Summary
Meet Håkan Swahn, founder and majority owner of famed New York restaurant Aquavit. Swahn was relaxed and happy when we meet at his New York home in February this year. The flagship of his growing empire, Aquavit, has a solid place among America's three-star restaurants. And its management company, Townhouse Restaurant Group, recently opened Riingo, with the kitchen manned by former Aquavit-trainee Johan Svensson.
"My father was originally from Husqvarna, near Jönköping in Småland, and in the 1930s he worked moving furniture," Swahn related. "Sweden at the time had experienced an outbreak of tuberculosis. As the patients died, since their furniture could not be resold or stored, it had to be burned. One particular man had such nice furniture, my father and a colleague simply couldn't burn it." One such chair ended up in Håkan's grandfather's home -- and eventually with Håkan himself.The new Aquavit restaurant will seat slightly more guests than the original, up from 165 to 200. "We can't go bigger than that without becoming too close to a food factory," Swahn explained. "Restaurant business to me is show business -- we compete with Broadway, and we want the customer to come inside and spend up to two hours and forget about the outside world. We want to pamper him and seduce him, with the decor, the food, the ambiance and the service. This is what you pay for as you enter Aquavit, an experience out of the ordinary."See the full content of this document
Extract
A Life of Food
Meet Håkan Swahn, founder and majority owner of famed New York restaurant Aquavit. Swahn was relaxed and happy when we meet at his New York home in February this year. The flagship of his growing empire, Aquavit, has a solid place among America's three-star restaurants. And its management company, Townhouse Restaurant Group, recently opened Riingo, with the kitchen manned by former ...
See the full content of this document
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