Tia Strandberg: The Rising Star

At 22 years old, Tia Strandberg is not your average youth. Born and raised in Halmstad (a town in the Swedish south), in a big family with many siblings, food was never a stranger in the house. Nevertheless, Tia doesn’t really associate her childhood with food.

“Nobody in my family really did something with food, nothing that I would say counts. Of course my parents cooked, we were many siblings and we ate together as a family. One of my grandmothers is an excellent cook actually, but that’s something I realized recently. I've no real childhood memories of cooking with someone in my family.”

Although she doesn’t feel like her family influenced her choice, her history tells a different story. As a well-travelled family, Tia’s parents made sure the kids experienced the cultures of the places they visited, through food.

“We wanted to experience the food culture. We ate a lot of Swedish food as well but we we're raised to want to taste everything.”

Faced with the need to make a choice in what to study in high school, Tia was ready to choose an education that would give her many options. But in a twist that would completely change everything, she chose to study culinary arts. Tired of theoretical studies, a program focused on cooking gave Tia the chance to do something more stimulating.

“I started competing pretty early on” Tia explains. “We participated in the High School Swedish Culinary Championships and I thought it was super fun. Competing and interning allowed me to experience the culture of haute cuisine, which until then was hard to experience in Halmstad.”

After interning in Gothenburg and Palma de Mallorca, Tia moved to Stockholm before the summer of 2019, taking the position she still occupies at restaurant Hantverket. The mindset at Hantverket is not about achieving a fine dining status or Michelin stars. Good food is what matters to the team.

Acting as a sponge near mentor Stefan Ekengren, Tia has been learning a very personal way of cooking food.

“Stefan creates most of the recipes. The dishes are very personal at the restaurant, there aren't a lot of places doing dishes the way we do there. And that’s mostly Stefan, he makes it from his own view of food and then obviously everyone gets to taste and gives their opinion. He’s the creator.”

Experience has quickly taken Tia’s role from the apprentice to the teacher, educating the newcomers on how to work the different stations. Agile and fast, the chef thrills under pressure and loves a challenge mid-service.

“I like the service generally! It’s lively and a lot happens, we can have to deal with allergies and then you just have to wing it. I like to create in that context, as a problem solver. To solve problems in a creative way.”

Tia loves to create new dishes and her creativity goes in full bloom at the Swedish Junior National Cooking Team, which she’s been a part of since april 2021.

Young blood battling for glory

The Swedish Junior National Cooking Team is composed of 11 young chefs, all under 24 years of age and with different paths and experiences in life. Guided by two coaches, the team goes through a constant creative process of creating and perfecting dishes for competitions.

The process is a little different each time. As described by Tia, sometimes it starts with the “packaging”, how you want something to look like. Other times it’s more about the taste, what flavours do you want to incorporate. And sometimes you have a moodboard of the flavours and textures you want and you have to figure out where in the dish they are going to pop up.

“I have just started learning how to cook food for competitions and that’s very different from cooking in a restaurant. I don’t feel like I have a lot of experience but I would say I’m quite good with the finishing and the aesthetic of the plate, I can picture it very clearly. I calculate where to put something on a dish because I know what comes next. That makes me efficient. I feel like I’m always two steps ahead.”

The team is debuting in november, at the Culinary World Cup 2022, where they expect two days of hard competition and focus. Happening in Luxembourg, the championship is separated into two moments: one big service, for up to 70 guests, where the focus is on quality and consistency; and one smaller guest dinner for 12 where the fine dining details get room. Besides the previously mentioned, the team is also judged on speed, very low to zero food waste and how clean they work during the whole process.

Tia has learned during the training process how crucial what goes inside your mind is for success. Her passion for tension and the adrenaline kick helps wildly when things don’t go as planned.

“You have to know where something is not going well and be able to stop, collect yourself and make the best of the situation. Being able to focus on the task at hand and not think that everything else after that is going to go bad. It’s nerve wracking and it’s also all in your head.”

The goal is nothing short of gold because in the end, in Tia’s own words, the best part of competing is winning.

“The preparation can be fun but when you’re competing there’s a huge fear of loss and failure. You’ve spent so many hours working towards that goal.”

