Jonathan Tam

The Path

Jonathan Tam began as an intern at Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark, then returned there as chef de partie. Those early roles placed him inside one of the city’s most closely watched kitchens, where the work moved at the speed and precision the trade demands. He later became head chef at Restaurant Relæ in Copenhagen, Denmark (2010–2020), a ten-year stretch that gave his cooking a long base in the same city. Since 2022, he has been chef and owner of Jatak, carrying that experience into a new restaurant with a different frame but the same level of focus.

The Work Today

Since 2022, Tam’s work at Jatak has been defined by the combination of chef and owner. That pairing matters in practice: it ties the kitchen to the point of view behind it. At Jatak, local ingredients sit alongside the cultural heritage of the team behind it, so the restaurant draws from place and people at once. The result is a dining room and kitchen shaped by Copenhagen, while still leaving room for the identities and perspectives that helped form it.

In Their Words “I’ve been fortunate to be part of Relæ since the very beginning, working alongside Christian to create the type of cooking that we do at Relæ.” The statement points to shared authorship rather than individual credit. It places the work inside a kitchen built through repetition, coordination, and time, where the daily output was made collectively and refined through continuity. “We’ve been taking a step back and looking at Relæ as a whole and planning the next chapter for the restaurant since the end of 2015.” This reads as the kind of long-range thinking required in a serious kitchen. Before any move forward, the operation is assessed as a whole: what holds, what needs adjustment, and what should be carried into the next stage.