Nick Curtin

The Climb

Kitchen formation in New York City gave the work its first professional grammar. After training at New York University and The Wheeler School (2005), Nick Curtin entered the dining scene as kitchen staff at Perry Street, where repetition, timing, and the compressed language of service became a second education. The move from classroom to line did not replace analysis; it put it under pressure. Leadership in New York kitchens added responsibility to technique. The progression through head chef at ACME in New York City and executive chef at Rosette in Lower East Side, New York City (until 2014) marks a cook taking on menu, brigade, pace, and accountability. Those roles sit in the trade record as evidence of range before the Copenhagen years. Copenhagen changed the working context without erasing the New York edge. In 2014, Nick Curtin moved to Copenhagen as chef at Almanak (from 2014), entering a food culture where sourcing, seasonality, restraint, and clarity carry particular weight. The relevant shift is not geography alone, but the way Danish culinary heritage and product discipline became part of the cooking vocabulary. Restaurant Alouette has carried that transatlantic register since 2018. As co-owner and executive chef, Curtin works in a model where technical control, sourcing choices, team structure, and the economics of the room are linked. The restaurant is treated less as a platform than as a functioning system.

Today

Ownership and cooking are combined at Restaurant Alouette in Copenhagen. In Curtin’s role as co-owner and executive chef, the pass is only one part of the craft: sourcing, labor, cost, and the daily human structure of the kitchen all bear on the plate. For a contemporary tasting-menu restaurant, those decisions are not separate from technique. Sustainability at Alouette is framed broadly: fiscal sustainability, human sustainability, and a sustainable kitchen. The tasting menu moves through Denmark’s culinary heritage, joining tradition with innovation and rooted in full-circle sustainability. In practice, the stated emphasis is connection—producer to chef, ingredient to origin, kitchen to guest. Sourcing is handled through hand-picked producers, with the components and their origins presented to diners. The named work shows two registers: dry-aged dairy cow with hen-of-the-woods mushrooms and black currants, and, in 2025 at Aurelia at Castle Hill Inn in Newport, Rhode Island, Osetra caviar with kombu oil served in a beeswax-glazed, fire-roasted pumpkin bowl. Both examples place provenance, vessel, texture, and contrast inside the construction of the dish.

Signature

The signature work attributed to Nick Curtin includes Spicy Fried Chicken, Dry-aged dairy cow with hen-of-the-woods mushrooms and black currants, Osetra caviar with kombu oil, twice smoked trout with fermented blackberries, and grilled lamb loin with sweet habanero relish and milk bread. Read as a set, the dishes move across crunch, heat, smoke, fermentation, richness, acidity, fire, and softness without fixing the cooking to one register.

In Their Words “For my fried chicken brine, I always use Tabasco Sauce combined with buttermilk (a classic component in fried chicken brine). The acid helps break down the chicken, and the spice really punches up the flavor.” “One of my favorite game-day snacks is fried chicken. It is a heartier finger food that hits all the right points—crunchy, moist, salty, tangy—and hits the spot every time.”

Recognition

Nick Curtin has received Zagat Top 30 Under 30 (2014). The record around Nick Curtin includes One Michelin star for Restaurant Alouette, Most Sustainable Restaurant in Denmark (2024), 30 Under 30 (2014), Global Masters Level induction, and Fifth-Most Sustainable Restaurant in the world.