JONAS HALLBERG is a former event organizer turned economist/statistician working as an agent for a beer dispensing system. He loves music, football, good (and bad) sci-fi, he’s a tech enthusiast and probably one of the people who love dogs the most without ever been close to having a dog. Born and raised in the small city of Arvika, Värmland (Sweden), he spent all his childhood vacations in ”The Garden of Sweden” Blekinge, where he has a family summer house (called “Ass croft” by Google maps…). Partially Icelandic in origin he has a vampiric aversion to sun and thrive in the cold, dark parts of the world that is the Nordic countries. But perhaps, maybe even probably, Jonas is first and foremost a great lover of food. The sophisticated and the straightforward. From the never ending tasting menu at Fäviken to some good ol’ Swedish ”Falukorv”, he just loves food. HE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND people who when the food is ready does not just drop everything to go eat (which includes not understanding his girlfriend). As he puts it himself: “If I did not have a disposition aligned with some pretty strict self discipline, I would be very, very overweight“. Though ever more excited by the prospect of consuming the next tasting menu, in his own cooking he’s mostly interested in elevating ordinary things to the extraordinary. He’d rather make you the best fucking mashed potatoes you’ve ever had, than something that looks exactly like a strawberry but tastes EXACTLY like hamburger. So, let’s see how that goes.
DANILO AGUTOLI used to be an Orthodox Italian Foodist before moving to Stockholm five years ago from the city of Caserta, south Italy. But the clash with the melting-pot of food cultures that he found in Sweden changed him deeply: his italian friends hardly recognize him anymore.
He is a freelance illustrator (and before that a clown, juggler, street performer, actor). He loves the bikes, the Beatles, and he is a huge fan of building and fixing stuff. However, if he’s not drawing or building a time machine, he is probably cooking food, a passion he inherited from his grandmother who owned a small Trattoria in the hometown of Castel Morrone (“one of my first memories as a kid is me playing waiter at the Trattoria, and throwing a beautiful plate of Tagliatelle with Ragù alla Bolognese on the floor and on the shoes of a client“). He loves to cook simple things made very well (which is what Italian Cuisine should be), but he also enjoys long, difficult food preparations that require patience, time and dedication.
He remains a pizza fundamentalist though, and that is because he is from the Napoli region in Italy, birthplace of pizza and mozzarella, so please, don’t even start arguing about that.