A professional kitchen, no matter the prices on the menu, is almost certainly a stressful environment. (Have you seen The Bear?) Add in the pressure of keeping one Michelin star, two, three—the weight can seem unthinkable. Now multiply that by three yet again, and you’ll start to imagine what life is like for Björn Frantzén.

The 49-year-old Swede is the only chef to helm a trio of the world’s 157 Michelin three-star restaurants: Frantzén, in Stockholm, received three stars in 2018; Zén, in Singapore, followed in 2021; and Dubai’s FZN was awarded the guide’s highest honor just last year, mere months after opening. While Frantzén admits that he feels pressure to stay on top, he tells Robb Report that he doesn’t lose sleep thinking about how to please the Michelin inspectors year after year.

“It’s a relief when you keep [the ranking], but I hope that myself, my team, and all our regular guests will react a lot quicker than once a year if we’re on the wrong track,” he says over the phone from London, where he’s doing site visits for potential projects. “We need to be our absolute best. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Michelin Guide or if it’s a grandmother from the northern parts of Sweden. It’s the same.”

This mindset is perhaps why Frantzén has become one of the most successful chefs on the planet—he’s as focused, if not more so, on his regulars and the diners who save up to eat his Nordic-inflected fare (think pickling, fermenting, and the like) as he is on the critics and talking heads who can make or break restaurants. And he’s often thinking more about day-to-day issues—like a storm in Norway preventing the arrival of king crabs—than about the highs and lows that come from winning or losing accolades.

The demanding world of fine dining isn’t where Frantzén imagined himself when he was a child. His early life revolved around soccer; he even played professionally for five years. A congenital heart condition brought an end to his athlete dreams, but cooking had long been on the back burner. Frantzén still fondly recalls a dish of steak frites he had at age 12 or 13—“It was a hallelujah moment for me,” he says of the meal—and so, when a life on the pitch became impossible, he pivoted to the kitchen.

After studying at a culinary school in Stockholm where he trained in the classical French tradition, he worked at a handful of Michelin-starred spots including Pied à Terre in London and L’Arpège in Paris. In 2008, he teamed up with chef Daniel Lindeberg to open Frantzén/Lindeberg, which became one of the few restaurants in the Nordic region to hold two Michelin stars at the time.

Though Lindeberg left in 2013, the restaurant didn’t drop his name until it moved locations in 2017 and became, simply, Frantzén—marking its proprietor’s debut as a solo restaurateur. Nearly two decades later, the Frantzén Group operates nine establishments from Bangkok to Marbella, all of them uniting Swedish heritage with French technique and Asian influences, especially Japanese cuisine. “Each restaurant is a project and a little town of itself,” the chef says. “We say no to a lot of offers. We are building the company slow and steady.” This year isn’t shaping up to be so quiet, though: The group is set to open six to eight restaurants in 2026, including a Brasserie Astoria outpost in London and a completely new concept in Stockholm. Called Emberlin, this will be Frantzén’s take on the classic steakhouse. It’s scheduled to open in late summer, and he already has ambitions for it to expand around the globe.

Outside of the kitchen, Frantzén keeps himself busy looking after his two teenage daughters and their golden retriever, Aston. At home, he mostly cooks simple, quick meals, relying on local classics like Swedish meatballs. He loves music and listens to everything from hip-hip to rock to opera to Swedish pop. “My Spotify is a freak,” he says. When we spoke, he had recently gone to a Metallica concert in Abu Dhabi. And even though he no longer plays soccer, Frantzén still runs and plays golf, a sport he admits “suits my age.”

As a kid on the pitch, Frantzén never imagined that he’d be one of the most highly awarded chefs of his generation. And even when he first branched out into the culinary world, he felt more or less the same. “My main objective when I started my first restaurant was to try to achieve two Michelin stars,” he explains. “I would never have thought I would have three restaurants with three Michelin stars. So, I would say that’s pretty well played from a lad from the suburbs without rich parents.”