Sayan Isaksson is a michelin star-winning chef, who has been voted the number one chef in Sweden by his peers and whose restaurants have appeared in the World’s 50 Best list. He has been a member of the Swedish Culinary Team and recognised by the Swedish gastronomic Academy for promoting Swedish gastronomy. Born in 1974 in Ubon Ratchatani in the south east of Thailand, Sayan Isaksson was adopted by Swedish parents when he was three months old and grew up in gävle, a Swedish town 160km north of Stockholm. He graduated from culinary school in Sweden in 1992 and took his first job at Cafe Artist in his home town before moving to Stockholm in 1996. He worked in a number of restaurants before opening Esperanto in a former theatre in the Östermalm district of Stockholm in 2005. With the motto ’gastronomically, our tongue is universal’, Isaksson’s philosophy is ’to create a contemporary gastronomy that is both local and global and in fine tune with nature’. He fuses influences from around the world (especially from Japan and France) with modern Scandinavian cuisine in dishes such as sashimi of char infused with dill-scented crayfish water that’s served on a stone slab with daikon relish and tapioca crisps and langoustine with bone marrow and hazelnut. As part of the Swedish Culinary Team from 2000 to 2004, Sayan Isaksson helped win the Culinary World Cup in Luxembourg in 2002 and the Culinary Olympics in Erfurt germany in 2004. In addition to winning a michelin star in 2007, Esperanto was placed number 72 on the San pellegrino list in 2008 and 96 in 2015. The Whiteguide, the leading restaurant guide of the Nordic region, named the restaurant its ’shooting star’ in 2006 and ranked it the number one restaurant in Sweden in 2008, 2014, 2016 and 2017. Sayan Isaksson opened two further restaurants in Sweden – Shibumi Izakaya in 2014, which won a Bib gourmand in 2017, and Imouto, a nine-seat sushi counter in 2015, which was awarded a michelin star in 2017. He closed all three restaurants in 2018 and is currently working on various projects including NU – a fast food project, consulting with the Finnish Culinary Team, being a judge on the Swedish Chef of The Year and a pop up restaurant in Bangkok.