Eating Good Food with Arne Anker

Mr Anker, we will start our 5-question menu with your home region, Schleswig-Holstein: is there any culinary speciality that you have brought to Berlin from there?

A love of extra special food and cooperation with local farmers.

There is a trend of going back to native produce in the kitchen. What role do regionality and seasonality play for you?

Regionality is very important to me.There’s nothing better for a chef than tobe working directly with the producers. But I also love to work with seasonings from all over the world.

Talking of trends, Berlin is the foodie city and it boasts a vast and highly diverse gastronomic scene. Does this make it a place of stiff competition or a place of creativity?

Most definitely a place of creativity – it’s Berlin’s diversity that makes it unique. New and exciting concepts crop up every week. This results in a lot of scope for mutual inspiration.

The digital transformation is changing the food service industry too. In your opinion, what benefits do digital tools offer the customers and restaurateurs?

We are always looking to optimise ourwork steps. It’s important to us that wedon’t spend our time writing lists, but can continuously work on making our dishes more rounded.

A piece of politics for dessert: a traffic light system, modified recipes, a national animal welfare label – how political should food be?

Politics has an important role to play in the food service industry, for example regarding the regulation of working hours, the sustainable cultivation of vegetable types and responsible cattlebreeding. You can’t offer a good mealfeaturing good food at knock-downprices.