Hannah Grant is the chef for the Tinkoff-Saxo professional cycling team, where she provides the right meals for professional riders to help them perform to their potential. She calls it “performance cooking”. Grant graduated from the Copenhagen Culinary Institute in 2007, has worked at the Fat Duck with Heston Blumenthal and Noma with René Redzepi, and is the author of The Grand Tour Cookbook.

Grant is funny and talkative and laughs often. She also has a culinary CV most chefs would die for, but she chose to carve out an extraordinary niche in the very masculine world of men’s professional cycling. She took time out from planning menus in her home city of Copenhagen to talk about her career in food and some of the memorable dishes she’s cooked for Tinkoff-Saxo, one of the biggest professional teams in the world.

Hannah Grant (@dailystews) Oh the good old rest days😴 the grand tour never ends w/ the #grandtourcookbook get your copy http://t.co/24kXmxDWT0 pic.twitter.com/SikTeTEd9q

Hannah, you’ve worked at several top restaurants, including Noma, one of the three best in the world, so how did you end up cooking for a cycling team?

I’ve always been interested in food. When I was a small child I’d pull out all the contents of the cupboards and drawers to make my own sauces! So I’ve always had an interest in cooking. In ninth grade I decided I wanted to go into the restaurant business but my dear mum was under the impression that this was the slippery slope to becoming an alcoholic – in the old days, chefs were super hardworking and they drank a lot, it was a very hard lifestyle. So my mum was reluctant to put me into chef school. She told me “when you’re 18 you can decide, until then I’m in charge.”

So when I left high school, the chef thing was right at the back of my mind because the years my mum had told me not to pursue it had pushed the idea so far back I didn’t realise that it was the path that I was going to go. I was working full-time, I went to fashion school, I tried a lot of things. But I realised I need to push myself in one direction, to give myself a big kick up the arse, as we say in Danish, and to figure out what I wanted to do so I signed up for the Danish Royal Navy!

Why the navy?

I’m really good at getting my own way and talking my way out of a lot of things but in there you can’t talk your way out of anything. I wanted to learn discipline and to experience that. So I ended up on an inspection ship round Greenland and the Faroe Islands, doing fishing inspections – checking the quotas, making sure they hadn’t overfished or fished the wrong things.

On the boat I met a very dear friend, a guy named Karl, who had just graduated as a chef. And all of a sudden, on this boat in the middle of the ocean off the coast of Greenland, I’m standing in the galley with him making two hundred litres of soup and it totally occurred to me: “This is what I wanted to do! I wanted to be a chef!” So I finished my time in the navy and went straight off to sign up for chef school.

That was quite a change in direction.

It was weird. I’d taken the path away from it and then realised that this was the way I had to go. In Denmark you train for four years to be a chef and I’m glad I did it that way. Being a chef is a lot about accepting that you don’t know anything and that you need to be taught. It’s about saying “yes, chef” constantly, about learning and failing and rising from the dust again and again. I don’t think I could have done that without being a little older and having done the navy thing as well. Accepting the hierarchy, accepting that there’s someone above you who tells you this is the way it goes.

How was working at Noma?

When I was an apprentice, Noma had just opened. It was a small restaurant scene in Copenhagen and no one ate out at lunchtime because the government had passed a law to stop meals out being deductible, so all these amazing chefs were forced to rethink things. Noma was nothing – everyone laughed at them and called them “field fuckers”! [laughs] But René was an amazing chef and his staff were really talented. Anyway, I kept an eye on it and two apprentices I knew started working there. But I took a different path – where I worked was super classic French.

During your training you’re supposed to work at one restaurant but then you don’t develop; it becomes impossible to adapt and change to new things. So I worked at three places and the last one was the super fine dining that I wanted to do. I was super happy. I never intended to work at Noma. But the restaurant scene was so connected and a girl apprentice I knew at Noma, René had arranged for her to work for three weeks at the Fat Duck and I was unbelievably jealous. My chef said no, but René believed in sending people out to see what was going on, for ideas and inspiration, to learn to change and adapt and see that things are not the same everywhere.

