Ricky Saward, chef of Seven Swans, Frankfurt’s first Michelin sustainability award-winning vegan restaurant, talks about his culinary approach.
The aim of fine-dining restaurants is to bring the best quality food to the customers with the best presentation in the environments decorated by the best architects. That’s why when you think of fine-dining, sumptuous, state-of-the-art meat and fish dishes made from the highest quality ingredients come to mind. For a long time, chefs thought that a luxurious experience could only be achieved with meat and fish dishes, but it was realized a little late that vegetarian and vegan cuisines could offer the same experience, and many fine-dining vegan and vegetarian restaurants began to be awarded the Michelin star, which is considered the Oscar of the food world. Seven Swans, led by Ricky Saward, also received the first Michelin Sustainability Award in 2019. In this interview that I had the opportunity to do with the master chef, you will get to know Seven Swans and accompany his team to the Michelin Sustainability Award adventure.
I call it “adventure” because for Ricky Saward, who has worked in the classic kitchen for 10 years, working at the vegetarian Seven Swans, which he took over in 2018, was a struggle at first. Swans explains how this change affected his life: “Seven Swans, which I took over in 2018, was a vegetarian restaurant. For a classically trained chef who has worked in classical kitchens for ten years, this was an incredible change. But it was time for a change, both for myself and for the culinary arts. In 2019, no one was talking about vegan cuisine. But I’ve known for a long time that the future is in the vegan kitchen, away from luxury ingredients. So I’ve been cooking vegan meals for a year without publicly declaring it. Nobody noticed this. This was the signal for us to switch to a sustainable vegan cuisine with our own grown.”
Although Ricky, who was sure that he could not work at a desk job and wanted to bring his creativity to the fore, did not have a dream of being a chef at first, he knew how to continue his kitchen life as a chef, which he started as a dishwasher. Ricky Saward explained the reason why they switched from vegetarian to sustainable vegan cuisine, “He was the next step to take. I’ve never liked to immerse myself in the flow, I’ve always been interested in complicating and complicating things. Of course we risked losing the Michelin star, but someone had to start. Cooking vegan at this level has always been and still is a learning process for me,” she explains. What stands out most about Seven Swans is that almost all of their materials come from their own 5 hectares of permaculture land, 20 minutes outside of Frankfurt. Here they grow about 350 different vegetables and aromatic plants. To include all colors and scents, to explore them all and to use them in their kitchens is their dream. They pay attention to the fact that the products that are not grown in their own fields are also local. Ricky says, “We only use local products. In other words, we do not import products such as chocolate, olive oil and lemon from overseas. Sometimes we don’t even use some spices for this reason. We go as a team to gather our own materials, we spend more time in the fields and forests than we spend in the Seven Swans kitchen in the spring. It is a luxury to know what grows wild in our region, in which season,” he says, explaining how valuable the ingredients grown in nature, without pesticides, only with soil, water and sunlight, are for his restaurant.
