Off-Script: Jordnær’s Eric Kragh Vildgaard On Love And Hate And Cucumber Salads

Eric Kragh Vildgaard runs his hand across his freshly shaved head. The word ‘hate’ is tattooed across his knuckles. And three Michelin stars hang in his restaurant, called Jordnær, in Copenhagen. But right now, in a kitchen in Saigon, he’s getting emotional over a cucumber salad.

Tina made him choose, he remembers. Be a gangster or a family man. And Eric Kragh Vildgaard chose family. “Or I’d be in prison or dead by now for sure,” he says. “I thank her sometimes.” Then he catches himself. “Actually, I thank her a few times a day.”

Both sides of Eric still exist. “Am I swearing too much?” he asks early in the interview as if to prove it. He’s taken the morning off during his holidays exploring Saigon with Tina and their six kids to check in with the team at CoCo Dining – he first came last February, before they earned their own MICHELIN star – and try a dish Chef Vuong’s been working on under the watchful eye of CoCo’s Managing Director, Daniel Dang.

Eric And Tina Are Down-To-Earth At Jordnær 

‘Not at all,’ we assure him, and we mean it. It’s that lack of pretense – the refusal to sand down the rough edges – that made a friend suggest he and Tina call their restaurant Jordnær. The name means ‘down-to-earth’ in Danish.

At Jordnær, she runs the front of house, he runs the kitchen, and they built the operation together as partners. 

Nothing about either of them feels polished for show. The restaurant only opens Tuesday through Friday so they can have normal lives with their six kids. The dining room seats 25. The chefs outnumber the front-of-house staff because Eric and his team bring the dishes out themselves. 

Then there’s the cuisine itself. Caviar with Cauliflower Cream, Double Cream & Walnut Oil, King Crab, Mussels & Sake, their take on Chawanmushi and Bread & Butter. You’ve heard of ugly delicious food? What they do at Jordnær is brutally beautiful.

Big. Chunky. Tattoos. And The Language Of Love.

“I am quite a brutal looking guy,” Eric admits. “Big. Chunky. Tattoos. Then you see my creations that are very delicate. This is the language I learned to talk through cooking. And that language is love.”

The passion comes through not just in his food. He gets “culinary goosebumps” when he tastes something exciting. “Something that makes me react subconsciously.”

He’s getting them right now tasting Chef Vuong’s ‘Salad Not Salad.’ Raised 10,000km apart, Eric and Vuong both survived tough upbringings – Eric on the wrong side of Copenhagen, Chef Vuong in a poor fishing village near Phan Thiet. His decorative but delicious ‘Salad Not Salad’ is a delicate bowl of herbs and edible flowers that Eric tells him wouldn’t look out of place on the menu at Jordnær.

“How can you two guys, with your tough upbringings, make beautiful food like this?” Daniel wonders.

“I think this expression comes from within,” Eric suggests, pointing at the plate. “All humans are born with good intentions and a beautiful soul. It’s like hatching an egg. It takes a longer time for some people like me and Vuong because there’s not enough warmth and nurturing.”

“I’m almost emotional now,” Eric admits, taking another spoonful. Maybe it’s the reminiscenes of a time before all this as much as the food.

Same Ambience Different Outcome

“I did just want to be a gangster,” he shrugs with the purity usually reserved for more wholesome career directions – becoming an accountant or an engineer. “That was my dream.”

But in cooking, he discovered focus. “It had the same ambience but with a different outcome,” he laughs. And it offered an escapism that felt real. Having a brother in the industry helped. Torsten, who’s also a three-star chef now, together with Björn Frantzén at FZN in Dubai helped him get his start in the industry. 

“And his restaurant became the fastest three-star in the world after only six months open. He’s my biggest inspiration,” Eric explains proudly.

For Vuong it was a different kind of escapism that led him here. There was a cooking show on the TV he’d watch every day. “Before school I’d turn the TV on and be transfixed by the program,” he remembers. That led him to culinary school in Saigon, and from there an extended apprenticeship under Sakal Pheoung. 

Proving Everyone Wrong 

At thirteen, Eric was sent to a ‘therapy ship’ on the North Sea. He was assigned to cook for the crew and discovered something: making people happy felt better than making them angry. By the time he was opening Jordnær, he was already confident enough to stake a lot on its success. He’d even promised his landlord a MICHELIN star within two years in exchange for a rent cut. It arrived in nine months.

That moment, when he got his first star in 2018, remains the most meaningful. But the two sides – gangster and family man – emerge again. Lots of his recollections are about proving a fellow chef who disparaged him wrong. 

