Seeing a simple, off-duty Basque meal at avant-garde gourmand destination Mugaritz in Northern Spain inspired Eating with the Chefs, the behind-the-scenes restaurant book by Per-Anders Jörgensen. “All of the staff meals are really different,” says the Malmo-based documentary photographer, who has been visiting creative chefs and respected restaurants for 15 years. “Cooking for a staff of 10 at Le Chateaubriand in Paris is vastly different to Noma with 100 people. At Mugaritz they even have a nutritionist. They are very scientific.” Exploring the ritualistic family meals of cooks and front-of-house members at 18 restaurants, the one-time Swedish Photographer of the Year journeyed to Attica in Melbourne, Roberta’s in Bushwick, New York, The French Laundry in the Napa Valley and London’s St. John. Together with wife Lotta, Jörgensen founded the gastronomic biannual Fool magazine in 2012 as an antidote to cookie-cutter food photography, prompting the duo to win Best Food Magazine at the Gourmand Cookbook awards in 2013. “We shot Massimo Bottura and Michel Bras, but omitted the food shots because everyone knows what their food looks like—you can Google it,” he says. “With Fool we’re interested in people. And it doesn’t have to be chefs. It could be fishermen or scientists.���

Eating with the Chefs is available now on Phaidon.