Mati Pichci glides between an induction burner and a record player, and back again. In one motion, he folds an omelette into submission. In the next, he flips a record—one of many he brought back from Japan. Mati visited last January for an omelette pop-up tour, stopping at every hi-fi listening bar he could find along the way. He returned to his Copenhagen café, AMATOR, with inspiration and 18 kg of smuggled vinyl.
The chef, who left an advertising career in Poland to pursue cooking, knew he would invest in speakers when he opened his own place. But going all-in on vinyl wasn’t part of the original plan. That changed quickly.
“I thought, I’m going to start collecting records and build a library of the vibes I want in the space,” he says. The initial concept was “soft sounds,” delicate jazz and lo-fi soul to complement the café’s soft opening. Then it evolved to include R&B and a growing ambition to showcase more “avant-garde” stylings.
“AMATOR isn’t a concept written on paper,” Mati shrugs. “It’s an organic understanding of what I want along the way. If something’s cool, I do it.”
Like techno yoga sessions, a literal breakfast-in-bed in collaboration with design studio ReFramed, and, most recently, Sound Hygge—an evening of focused listening inspired by the bars Mati visited in Japan.
The seed of Mati’s acoustic affinity was planted years earlier, at a pizza shop in Poland that he opened with a friend. At Przyjemność, Polish for ‘pleasure,’ 1970s soul and R&B were on loop. It was there, serving California-style pizzas like those popularized by chef Nancy Silverton, that he decided to take his craft a step further.
In 2019, Mati moved to Copenhagen for an internship at Noma, but it wasn’t long before he crossed paths with chef Frederik Bille Brahe. Frederik was looking for a manager for his café, Atelier September, a spot that would soon become the blueprint for the new wave of cafés to follow.
Despite his time at Noma, Mati gravitated toward a more intuitive approach to cooking, one that celebrated simplicity over tweezered precision. It was a perfect match for Frederik’s style.
Mati would go on to master the omelette in Frederik’s kitchen, but it wasn’t always his dish of choice. “I was a scrambled eggs guy,” he recalls. That changed during a brunch in late 2021 at a French bistro in Warsaw. Enlightened by the silky-soft structure of a classically made omelette, he became determined to perfect it himself.
“There was a little part of me that wanted to be great at something, to nail one dish,” he confesses. But Mati is the first to tell you he didn’t invent anything new—much of his technique was learned from a Jacques Pépin video on YouTube.
Mati began making omelettes at Atelier September, but the café’s original kitchen on Gothersgade was too small to support the new addition to the menu. “And I just really wanted to keep making omelettes,” he admits. That was one of the reasons why, in August 2022, he and Frederik parted ways. Atelier has since moved to a larger spot and added two more locations. Omelettes found their way back on the menu.
“He affected me in many ways,” Mati reflects on his time working for his former boss. “My understanding of gastronomy, produce, and hospitality.” He pauses, then adds with emphasis, “Gastronomy and hospitality are not the same thing.”
The day after Mati’s last shift at Atelier, an unexpected opportunity presented itself: he was approached to take over Relæ, the Michelin-starred New Nordic institution from Christian Puglisi. “I was a bit overwhelmed because it was a big restaurant,” he says. He opted for something more manageable: Psyche Café, a three-month residency at Relæ with his friend Theophilos Constantinou. They invested in a sound system and got to work. Mati handled the cooking; Theo curated the sound and managed service.
After Psyche’s run concluded, Mati took his omelettes on the road in a series of pop-ups. First to Seoul, as a prelude to his internship at the Michelin-starred Kabi in Tokyo. Then came a European tour: Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Berlin, Brussels, Porto, Bolzano, Vienna, Warsaw, Poznan, Bucharest—and, of course, Copenhagen.
“2023 was crazy,” he recalls. “The pop-ups just kept coming.”
These events became a way to travel, all the while embedding the French omelette into the Scandinavian café lexicon.
While Atelier September was serving the dish to an ever-growing clientele, Mati was out spreading the gospel in his own way. It should come as no surprise that Copenhagen-inspired cafés abroad—like Ante in Edinburgh, BAKEN in Warsaw, and Babbo in Oslo—all serve soft, glistening omelettes alongside more historically Scandi fare.
“According to my knowledge, there is some sort of a connection,” Mati says, his tone marked by a hesitance that reads as humility.
When he opened AMATOR in the spring of 2024, he brought everything with him: the sound, the omelettes, and a curatorial eye sharpened by his travels that makes the space feel more like a friend’s impeccably designed, charmingly lived-in apartment than a café.
“My concept isn’t just to provide a perfect omelette,” remarks the chef. “It’s to provide design, sound, and atmosphere.”
Stickered decals on AMATOR’s window spell out his intent: 'CURATED BY MATI PICHCI.'
AMATOR
Nordre Frihavnsgade 7
2100 Copenhagen Ø