Sauli Kemppainen opened a new restaurant Atelier7

A carrot should taste like a carrot.

It is one chef and restaurateur Sauli Kemppainen favorite phrases, because in his opinion the raw material and its taste must be respected.

– If a carrot tastes like sesame, soy, ginger and chili, let’s go to the forest, a carrot should taste like a carrot. Piste, Kemppainen, who became familiar to the general public as the foul-mouthed kitchen manager of the TV show Hell’s Kitchen Suomi, download.

Kemppainen, who moved back to Finland from Germany a few years ago, has recently opened a new restaurant in Vallila in Helsinki’s Konepaja area.

In Berlin, Kemppainen had a one-Michelin-star Savu in the city’s refined area, whose ingredients were only from Spain, Italy and the North.

Now Kemppainen has freer hands in Atelier7 than ever before in his career. He doesn’t want to tie himself to anything other than good ingredients.

– The taste of the food is not compromised. I’d rather break the old rules and stir up an anthill. Gastronomic rules I learned at school don’t interest me at all. Instead, I am interested in logic, practicality, recycling and common sense. Taste is the most important of all, Kemppainen says directly.

Atelier7’s evening customer is the first to receive a small green bottle. Its contents should be swallowed in one go and burped before swallowing.

What on earth?

– What worries us is what the customer has done with his mouth in the last 15 minutes before he comes to the restaurant, Kemppainen explains.

If the customer has smoked a cigarette or eaten a strong lozenge just before dinner, the taste of food put in the mouth changes.

The small glass bottle contains 99 percent cucumber juice and 1 percent mint.

– We try to neutralize the balance of the customer’s mouth as close to zero as possible. It is important to think about what happens in the mouth. After that, the customer is ready for a cavalcade of tastes.

Kemppainen has come across a similar practice in the world, but so far nowhere else in Finland.

Atelier7’s ideology is that 1+1 is more than two. It means that even though there are only two ingredients in the dish, the range of flavors is much larger.

A good example is pumpkin soup with pumpkin and cheese. Despite the few ingredients, the soup is certainly the best pumpkin soup that the undersigned has ever eaten.

– Everything that comes off the pumpkin has been ripped out. The soup contains 100 percent pumpkin juice, 100 percent pumpkin meat, pumpkin vinegar, pumpkin seeds, pumpkin seed oil. They are stitched together by Swiss Emmental cheese matured for 55 months, which has a shockingly nutty, refined taste, says Kemppainen.

One plus one, i.e. pumpkin and Emmental are more together than you might suddenly imagine.

Kemppainen likes cooking and designing soups. It is difficult for him to rank his own soups, but it is certain that pumpkin soup is definitely in the top ten on that list.

A classic recipe that has been in the Kemppainen family for almost a hundred years has ended up in Atelier7’s kitchen.

– Grandma started, then mother, sister and now it’s my turn.

It is an island bread that Kemppainen has flavored with orange peel and fennel and anise seeds. Peltola’s hand-churned butter is served with the bread.

– It is the best butter that can be found in Finland.

Kemppainen designs menus and dishes that are not obvious.

– I intentionally confuse things. We have a little different food than others. I want the customer to think they’ve never seen or tasted anything like this. But the food has to go to the finish line, and no stupid risks are taken.

Kemppainen states that when you have been cooking for enough years, you no longer need to prove it. There may be only celery and lamb on the plate, but it’s still the best lamb the customer has ever eaten.

– Making it simple is difficult. But I don’t understand why you have to put everything possible on the plate.

Atelier7’s wine list and other alcohols have the same ideology as the food: they are a little different from what is available elsewhere.

Kemppainen doesn’t want a drink list with many pages, but a higher quality and more interesting one.

Mexican corn liquor is one of the restaurant’s specialties. So special that not even a restaurant manager has worked with alcohol for 26 years Miika Korpela had heard of it before.

– It’s my wife’s favorite. He is an expert in Mexican food, Kemppainen reveals.

Corn liqueur is now in cocktails as well as in the dessert that will be on the menu in the spring – and restaurant manager Korpela is convinced of its excellence.

For lunch, Atelier7 offers warm soup, an appetizer table, and a changing selection of proteins for €13.30. In addition, you can order one of five different warm dishes, in which case the whole package costs €17.30.