So I got it stuck in my mind that I wanted to go to the Fat Duck when I graduated. Noma was interesting, it was doing something different, but it didn’t have the superstar appeal it has now and at that time the Fat Duck was the No2 restaurant in the world. So when I graduated I applied to be a stagiaire at the Fat Duck – I had to fill out a 10-page application form about my background and my motivation – and I got accepted. So I made as much money as I could in three months so I could go and work for free for Heston Blumenthal!

That’s funny. How did you get the money together to get to the Fat Duck?

I applied for a lot of grants; I was going to be the biggest female Danish chef! The worst thing I could get would be a “no”. I applied saying I was representing the female side of Danish culinary life. I was going to go out and get lots of inspiration and come back and give back and make Denmark a country with female chef power. And it worked out to my benefit and I got 10,000 to go to the Fat Duck.

So I started working there and I met this amazing American guy who’s now my husband. He was working in the development lab there. He has Norwegian heritage and he was into all things Scandinavian so I was telling him about Noma. I ordered the book for him and I realised that what they were doing was super neat and I was kind of representing this! And I said to Lars: “This is your dream scenario, you should develop dishes for this restaurant.” And that’s what he does today.

We went to the Galapagos Islands, sailed across the South Pacific to French Polynesia, fishing and cooking what we found

So what happened when you left the Fat Duck? Where did you go next?

After the Fat Duck we didn’t know where to go. There were visa issues and we weren’t ready to get married, so I went to New York to visit him and try and figure out what we were going to do. And a chef friend of mine was in New York, working for the third richest person in the world as a private chef on his yacht – and he has plenty of free time and money and he says: “Hannah, work on a boat. You’re in international waters, there are no visa issue and you can get to know each other better.” And I said “that sounds reasonable” [laughs]. I’d never thought about it before but the things we do for love [laughs]. So we signed up for boat crew and within three days we landed a job on a kite boarding expedition boat travelling the world.

That sounds like an incredible job. Where did that take you?

We flew to Panama City and started this crazy job on a catamaran sailboat that was meant to travel to the remotest places on earth. We did it for a year. We spent two months in the Galapagos Islands, sailed across the South Pacific to French Polynesia for six months, fishing and cooking everything we could get and then on to the Cook Islands and Tonga. And it was a completely different world of cooking all of a sudden. Every day we created new dishes for the guests and ourselves, it was very low-key, there were only 10 of us on the boat so we all ate together.

After a year Lars and I had got to know each other really well – we’d never been further apart than the 60 feet the boat allowed us to get away from each other [laughs]. It was a good time but we had to move on. I went to Denmark and he followed me. We were both broke – the boat was about the experience, not making money.

Hannah Grant (@dailystews) It's never to late: get your #grandtourcookbook at http://t.co/6ywr2roEul & start cooking YEAH! #gtcb #cycling #food pic.twitter.com/u6rR1sAogF

So you’re back in Copenhagen. What came next in your culinary career?

I got a job as head chef in a new place that was opening, the first 100% organic eatery in Copenhagen and, since we weren’t married, Lars was going to stage at Noma – they offered him a job two weeks after he’d started. It was very romantic; we decided to get married because we’d been together so long and worked closely together without killing each other so that was a pretty good sign, we thought “we can do this!” [laughs].

So Lars started his job and I grew tired of mine – the guys I was working with had no background in restaurants and they had unreal expectations of what could be done so it didn’t turn out well. But my interest in nutrition, especially sports nutrition, had been awakened on the boat – all the kite boarders ate, a lot, and they were into different diets and I really wanted to dig into that. So I applied for a course in Copenhagen and they gave me a place because of all my previous experience. I had really high expectations and they made a lot of promises but educationally it basically turned out to be a lot of googling and I thought “Arrrggghh, there has to be a better way!”

I discovered that, if I took a few extra classes, I could get into university to study sports nutrition. And that was when I started working at Noma.

