Norway wins silver at Bocuse d'Or 2023

Norway's Bocuse candidate, Filip August Bendi, and his team reached their goal of a podium finish at the 2023 Bocuse d'Or Grand Final in Lyon.

Norway’s culinary team has once again reached the podium, maintaining its position as the country with the most medals in the competition’s history, even ahead of France. This shows the extremely high level of Norwegian chefs and gastronomy. In addition, Norway's Leon Haarberg Nilsen won The Best Commis Chef Prize.

Next year, the Norwegian city of Trondheim will host the Bocuse d'Or Europe 2024. Trondheim and Trøndelag was European Region of Gastronomy 2022, and is considered Norway's premier food region.

“Killer instinct”

Filip August Bendi has been described as a highly creative chef with a “killer instinct” and is an unusually competitive person. When he was just 20 years old, Bendi travelled to Copenhagen and knocked on the door of the renowned restaurant Noma, looking for work. Noma's team rejected Bendi three times before sheer exasperation led them to giving him an apron and ordering him to take a seat in the kitchen. He stayed there for a whole year.

After his stint at Noma, Bendi headed to Stockholm in Sweden to work for Mathias Dahlgren, who is described as a chef's chef. The Norwegian-Italian chef has also worked at Daniel, in New York, which has two stars in the Michelin Guide and was named one of the world's 10 best restaurants by Forbes in 2019.

Since returning home to Norway, Bendi has, among other things, served as creative developer for the venerable Hotel Bristol in Oslo and worked at Thon Hotels, his current employer.

Some fun facts:

● Bendi's favourite ingredients are potatoes and onions.
● He has not had a kitchen in his own home for over half a year.
● One of the signature dishes he makes for friends and family is omelette (!).
● Filip is also interested in poetry, and has been writing poems since the age of 12 or 13.

One of the top chefs in the world

Bendi is not the only Norwegian chef to have brought home more than one medal from the competition. In 2021, two-time Bocuse d’Or Europe winner Christian André Pettersen secured his second international bronze medal, making him one of the most awarded chefs in the history of the competition.

Pettersen and his Norwegian team won medals in this extremely demanding competition no less than three times in three years: he won the Bocuse d'Or Europe in 2018, came in third in the international Bocuse d'Or competition in 2019, and won the Bocuse d'Or Europe for a second time in 2020.

In 2021, the jury awarded Pettersen, a talented Norwegian from the small northern city of Bodø, a bronze medal, cementing his reputation as one of the most extraordinary chefs on the planet.

Most awarded country

Bendi and Pettersen are only two among a wave of innovative and creative Norwegian master chefs leading the culinary revolution that has taken place in Norway in recent years.

Every second year, 24 of the most promising chefs in the world meet in Lyon in France to participate in the world’s most prestigious culinary competition. Since it was first held in 1987, Norway has won five gold, four silver, and four bronze medals in the international competition. Norway, together with France, is the country with the most international Bocuse d’Or awards.

There is something exciting cooking in the Nordics now, too – all three 2019 medallists and two of the 2021 and 2022 medallists are Scandinavian, making it a go-to region for food lovers. And now, two of the medallists in the 2023 world competition are Scandinavian. This means that the Nordic culinary wave is far from over … Are you ready to come and taste its delicious and innovative flavours? 

Bent Stiansen was the first Norwegian to achieve the grand award in 1993. Since then, Norwegian chefs have been represented in the international final 16 out of 18 times.

World-class cuisine

Many other Norwegian chefs have also gained an excellent international reputation. In addition, an increasing number of Norwegian restaurants have received stars in the Michelin guide in recent years. In 2016, Maaemo became the first restaurant in Norway to be awarded three Michelin stars. The opening of the world’s largest underwater restaurant Under in 2019, and the Michelin star it received in 2020, brought Norway even higher up on the bucket list of serious gourmets.

And there is more. Norwegian cheeses are winning a lot of medals at the World Cheese Awards. In 2016, the blue cheese Kraftkar from small local producer Tingvollost in Fjord Norway was chosen as the Champion of Champions – simply the best cheese of all time.

Norwegian ciders are now also considered among the finest in the world.

Frisky, witty and unpretentious

Some of the world’s most important food writers are now exploring the fresh Norwegian food scene. “Egalitarian and sincere, Norway’s version of New Nordic cooking is frisky, witty and unpretentious,” writes Alexander Lombrano in the New York Times, who even labels it “relatively affordable”.

He has a good point when he writes that the growing appeal of the Norwegian culinary scene “isn’t best defined by Michelin – where the dominant DNA is Gallic gastronomic refinement – but rather a delectable local food culture that’s based on the country’s spectacular seafood and produce, amped up by the brevity of its growing season.”