Jonas Lagerström and Danny Falkeman are the chef duo who first joined forces about ten years ago after meeting in a restaurant kitchen in Oslo, Norway. Together they have established the Etoile restaurant in Stockholm, Sweden,which received its first start in the Michelin Guide in February 2020.
The star was certainly well-deserved, as both Jonas Lagerström and Danny Falkeman, are well-known faces in the restaurant industry. Jonas has been active in the Swedish National Chefs Team, the Swedish Junior National Culinary Team, and he has competed in both Chef of the Year and Bocuse D'Or Sweden. In 2020 he also won Kockarnas Kamp, a Swedish TV series in which established chefs compete in cooking against each other. Danny has also participated in Chef of the Year.
Stella Pizza is actually the polar opposite of the Etoile restaurant. The whole concept is based on the idea that everyone should be able to eat pizza one or more days a week at a good price. For example, children up to the age of 12 eat for free in the company of a parent, and it’s easy to place an order online and have the pizza delivered to your home. Or you can choose to eat on-site at the restaurant.
- “For us Swedes, pizza is something completely different than it is in places like Italy,” says Jonas. He continues:
- “They’re innovative and have a niche market. At Stella, we’re more middle-of-the-road, working with fresh ingredients and sustainable producers but trying to find inspiration in the ‘ugly pizzeria,’ the neighborhood pizza joints you can find all over Sweden. You can eat pizza whenever you can’t be bothered to cook!”
Stella Pizza is open every day of the week from 10 am to 10 pm, and relies on Sveba Dahlen’s double-decker Beyond Black pizza oven (P602BB) to bake its pies. The restaurant bakes about 200 lunch pizzas and a total of around 400 pizzas a day. In fact, the restaurant has had close early on certain days when they didn’t have enough dough to meet the great demand.
- “The pizza oven is really efficient, and we’re so happy with the result,” says Jonas, who believes that the restaurant’s main concern now is to keep up with demand when the tempo is high.
- “I think we need to invest in a DAUB dough divider! Then we’d have ready-made dough balls to work with, which would save us time!”
Stella Pizza has 15 full- and part-time employees and is looking for more talented pizza bakers. The aspiration to expand the chain to include more restaurants in the Stockholm area is in the plans for the near future. These restaurants may be slightly smaller than the concept restaurant, but it should still be possible to eat on-site, even if there may be more of a “hole-in-the-wall” vibe at these pizza joints.
The installation of Stella Pizza’s pizza oven was handled by Sveba Dahlen’s partner, Alilux Storkök.
- “It was so great that everything went so smoothly with the installation and with the baking! Immediately after the installation, we were able to start test-baking our pizzas. The 3 weeks leading up to opening day were pretty intense,” says Jonas.
The current menu features 12 different kinds of pizzas, all carefully test-baked and tasted. And yes, the classic Swedish kebab pizza is on the menu – but so is a not-so-classic mushroom and truffle pizza!