I was interested in food from a young age. It was a hobby and I enjoyed cooking and baking with my mother and grandmother. Also, since I was a baby I had extreme eczema and asthma, then chronic ulcer problems, although we didn’t know at the time that these were food allergies. Later in my teens, doctors tried many contact allergies on my skin and it turned out I was allergic to shellfish, raw meat, lots of vegetables and almost everything else they tried. The only solution was cortisone treatments – injections when it got bad and various creams the rest of the time. My hands would bleed terribly. Basically, I was told I shouldn’t touch foodstuffs. Cortisone alleviated it but there were side-effects – the skin gets very thin, is ruined, and the immune defences, too. Gloves weren’t a solution because I was allergic to gloves. It was a nightmare.

It was only after many years that I found the appropriate diet for me to be able to consume and cook. In the meantime, I’d become a commercial lawyer. Mergers, acquisitions, a bit of litigation. Nothing about it really bored me, although airplane leasing was pretty dull. Yet I didn’t work on anything I felt passionate about. And if you want to feel passionate, why not change profession?

I didn’t lack the entrepreneurial skills or drive needed. I’d started businesses since I was a teenager – selling ice cream on the beach in the south of Sweden when I was 13, importing computers from the UK and selling them in high school, and travelling to Burgundy to collect wines. And me and a few other lawyers left one of the largest law firms in Sweden and started up our own law firm when we were relatively young. Meanwhile, I was blogging – at gastroville.com – about restaurants I visited while a lawyer or in my spare time. But what especially made it possible to have my own restaurant was discovering my palaeolithic diet, which meant my eczema, asthma and ulcers disappeared within months. There is an appropriate diet for all of us and it’s marvellous to discover. Mine is my interpretation of what Cro-Magnon people ate over 30,000 years ago. It’s not what food I now eat which caused the allergies to abate but rather the food I now avoid eating, like certain grain-based proteins, sugars and man-made oils introduced as little as a few hundred years ago.

So, with my health finally in place and aged 44, it started to really grind in the back of my head that I should take my home-cooking skills and see how good I could become as a chef. I’d always believed that, if you’re able to be creative with the stuff you love, real happiness follows. My advice to anyone wanting to do the same is to try talking yourself out of it, hard. But then, if you can’t, go do it, if you have the stamina, lest you never get the idea out of your head. Law is something that was easy to leave for good, because once someone gets away from it they can’t really practise any more. But know it’s going to be very difficult, because any new business will face unforeseen hurdles. You must always expect many problems.

Hedone began on a shoestring and it’s been very difficult to get it to where it is. You’re starting over and it’s possible it’ll be more difficult when older than younger. Mainly because of scepticism. When a young chef opens a restaurant, people might say, “Oh, it’s new, with a young chef”, but no one will say, “Oh, this old Swedish bloke’s opening a new restaurant.”

And there was much to learn, but one of the things I definitely had was experience of eating a very large number of meals at top end restaurants all over the world, and a good sense of how things should be. And attention to detail. That’s a good starting point, but it doesn’t mean copying. My aim was to find an original style of cooking and that is extremely difficult.

Educating myself in cookery – in mastering techniques – is something I’ve done gradually. Fine dining is a very difficult field within the restaurant business. It’s almost madness to open any fine dining restaurant. You’re much better off running fast-food businesses, for reasons including higher profitability and fewer staff. With fine dining, people say, “Why should I pay this much?”, but a few very good reviews can change everything. Then people want to work for you.

Living above the restaurant has been essential; not least because I’m bread-making in the basement and using only natural spontaneous fermentation, which is complicated. One needs an eye on things.

You have to be really committed when starting a business but find the right tempo. Recently I’ve reduced the number of services – I think the 90-hour weeks that are common in the industry have to stop. In another six months, maybe I will get, if I wish, a slightly better life, in the sense that you don’t actually have any “life” when you’re running a restaurant. But I enjoy every minute. I’ve always plated every piece of food, except for at three services I’ve missed, due to very pressing circumstances. I told Pascal Barbot, the three-star Michelin chef at L’Astrance (in Paris) that I’d only ever missed three services and he said, “So what? It took me eight years.”

I’m definitely up for doing something different again though. I’m not thinking this is a career I will have until I retire. If I see there’s another passion I really want to exercise then I will probably change again. Maybe if I’d been a chef earlier, I would now be a lawyer. I don’t understand this notion that you have one career in life and then that’s it. Why can’t you be a surgeon and then maybe a journalist? And I think schools getting people to decide on their career path at 15 is absolutely insane. I think, actually, it’s only at 30-plus that you have an idea of what you want to do with your life.