Chef Niko Lehto: “Waiters are the heroes of the restaurant floor.”

Restaurant Vår opened its doors in August 2021. The all important first year of the restaurant is almost done. We were able to talk to the head chef and co-owner Niko Lehto just before the start of the busy summer season in Porvoo.

What makes Vår special? “Nature is a big factor for us. We try to be as seasonal as we can and use the local producers as much as we can. So we are quite limited with the ingredients that we have”, says chef Lehto. The limitation also serves as an inspiration in how to get the most out of the ingredients at hand.

This means for example using every bit of the fish they serve and building a whole menu around it. Ecological and imaginative.

“The seasons are super short, so we have to preserve summer vegetables. I think if you are seasonal you should prepare for the bad months also and all around the year, not just when it suits you. So there is the challenge to find the ingredients that we can use around the year.”

The learning curve

The first year in any restaurant’s life is crucial. It’s doubly so in the case of Vår. They have a solid dedication to seasons and serving fresh local fish. This means that the first complete calendar year has been a year of testing the concept thoroughly. “Running a restaurant is more or less like solving problems”, says Niko Lehto. “We joke about waiting for things to get normal. But there’s never a normal week”, he laughs.

Despite getting excellent reviews by food critics, Niko Lehto thinks his restaurant is still in the first grade in the ‘school of restaurants’. “We are learning the basics, how to run the restaurant. And when we get that right, we’re starting to get better and better every day. The day you stop trying to be better, then it’s the day to close the door.”

So what is next on the learning agenda? “This year we are going to put more effort into the cooperation with the local farmers. We need more direct links between farmers and restaurants. We are too used to there being a middle man.”

This means planning together what would be the most useful and profitable crops for both the farmer and the restaurant. He also wishes to be able to help with seasonal overproduction. “If there is for example too much beetroot flooding the market we can say, don’t throw it away, we can use it.”

The staff

Niko Lehto isn’t the type of celebrity chef who enjoys having the spotlight. While working at Vår he prefers to stay behind the scenes in the kitchen. “We appreciate our waitering staff. They are the heroes who make people feel welcome. It’s important that they get their moment in the limelight. My role is to make the food”, he explains. 

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the shortage of staff in restaurants, mainly due to the covid pandemic and hard restrictions. How does the situation look from Vår’s perspective? A bit surprisingly Niko says the staff situation hasn’t changed. It has always been difficult and turnover of workers is high in this business. Especially in a small town like Porvoo.

And to keep the good ones, it’s always hard. But Niko Lehto appreciates that good workers want to push themselves. And sometimes it means they have to leave to go further. The idea of Vår is to help everybody to go as far as they can. This philosophy applies to the staff as well as the farmers and fishermen who are the restaurant’s suppliers.