Which was the No1 restaurant in the world. What was that experience like?

I was doing a full-time job and full-time study and I kind of snuck in from the side [laughs]. But I knew their style and I decided to quit my studies and work there. I was there for one season, 2009-10, a year without a summer break, with very long days.

The sports nutrition idea was still lurking and I made a deal with the university to let me in. So I was working in a restaurant, getting up to go to class and working full-time which was almost impossible. I moved away from Noma and got a job at a place called David’s Bistro. David had worked with René so I knew his way of thinking. I thought it would be more manageable but, surprisingly, it didn’t work out that well [laughs]. It was super, super hard. I was still determined to get in but I couldn’t work Wednesday night, get in at 1am and then be in class at 8am and get my head round complex maths problems – I hadn’t done maths since I was 15!

Sounds like a tough life. How did you cope with everything?

I was determined to do it, so I called my old sous chef from Noma and asked him if he had any contacts for jobs where you did a lot of work in a compressed space of time and then have time off for study; I was thinking about banquets and weddings where you work a lot at weekends but have weekdays free. He called me back in half an hour and said: “You gotta talk to this guy Michael, it’s a cycling team and they’re looking for a chef.” And I thought “this is interesting, but terrifying!” And he said “It’s Bjarne Riis’ team” and I thought, “Oh, this is big, but I don’t have the education.” And he said they had a nutritionist and I could talk to them.

The chef they had wasn’t happy because he wanted to do a 13-course meal every day and the riders didn’t want that

So that was how you ended up working for Tinkoff-Saxo?



I met up with this guy from the team and asked “what is this?” They’d had this idea that they wanted a Michelin-starred gourmet chef to do the job, but it’s very hard to ask someone with a restaurant to do this job as well – it’s extremely time-consuming and tiring, and you have to be in several places at once.

The chef they had wasn’t happy because he wanted to do a 13-course meal every day and the riders didn’t want that. They’re tired, they’re hungry and they don’t have the mental capacity to enjoy delicately put-together small, complex dishes. And the chef couldn’t always be there, so he sent different apprentices to take his place and there were constant changes in the food and no one was happy. There was no routine and it was a big mess.

They told me I’d work four, maybe six days, then have some time off. And I had that weird feeling about doing something new and this being a once in a lifetime chance, you can’t not take it. And they’d managed to get a chef who would start after the Tour de France in 2011, so I would do the job from January just until the end of the Tour, when he’d take over. So I thought “I can do this – if I have time off I can study and it’s a cool basis for sports nutrition.” And with the Tour de France ending in July I could, fingers crossed, start university on 1 September. So I said: “Fuck it, let’s do it!”

So, you’d never done anything like this before. How did you start?

I was hooked up with the nutritionist and we spoke for hours and hours and hours, writing everything down, figuring out what do these guys need – it was so different from the kite boarders, some of them were raw foodies, some were living on cookies – but this was way more strict, an old school, classic world where you can’t just come in and change things. You can’t start a revolution; that just doesn’t happen in the cycling world!

I spoke to the nutritionist and my ears were bleeding with all the information. I was planning menus for the training camp in January when I had to meet them all and so I went to Majorca in January and I met 29 riders and 40 new staff members, none of whom I’d met. I was alone and I had to cook for two weeks for 30 guys eating like horses. It was freaking crazy!

But you’d spoken to the nutritionist so you had a good idea what you were doing?

In those two weeks I found out that what the nutritionist said versus what the riders want to eat doesn’t correspond at all! So it was two weeks of crazy fighting and trying to survive and being able to cook the food without passing out from being so tired.

The whole team were so sweet. They could see it was completely crazy and they helped me out as much as they could. I survived the two weeks and called the nutritionist and said “this is insane because I can’t do this job alone and what you dictate is not what the riders want. What you want them to eat is not what they want to eat.”

