Christian Puglisi

Christian F. Puglisi is a Sicilian-born, Norwegian-raised chef who built one of the most influential restaurant groups of the post-Noma generation in Copenhagen. Born in Catania, Sicily, in 1982 to a Sicilian father and a Norwegian mother, Puglisi moved to Norway as a child and trained at the Hotel and Restaurant School in Oslo before staging at Taillevent in Paris and El Bulli in Roses. In 2006 he joined the opening team of Noma under René Redzepi, rising to head chef within four years.

In 2010, at the age of twenty-eight, Puglisi opened Relæ on Jægersborggade in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen — a then-unfashionable street the restaurant immediately changed. Relæ was the first restaurant in the world to receive a Michelin star while operating without tablecloths, without traditional table service (cutlery, menus and bread were stored in drawers under each table for guests to set themselves) and on a fully certified-organic supply chain. It held its star continuously from 2012 until its closure in 2020 and was at one point ranked No. 39 on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list. In 2016 it became the first restaurant in the world to receive the Michelin Sustainable Restaurant Award (the precursor of the Green Star).

Around Relæ, Puglisi built a small group of more casual restaurants that became equally influential: Manfreds, an organic wine bar and small-plates restaurant directly across the street; Mirabelle, an organic bakery and pasta-and-pizza restaurant; Bæst, an organic pizzeria with its own in-house mozzarella-making operation using milk from a single biodynamic farm in Jutland; and the cheese-and-yoghurt dairy Mirabelle Spiseri. He closed Relæ in 2020 during the pandemic, citing a desire to focus on the more casual restaurants and his family, and has since reduced his public profile while continuing to operate the group.