- Written by: Neve Qaraday
Before founding Amass and reshaping Copenhagen’s dining scene, Matt Orlando’s culinary path ran through some of the most revered kitchens in the world. He began at Le Bernardin in New York under Eric Ripert, mastering the discipline of precision. In the U.K., he refined his craft at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons with Raymond Blanc and later at The Fat Duck with Heston Blumenthal, where creativity and science collided. His journey then took him to Noma in Copenhagen, where René Redzepi made him head chef, a role that would define his deep respect for ingredients, ecosystems, and innovation. Those experiences became the foundation for the rebellious, conscious cooking philosophy.
After years leading Amass, the sustainability-forward restaurant that became a global benchmark for conscious cooking, Orlando closed its doors in 2022 with one clear promise: he wasn’t done.
Since that moment, Orlando has been involved in pioneering culinary projects in Southeast Asia. He collaborated with chef Will Goldfarb (Room for Dessert, Bali) and Ronald Akili (Potato Head, Bali) to create AIR (Awareness, Impact, and Responsibility), a revolutionary food campus situated on 3,700 square meters of reclaimed jungle in Singapore’s Dempsey Hill. The campus features a two-story restaurant, a cooking school, research facilities, and extensive gardens, all designed to promote education, sustainability, and regenerative food practices.
Now, three years later, he’s back, and louder than ever, with ESSE, his new restaurant in Copenhagen’s Nordhavn district.
“Esse means to be. That’s exactly what this is, just being.
Being responsible, being delicious, being honest.”
Matt Orlando
ESSE isn’t Amass 2.0. It’s evolution. A restaurant that doesn’t preach sustainability, it lives it.
The Warehouse That Became a Restaurant
Tucked behind the docks of Nordhavn lies an industrial giant turned gourmet hideaway. The building, dating back to 1895, was once a sprawling warehouse, with raw brick, towering ceilings, and original timber beams. A place meant for cargo and crates, not tasting menus.
Now, it’s the home of ESSE. The transformation feels poetic. The exposed beams and soft brown tones pay tribute to the building’s past, while the energy is pure present, alive, loud, and unapologetically modern.
Walking in, you sense the dual narrative at play: what once moved goods now moves ideas. Rap music hums through the rafters, fermenting jars glow on the shelves, and the smell of toasted grains fills the air. In choosing this old warehouse, Orlando didn’t just find a location; he found a metaphor. Here, reuse is a foundation. Every detail, from the reclaimed floorboards to the locally crafted ceramics, reflects the same philosophy that underlies the menu: transformation achieved through respect for materials.
ESSE welcomes guests in an intimate 42-seat main dining room, complemented by a lounge for drinks and snacks. Four additional high-chair seats will be reserved for walk-ins, who can order à la carte selections from the tasting menu.
The potential in an ingredient is only limited by your imagination
The menu opens with Tomato, and right away, you sense the difference. The story behind it is as layered as the dish itself. Local farmers are shutting down their greenhouses for winter. Instead of letting the tomato vines and leaves compost away, Orlando and his team collected them, dried them, toasted them like tea, and infused them into cream. What lands on the table is an edible ecosystem, salted zander fish, chewy tomato bits, smoked tomato-skin oil, and a hint of pickled habanero. It smells faintly of hay and heat, a dish that tells you exactly who Orlando is before you’ve even finished your first bite.
“People don’t need lectures,
they just need good food that makes sense.”
Matt Orlando
Bread, Bones, and Everything Between
The second course feels almost like a handshake. Orlando’s now-iconic potato bread, known well from Amass, is paired with butter mixed with leftover vegetable peels. It’s simple, soft, and deeply comforting.
Next come fishbone noodles, yes, noodles literally made from fish bones, a dish that captures Orlando’s restless creativity. The inspiration came from his obsession with making noodles from fish skeletons, a project he began back in 2017 after discovering that the extra protein helped with structure and texture. The team extracts collagen from the bones, forming them into delicate ribbons that shimmer like glass noodles. Served with slices of cured egg yolk, it’s a dish that captures ESSE’s core, technique, curiosity, and a touch of madness that somehow makes total sense. You can’t help but grin while completing the zero-waste “whole fish” puzzle.
The dish finds its anchor in the monkfish, grilled over open fire and finished with a hollandaise enriched with koji and burnt leek oil. It’s a moment of balance, primal flame meets refined control and a reminder that Orlando still cooks with both intellect and instinct. Clean flavours, clean conscience.
Then comes the celeriac, glazed in vegetable trims, layered with apple, cheese sauce, and parsley oil. Sweet, salty, acidic, earthy. It hits you from every direction, a full sensory explosion that leaves you slightly speechless.
“We need to change our mindset before we change our behaviour. Once you discover the potential in what you thought was waste, a whole new world of flavours opens up.” says Matt Orlando.
Furiously pickling, drying, fermenting
When the wild duck arrives, it’s clear Orlando is still fluent in fine dining. The meat rests on a mousse of hazelnut and treviso, while the sauce, made from lactic-fermented plums, adds the kind of acidic punch that keeps your fork busy. It’s a dish that feels like a conversation. Sweet, sour, savoury. Everything talking to everything else. Every layer complements the last. Like the chef himself, it’s composed but restless, always chasing balance.
Dessert, Rewired
Comes the bread ice cream. Stale loaves from Andersen & Maillard are dried, their starches transformed into sugar, then spun into ice cream. Served with crispy shards that crackle like Pop Rocks, it is playful and precise at once.
Desserts at ESSE are not afterthoughts. A “milk and cookie” moment reimagined through Orlando’s circular lens, “chocolate” made from spent beer grains, with 100 times less CO₂ than cacao. It’s malty, roasted, complex, the kind of sweet that makes you think rather than just smile. The finale - a beer-batter cookie - just perfect taste without unnecessary fanciness.
"It’s not about perfection. It’s about the process.
About finding beauty and flavour in the forgotten."
Here’s the thing: Copenhagen claims to be one of the most sustainable food cities in the world. Yet many restaurants talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. What matters is turning rhetoric into practices that ripple out beyond the plate.
Matt Orlando, through his years at Amass and now with ESSE, demonstrates exactly how to link taste and sustainability without compromise. Balancing instinct and intellect, soul and science with philosophy and action. The Copenhagen Rebel has challenged the industry and the city to do better, to move beyond appearances and embrace accountability with appetite.
He’s offering a blueprint for how high-end dining can be responsible, intelligent and delicious. He’s not just elevating food, he’s elevating what we expect from food. In a city committed to sustainability, ESSE becomes part of the story of how we live, how we consume, how we care. Once again, he gives us something to believe in, something we can taste, reminding us that the most radical thing a chef can do today is simply care.
Practicalities
Chef: Matt Orlando
Address: Trelleborggade 13A/13B, 2150 Copenhagen Ø (Nordhavn)
Reservations
Menu: 7 servings for 995 DKK and 12 servings for 1595 DKK
Open: Tue - Sat, Dinners only (from 18:00-23:30)
Photos: Emily Willson Photography and Neve Qaraday