Anyway, I had a month off and then there was another training camp and I was very determined to succeed in this job. And at this camp I said: “Listen, I need some extra hands.” So my cousin, who’s a brilliant chef, came over from Scotland and though it was still super tiring we could manage, and I had someone to ping pong ideas with. The training camps are without doubt the hardest part of the year because you have all the riders at the same time.

Did life start getting easier when the team started the racing season?

That was crazy! It was super tough and I was alone, in my kitchen truck, trying to cook, clean and shop and you’re in a new place every day. It’s completely overwhelming in a new job where no one can tell you how anything works. But I managed to get permission to have an assistant for the Grand Tours and halfway through the Giro the nutritionist told me the chef wasn’t going to take the job and was I interested in continuing?

My first thought was “shit, this is really tough – we’ll have to take this a few trips at a time” [laughs] but knowing they were interested in keeping me made negotiations easier. So I said yes to staying on condition that I had an apprentice because the job is just too much for one person. The team were really in the shit with money but the Danish government had an apprenticeship scheme where they would pay the wages, so it was like getting a worker for free – the team’s only costs were living expenses. They agreed and we graduated a chef from a cycling team!

What was that first year like?

That first year was extremely addictive and it was very weird because, as hard and crazy as it was, it was also amazing, exciting, new and fulfilling. And then I got to really know the guys and we started on the negotiation of how we could find the middle way between the nutritionist’s strict guidelines and helping them to eat better.

So that was the foundation of really good team work between myself and the riders to figure out what worked and what didn’t. But for the first couple of months they were super angry at me for coming in and changing everything! But as each season went by it got better and we got into a routine.

Had that anything to do with being a woman in a male-dominated world?

It was a lot to do with that. Everyone was like: “No way! That’s not how it works here.” A lot of my colleagues gave me a hard time in the beginning but I fought for my job and I earned my space. I’ve been accepted in that world, I’ve gone through my fire baptism [laughs]! People were waiting for me to crack, saying, “When is she going to leave?’ But I didn’t fold and the guys would say, “Look at you, you’re in it for the long run.”

In the peloton right now there’s one other woman cooking, for Giant Shimano. She’s a nutritionist but she started cooking because you can’t tell a 60-year-old French chef what to cook. I respect her because it’s a fucking crazy job to do, especially when you’re not a chef and you have no training. But she’s cool, she’s learnt a lot. But there’s me and there’s her and that’s it.

I think most people in the cycling world know who I am because there aren’t that many female chefs. And that’s the strange thing – because everyone knows who you are but you don’t know who they are. It’s a big small world. You gotta earn your spot. It’s like being an apprentice in a kitchen, once you’ve graduated you earn your spot. It’s the same in cycling.

Girls in the cycling world are podium girls or fans who are giggling at the side of the road. You have to get your own respect. You have to show that you can work, that you can deal with things, that you’re not weak. You have to really prove yourself, that you’re one of the guys to make it – but once you do, then you’re one of the guys and that’s where I’ve reached now. No one says: “Oh, she’s a girl, help her,” and I’m used to working with a lot of men but it’s not strange for anyone on our team anymore.

It’s like having this extremely large, crazy family – like a weird circus family you travel around with

Is it tough being a chef in cycling?

In a restaurant kitchen everyone knows how everything works around you – in the cycling world no one knows how anything works in my world. If I’m in the kitchen and I say “we’re going to do this and this” no one is going to doubt me because I’m female in the restaurant business. No one is going to say: “I won’t take her seriously because she’s a female.” I’m the chef because I’m capable of doing it.

Now it’s much easier, but when I first started you had all these old-school types who had been in the cycling business for 20 years. All the teams are trying to have new ideas and funky plans. When I first started some of the cyclists told me they thought I was just another crazy person trying to change things, but I’m not a crazy person and I’m not a nutritionist. But you learn from each race, each season, how to build up the menus

This is now the job I’ve had for the longest but it changes every day and that’s the great thing about it and why you don’t get tired of it. It’s never the same, though sometimes you can get tired of that too! There are a lot of unforeseen issues that can happen when you’re in the middle of a race – you’re dependent on generators and roads being open, there are a lot of other factors involved than just cooking for the riders and making sure it’s the right stuff. I’m like the crazy logistics chef. But you get wrapped up in this cycling world and that’s extremely addictive!

