Wide Open

What do Massimo Bottura, Inaki Aizpitarte, Marco Pierre White, and other European chefs keep in their refrigerators at home?

For years, Adrian Moore and Carrie Solomon worked long hours, running between airports, bus depots, and train stations lugging heavy camera equipment and knocking on the front doors of some of Europe's most famous chefs. Why? Because Moore and Solomon wanted to peek inside their refrigerators. It took four years, but the photographer-writer duo peered into the fridges and home lives of chefs like Massimo Bottura, Inaki Aizpitarte, and Marco Pierre White, among others. They attended impromptu family meals, met in-laws, and wrote a book, Inside Chefs' Fridges, Europe, all about it. So, what do chefs fridges really say about them?

You Are What You Keep in Your Refrigerator

"A refrigerator is a good reflection of someone's personality, and for many of the chefs, a good reflection of who they are as a chef. It's a very intimate thing," says Solomon. She describes that chefs who thrive on perfection in details also have immaculate fridges—no sticky shelves, no rank smells. Others, who "fly by the seat of their pants, like Inaki," have a hodgepodge selection of refrigerated items, but use them brilliantly, she explains.

What those fridges contain also varies by country. In Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Denmark, Moore and Solomon noticed tons of pickled items lining refrigerator shelves. There was a lot of fish and lingonberry jam, too. "Everything was pickled elderberry, basically," Moore jokes.

But the most memorable fridge belonged to infamous bad boy chef Marco Pierre White. Not only did they find it beautiful as a decorative piece, but they also realized that it was completely empty. According to Moore, that fridge mostly stays empty because, "He goes hunting and then eats what he hunts."

The freezer was the only thing completely off-limits for most chefs, Solomon jokes, "It's like the kitchen underwear drawer. Not everyone wants you to see that."

What's Inside These Chefs' Fridges?

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Carrie Solomon

Moore and Solomon visited Bottura in Modena on a day when the chef had a high fever. "He greeted us with a scarf around his neck, in pajamas, and then just made us this amazing risotto using cheese stock," Moore remembers. "We talked about life and food. He's a genius."

Carrie Solomon

Most chefs had standard condiments like Heinz ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, soy sauce, bean paste, and sriracha. Aizpitarte's condiments included an extensive hot sauce collection, which earned its own call-out in the book.

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Carrie Solomon

Says Solomon, "They don't realize their fridges are a reflection of who they are as chefs. Some make it perfect, some only have gifts from chef friends, others fly by the seat of their pants." She says Aizpitarte fell into that last category, and he whipped up this seemingly effortless (and insanely delicious) Mexican-inspired egg dish in minutes. When a friend of Aizpitarte's wandered out of a bedroom in the middle of the interview, it was an indication to Moore that the whole event wasn't preconceived.

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Carrie Solomon

Solomon describes Darroze's fridge as connected to her heritage in France. "She had a potted wild game dish that her father made for her and special foie gras. But she also had lots of kids' food, because she has two young children," says Solomon.

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Carrie Solomon

At Joan Roca's home, he always has a Spanish tortilla in his fridge; his mother-in-law brings over a new one every week.

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Carrie Solomon

"He cooks a lot with his children," Solomon says of Roca. Here, Moore and Solomon include a recipe Roca made for them with the contents of his fridge.

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Carrie Solomon

Even though Bech had an appointment the day Moore and Solomon came by, he cleared his schedule and took them out. "We became friends with a lot of these chefs," says Moore, attributing it to the fact that "the fridge is such an intimate sort of thing."

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Carrie Solomon

Bech labels and dates his jarred creations up top, and keeps a bottle of sake from Thomas Keller on the shelf below.

"Even though Marco Pierre White usually doesn't do anything that's not his project, turns out a friend of his is a friend of mine; he does brunch at his house on Sundays and that ended up being one of the best experiences of the book," Moore recalls.

The Fridge Stares Back at You
Carrie Solomon

The biggest shocker? Marco White actually didn't have anything at all in his fridge. "In a way, it was the most beautiful fridge," says Moore. "It was empty, because he goes hunting and eats what he hunts."

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Carrie Solomon

"We were affected by all of them in a certain way. Like, with Marco Pierre White, you felt like you were in the presence of greatness," Solomon says, adding, "But the most memorable thing is that they were so generous with their time, and super nice."

High and Low

But what took Moore and Solomon by surprise was the mix of specialty ingredients with items you could find in an average person's fridge. "We were surprised to find industrial food in many chefs' fridges," Solomon says. For instance, a chef in Italy (who shall remain nameless) whose restaurant has earned three Michelin stars keeps knack balls, a.k.a. microwavable hot dog balls, for dinner emergencies.

Even more interesting was that their fridges' contain a mix of highbrow and lowbrow foods. On that list: Heinz ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, soy sauce, and Japanese bean pastes. Like the rest of us, "Everybody had sriracha," Solomon notes, though she adds that Aizpitarte also has an impressive collection of hot sauces.

"Not many of them ate bread," says Moore, unless it was a frozen loaf they preserved until they guests came over, though one chef kept gluten-free bread for one of his children. Indeed, Moore and Solomon noticed a big difference between single chefs and those with families. Says Moore, "If they were single, we were more likely to find takeout containers or beer. If they had families, the refrigerators were jam-packed with yogurt, apple sauces, Babybel cheeses, and other industrial kid food." Take Yves Camdeborde of Le Comptoir as an example. His fridge is divided into sections corresponding to each family member's cuisine of choice—a meat-laden section for his son, a section with Asian ingredients for his daughters, and a superfood section for his wife.

Chefs, Not Always Just Like Us

Chef Rasmus Kofoed of Copenhagen's Geranium had one of the strangest fridges Moore and Solomon had ever seen. "He has frozen flies. He said it's because he has a fish farm he experiments with, but he also mentioned his wife's not too much into it," Moore jokes. The duo also found it unusual that another chef, Sébastien Bras, son of the legendary Michel Bras and chef at their restaurant Le Suquet, keeps poisonous mushrooms in his: "They have to be cooked in a very particular way, and he can't serve them in the restaurant, so he eats them at home," says Moore.

What Chefs Cook for Lazy, Last-Minute Dinners

Moore and Solomon were blown away by the meals they had on the road. They would ask chefs to whip up a meal with ingredients in the fridge, and found their jaws dropping time and again. So they wrote down some of the chefs' quick and easy dinners for those days when they get home at 2 a.m., only have a few groceries left, and need something to eat—and put them in the book. Basically, as Moore wanted to know, "What happens when people with these highly developed technical skills deal with normal products?" For Geist chef Bo Bech, what's left in the fridge almost always involves an onion and becomes a creation involving a whole lot of Asian condiments. It was Moore's favorite. The clear winner for Solomon, though, was Jean-François Piège's: He smashed a bag of potato chips and then sprinkled the bits atop an omelet.

Never in their wildest dreams did they imagine Magnus Nilsson would pack them lunch bags with elk-heart sandwiches, a total treat for one of their pesky plane rides. Says Moore of the project overall, "It was a pretty wild project, a real life experience. I mean, how else could we have gone and visited the greatest chefs in Europe to see what they're like?"

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