ALBERT FRANCH SUNYER
AT HELSINKI ZERO-WASTE RESTAUR ANT NOLLA, CHEF ALBERT FRANCH SUNYER DEDICATES HIMSELF TO BEING ENVIRO NMENTALLY AWARE AND CELEBR ATING LOCAL PRODUCE IN ALL ITS FORMS.
“I remember ver y well,” says Albert Franch Sunyer of his light bulb moment. “I was inside one of the rubbish rooms in a restaurant in Helsinki. There were five big containers and you couldn’t walk into the room because of the amount of trash.” It was filled with bio-waste and vast amounts of packaging, all kept fiercely air-conditioned round the clock, he recalls.
At the time, the Catalan-born chef was three years into a series of stints in the Finnish capita l’s top kitchens, including two-Michelinstar Chez Dominique (now closed) and Olo (one star). The latter is where he met chefs Carlos Henriques and Luka Balac, with whom he’d go on to establish Nolla, the first zero-waste restaurant in the Nordics.
There’s no kitchen bin at Nolla. No singleuse packaging and no cling film or disposable food containers. Serving plates are made from waste clay, kitchen uniforms upcycled from discarded textiles and water glasses made with used bottles from the Presidential Palace. There’s even a high-tech composter, nicknamed Lauri, in the dining room, from which data is recorded, analysed and presented at weekly team meetings.
Ingredients, meanwhile, are sourced directly from producers in order to cut down on packaging. Only salt and sugar, in compostable paper bags, are supplied by a wholesa ler. Each ingredient presents its own challenges, from the sourcing of Finnish ginger and tomatoes to decanting the 1,750 - pint vats of Finnish rapeseed oil (delivered twice a year to Franch Sunyer’s parking space outside the restaurant) into carafes that can be stored in the basement.
It ’s all a far cry from that rubbish room encounter. But while that moment was a catalyst of sorts, Franch Sunyer’s interest in environmental issues can be traced back to his childhood in Catalonia. His hometown, Sallent, is a 6,000 -person mining communit y, where the largest mountain on the horizon is an artificial pile of sodium chloride waste. His formative childhood memories aren’t, t herefore, in his family’s kitchen, but as “a youngster engaged in environmental protest groups, trying to solve the problem”.
After leaving school, Franch Sunyer began a biolog y degree before deciding to pursue a career in pastry. “Restaurant pastr y,” he qualifies. “I had a clear idea that I wanted to be a ‘desser ter’.” He turned down a hardearned place at Ba rcelona’s Espai Sucre school, however, when he landed a pastry chef role at Michelin-starred restaurants Angle and ABaC, run by chef Jordi Cruz.
After four years