Were you interested in cycling before you took the job?

I knew nothing about cycling! [laughs]. I knew my boss Bjarne Riis because he was the only Dane to win the Tour de France, in 1996, and he’s a hero where I come from. But I knew him and that’s it. So at the beginning at the dinner table with the staff, the directeur sportifs would entertain themselves asking me questions about cycling that I couldn’t answer [laughs], like “what colour is the mountains jersey?” or “what does it mean to be dropped?” And I’d give some outrageous, hilarious answer because I had no idea. But it didn’t take me that long to get super into it, so even when I’m not working I follow what’s going on.

When you’re so wrapped up in this world, if you don’t get an interest in it you shouldn’t be there. I had a colleague at the team, a soigneur and he said “Hannah you can’t be here if you care too much” and I said, “Wait, if you don’t care you shouldn’t be here.” He’s not in the cycling world any more. Because if you don’t care it’s a really fucking hard job to do, if you don’t enjoy it or see the fun in it.

It’s like having this extremely large, crazy family – like a weird circus family you travel around with – and you’ve really got to be into it because it’s a really, really hard job but it’s a really, really fun job. It’s super hard being away from family and friends but you create your family out on the road. It’s like a whole little universe to itself.

Tell us about some of the meals you’ve cooked for the team over the year.



The first one was at Majorca at the training camp. I wanted to do a really kick ass ratatouille and I was in the worst kitchen in Spain – it was so smashed up, with no equipment and it occurred to me that you can’t win the Tour de France on a rusty old bike and it’s very hard to cook nice food for thirty guys when you’re in a broken up kitchen! I remember being not completely satisfied but I redeemed myself after that!

What if you’re cooking for a celebration?

The last couple of years its turned into the tiramisu. I did it by accident when someone won a stage and everyone constantly asks for it, but you can’t do it every day! It turned into “if you win a stage you get tiramisu” and they knew that all of a sudden. We always had the rule that if they did really well, a stage win or a podium, there’d be a dessert. But then it became every time there was a stage win it was the tiramisu, and we’ve had a lot of stage wins this year!

In the Giro and then in the Tour after, Alberto broke his leg and the tiramisu just took over! So it’s tiramisu for a stage win and a really good brownie for birthdays. But I also try and do a birthday cake from their country. I try and figure out what kind of cake they would normally celebrate with, to make it a little homely.

What is Alberto Contador’s favourite dish?

He absolutely loves – and it’s very simple – potato frittata. He loves that! That and a really good paella.

What do you cook every day?

That would be breakfast, and variation is the key to keep them eating and keep their appetites up. Because if you don’t change it up they don’t want to eat it. For dinner they always have chicken but I never cook the same recipe two days in a row. I mix it up a lot and keep it interesting because they get pretty sick of chicken!

The thing is, you have to have something neutral for everyone to eat, so I do two types of protein – chicken as the safe option everyone can eat and then another option that could be lamb, fish, veal, pork, anything that’s nice in the area. So if the guys don’t like fish there’s always chicken to rely on so there’s no crisis at the dinner table because, trust me, there will be if there’s no chicken [laughs]. Some of the guys could eat plain chicken every day for a month but they’re in the minority so I try and make sure everyone is happy with the selection of food I do.

What would be a typical dinner after a race?

We have two proteins, a lot of cooked vegetables and then a vegetarian dish on the side, a light salad with cold cuts or goats cheese and then a heavier salad of grains or root vegetables. So there’s a constant variation and a way for them to mix and combine in a way they want. So they don’t have to force feed themselves with pasta. They have to have so many carbohydrates and I know some guys could eat pasta every day and other guys are going to die if they have to eat pasta every day! But there’s always pasta and usually rice or another starch like roasted or crushed potatoes or sweet potatoes, something a little more adventurous. And it depends on the mood – sometimes they don’t want to eat too much. But that’s how I try and accommodate all their wishes – I know I can’t make everyone 100% happy but at least you make sure they want to eat.