At the Danish eating guide awards a year earlier – “which is a big thing in Denmark” – Jordnær was nominated as breakthrough of the year. They didn’t win. The chef next to him, working for a company with a lot of money and facilities but without any stars, told Eric to go home and practice.

“We knew we’d had some MICHELIN inspections,” Eric remembers. “They called my name at the ceremony, for the star, and I looked at him and said ‘it looks like I practiced.'”

But when they called his name for the MICHELIN star, he remembers people were laughing behind his back. “People were saying what possibility does this criminal have of succeeding in this industry.”

If You Can Get One, You Can Get Two

“I came down from the stage with one star on my chest, my wife was about to give birth to our second child. A journalist put a microphone in my face. I’m always saying something stupid. And I said, if you can get one you can get two.”

“We did it,” he says proudly, running his hand with ‘hate’ tattooed across the knuckles across his recently shaved head. 

And that’s another thing. 

His big, unnaturally woolly hair had led one journalist to talk about it more than the cuisine at Jordnær. “I found it super weird that journalists focused on my hair instead of my cooking,” he complains. So he cut it off a couple of days ago when he was in Phu Quoc. “It’ll grow back,” he smiles.

The Right Intentions

In 2020, Jordnær received its second MICHELIN star. “So, what did you do to go from one star to three?” Daniel asks.

“I just zoomed in with my focus. I asked why do we put this ingredient here? I stripped back as much as I could. Trying to be pure. When you’re insecure you put in too many ingredients,” Eric explains. 

“Take this,” he says, looking at the ‘Salad Not Salad’ again. “It’s a good dish. It has intention. Cucumbers from the garden and beautiful herbs. How do you do this? You underline it by lifting it with some acidity and some crunch for texture. It’s intelligent.”

Just as it was for Eric, the MICHELIN accolade was a big milestone adding even more confidence to Vuong’s culinary creations, “and daring to serve me this cucumber ‘Salad Not Salad,'” Eric nods.

“There are two kinds of chefs,” Eric says. “Ones that shower like this” – he mimes cowering against the wall – “and ones that shower like this” – he turns to face us. “Be the second one.”

That means avoiding what Eric calls a “clusterf*ck on the palate.” His signature langoustine is a good example of the focus on stripped-back pure flavor over complexity. The dish highlights the natural sweetness of the langoustine against the light, floral acidity of the sakura-infused butter sauce. That’s what he did, he reminds us again, to from one MICHELIN star to three. “Distill everything to its essence and offer no more than what’s absolutely needed.”

Really F*cking Sh*t

But in early 2023, a fire ravaged the restaurant. “It was really f*cking sh*t,” Eric remembers gravely. “We were hanging on like that,” he raises his arm in demonstration, “with the f*cking last fingernail since we don’t have an investor,” he shakes his head. 

Fortunately, the Gentofte Hotel – part of the Arp-Hansen Hotel Group – within which Jordnær is located, helped, meaning they only closed for six weeks. “And that probably gave us the impetus to push on for the third star,” he reckons.

“You can be a victim or a fighter, and I’ve been a fighter my whole life. So, the feeling of having to fight my way back was very good.”

The following year, he felt receiving the highest accolade in the industry was a possibility. “You reach a point where you think it could happen but nobody tells you. I was walking around Sunday – the ceremony was Monday – and I booked a ticket to return home from Helsinki in the morning. But then, I decided to stay on for the ceremony….”

He’s glad he did. That Monday in 2024, Jordnær joined Geranium and Noma, the two other restaurants in Copenhagen with the award. 

No Regrets 

Chef Vuong and Daniel at CoCo Dining find themselves at the same point Eric reached in 2018. At the ceremony at the InterContinental Sun Peninsula Danang, CoCo was the very last restaurant to be announced. Earlier, when the selected restaurants had been read out, it became clear that the list had been refined and some restaurants removed. It seemed like CoCo might not be getting a mention at all.

The elation was so great when CoCo Dining was eventually announced as the final recipient of a MICHELIN star of the evening that Chef Vuong, Daniel, and Vicky, the Marketing Director, couldn’t sleep and wandered down to the beach for sunrise. “Eric actually FaceTimed me,” Chef Vuong remembers. “To say well done.”

When Eric’s own three-star announcement came that Monday in Helsinki, he leapt up and punched the air like a Viking before wrapping Tina in a big hug. “The Vikings have been hibernating, but we’re still here,” Eric smiles finally. So is his gangster side even though Tina made him choose, and he has no regrets about that.