Christopher Haatuft

In 2001, Christopher Haatuft came into cooking from a food writer’s angle. At 21, he had a double spread in one of Norway’s main papers (Bergens Tidende), writing about food. Here he would explore local and exotic recipes and the stories behind them. Parallel with food writing, Christopher was asked to be the chef at a bar/restaurant. With unbridled enthusiasm and criminal arrogance, he jumped on the project, thinking “How hard can it be?”. The restaurant failed and Christopher joined an apprenticeship program. From there he took the vocation seriously and worked through the restaurants of his home town of Bergen, moving on to Paris as the head chef at the Norwegian Embassy before ending in New York in 2010. There he worked at Blue Hill at Stone Barns as well as 3 Michelin Per Se. He moved back to Bergen in 2013 and opened Lysverket the same year.

He continues with the odd bit of food writing, and is one of Norway’s leading culinary voices on sustainability, ecology, politics, tradition, progression and internationalization within the culinary profession. Haatuft is also the host of the Norwegian tv-show “Mitt Kjøkken Ruler”, adapted from the Australian format “My Kitchen Rules”.

Through Lysverket’s success, Haatuft has traveled extensively representing Lysverket, Western Norway and Norwegian cuisine in general. Through the last couple of years, Haatuft has cooked at Feast Portland, for the James Beard Foundation, for Norwegian Embassies and tourism offices in Germany and France and of course at friends’ restaurants in places like Paris, London and Miami.