What about the team’s favourite meal?

Anything that resembles a day off, relaxing, something fast foodish. We have a rule that the day before the rest day in the Grand Tours, one day they get build your own burgers with everything made from scratch, obviously and then the next day before the rest day they get homemade pizzas, with a nice homemade sourdough crust. I’m very obsessed with bread. And those are the two things that, if you tell them they’re on the menu, they’re like “yay!” And it means the rest day is coming.

What do you cook when you’re off duty?

I’m really into soups and stews all year round. Yesterday I cooked a really nice sumo-wrestlers hot pot, which is cool – in a way it’s like making a sourdough, but with a soup – you have a broth and you add meats and vegetables on a daily basis so that flavours the broth and then the next day you strain it and add more meat and vegetables and everyday the flavour changes.Things that steep, and take flavour and marinade, I’m really into that. And fish, I eat fish as much as I can.

What is the best dish you’ve ever cooked?

The one I really nailed? That’s such a difficult question [laughs]. People usually ask me what’s my favourite thing to cook, my speciality – and my speciality is not having a speciality! Which is a lie because I do. But I’ve done so many different things and it’s hard to find one dish that crosses them all.

When you’re in the South Pacific and you just pulled a giant yellowfin out of the water, then the most amazing dish is super fresh fish with soy and ginger on the side of a boat. And there are different dishes for different moods. You need the perspective of the situation and the simplest things, the most rustic things can be the very best things in the right environment. I don’t cook to impress people – I love it when food looks amazing and you want to eat it and dive right into it, those delicate small plates, but that’s completely different to what I do so I think the answer is I can’t answer!

Hannah Grant (@dailystews) Whole baked red dorade with lemon - great success #tinkoffsaxo #gtcb #grandtourcookbook http://t.co/24kXmxDWT0 pic.twitter.com/0QaaPFmJBN

What is your fantasy meal?

The team would want to go all in. They like exclusive and delicate things; most of them really enjoy well made classic food and they tell me about the great local restaurants they visit in the off-season. And maybe a bit of an extravaganza: super fresh turbot and truffles. If I could, and I had the crew for it, I would love to cook them an amazing tasting menu, because I’m trained in classic French cuisine. So refined, small, light plates – not too heavy but with the mentality of how I think about food now, that would be fun to do. I’d like to show that I can do other things besides cooking huge portions of chicken and pasta but rarely do you get the chance!

The most memorable meal you’ve cooked?

In 2013 at the Vuelta we cooked a baby piglet, with the head and everything, and people went crazy on Twitter because I put up a picture of this suckling pig saying “look what’s for dinner” and it started a storm of people going crazy because there was a face on the food that I cooked! So it was kind of crazy but the riders loved that and they still ask if I can ‘cook the baby piglet!’ In Spain it’s difficult to come across the fresh ones, they’re usually super deep frozen, but that one was fresh and very nice. I remember everyone was so happy and thrilled and we were sharing a hotel with Quickstep, and they only had four riders left. They were all looking and when our team was done eating I said ‘you can taste if you want!’ The other team was taking photos of it and I remember that often, it was very memorable. And the team still talk about it. The suckling pig. That was a big one.

And the most memorable meal you didn’t have to cook?

Oleg [Tinkov, the team’s owner] is not high maintenance; he eats what the team eats, but he did bring caviar and vodka to the Giro. He flew in 2kg of Beluga caviar for the team to share, that was pretty crazy! And then Mick Rogers won a stage the day after and the team were saying “apparently we have to have caviar more often because it helps us win stages!” And then we had tiramisu.

Ride the Revolution by Suze Clemitson and The Grand Tour Cookbook by Hannah Grant are available now