Two years after the World Cup, the team is taking its chance at the International Exhibition of Culinary Arts, colloquially known as the Culinary Olympics. Only after that will Tia get a clearer picture of what she wants to do in her career.

“There’s so much I haven’t done. It's a privilege to be at Hantverket, but of course, I want to test other things. I would like to try everything from a Michelin star restaurant to countryside restaurants working with local ingredients or with whole animals.”

Like a teenager searching to find herself, Tia’s cooking style is in constant evolution. That translates into a volatility that Tia doesn’t want represented in her own restaurant, which means it will probably be a couple of years until we see Halland’s Young Chef 2021 put her name behind a space.

You live and you learn

In 2019, Tia and another school colleague got selected to represent their school at a high school competition in Stockholm. They seized the opportunity for the fun of it. Little did they know that Tia would take home not only first place, but a whole new understanding of the culinary world.

Tia blushes when she talks about the dish she won with at the time.

“I would never want to cook that dish now, I would be embarrassed. But it’s probably going to be like this all the time. I’ll learn and I’ll be embarrassed by what I did today at some point in my life”

Nonetheless, the young chef, who generally keeps a positive tone and sees the fun in most, recognizes the importance of that moment in her life and career. Tia chose to upgrade the dish that gave her gold with new techniques she has learned since.

“It’s the same taste profile and there’s a few common elements like broccoli and lemon tapioca” Tia explains “The magic is in the details and finish which I couldn’t do then.”

Contrasting against the black plate, the dish is a masterpiece in tones of white and green. The fish, zander, is fixated and cooked in plastic film to a cylindrical shape and delicately coated in broccoli leaves. On the side, bellaverde broccoli, bellaverde broccoli puree, lemon tapioca and roasted onion. And, following the famous quote popularized by Beyoncé’s song, Tia finishes this loved dish by putting a beautiful golden brown thin potato ring on it.

In a great example of cooking with low food waste, the bellaverde broccoli is decomposed in its many components and used wholly in different shapes and textures.

This dish becomes an impersonation of Tia’s development from starting her career at Hantverket and learning to prioritize taste, to adapting her style to the global competition world.

“When you’re preparing for a competition there’s a lot to think about, in particular how taste is experienced around the world. In the nordics we love lingonberry but it doesn’t really please many foreign juries.” Tia says “It’s fulcral to work locally and still produce a Swedish product but people need to be able to relate to what they’re eating, otherwise it’s good but it doesn’t persist in the memory.”

Equality in the business

About being a woman in the industry, Tia is careful with her words and realizes the complexity of the question.

“It’s hard to talk about the differences between genders because I obviously have encountered it but I also think we are all sexist because of the society we were raised in. We end up playing a part in perpetuating the differences between genders.” The young chef reflects, “I may think that the guys I work with are doing or saying is sexist but maybe it’s things I also think about or have thought about. And girls can sometimes be strong contributors of that culture, without really being conscious of it. So it’s really hard, I think it demands a lot of reflection.”

Tia is aware she walks on the footsteps of her earlier colleagues that fought for her to be able to be where she is today but knows there’s a lot left to be done and she’s a part of it. Representation is key, even if sometimes it may come with a bittersweet feeling of being represented as the female face for cooking and not just as a chef as her male counterparts.

“I don’t see it as a restaurant problem. It’s such a big problem in society in general so I can’t say it's hard to be a woman in this field. I would rather say that it is hard being a woman in all fields. Some maybe a bit more and others maybe a bit less.” Tia clarifies, “ And it’s not always about numbers but also about the story or experience of a man being worth more than the experience of a woman. There’s a need for more women to be present but there’s also a need for them to be seen and valued.”

Tia is done being known as a female chef, she’s a chef. And a good one.

Words by Madalena Vilar. Photography by Johan Ståhlberg.

“... I can’t say it's hard to be a woman in this field. I would rather say that it is hard being a woman in all fields. Some maybe a bit more and others maybe a bit less.” Tia clarifies,

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“ And it’s not always about numbers but also about the story or experience of a man being worth more than the experience of a woman. There’s a need for more women to be present but there’s also a need for them to be seen and valued.”