actually need fighting for.

Do you still cook yourself?

Since I'm currently building a home, the one thing I don't have right now is a kitchen. But yes, I cook in the restaurants.

Let's hope the time never comes in Estonia when kitchens start disappearing from homes.

Exactly. Anyone who has the chance — build a wood-fired stove at home. It's an especially lovely way to cook.

It gives a different kind of flavor.

Yes.

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