When I spoke with Matthew Orlando, he was chef and owner of Amass in Copenhagen, Denmark. The restaurant’s zero waste ethos earned a Michelin Green Star and made him a global reference for circular, flavor first cooking. The book’s roll call records that Amass closed in 2022 and that Orlando opened ESSE Copenhagen in October 2025.
Orlando appears in the book more often than most of the chefs I interviewed. On leadership, he told me that a leader needs to be more motivated than the team, that the staff cannot see the leader’s stress or burnout, and that he would never ask his staff to do something he would not do himself. On hiring, he said he hires on personality more than skill, a public commitment from a chef who could afford to be more demanding on the technical side. On creativity, he gave me a number I have repeated often since: when the kitchen tries new things, it fails 80 percent of the time, and he treats those failures as the cost of the one dish that lands.
“You cannot be afraid of failure. Failure means learning and learning means progression. I embrace failure and criticism. There is always something to be learned from both.” Matthew Orlando, then chef and owner, Amass
What struck me most in our conversation was how the sustainability of the kitchen and its creativity turned out to be the same practice. Orlando’s team puts every piece of trim through fermentation, pickling, drying and other processes to extract the flavors locked inside it, which cut the restaurant’s landfill waste by 75 percent. The kitchen now starts with what is left over and works backwards toward the prime ingredient. The perfect piece of fish is the last component to hit the plate. He also pointed me to the garden outside the kitchen door, overlooking the harbor, as the most reliable place to find the final activator on a dish.
In the book, Matthew Orlando appears in Chapter 3, Leading by Example, on the leader’s duty to bring more motivation into the room than anyone else; in Chapter 4, First the Team, on hiring for personality and training the rest; in Chapter 6, The Creative Act, on failure, the garden, and building dishes outward from the trim; and in Chapter 14, The Future of Luxury and Craft, as one of the chefs who built a sustainable kitchen years before the rest of the field treated it as table stakes.
“Creatively, we now start with our by-products and work backwards. The perfect piece of fish is the last component to hit the plate.” Matthew Orlando, then chef and owner, Amass