Maria pushed through her ideas one by one. At 19, she started a catering service alongside her food service business, and weekend weddings soon became part of everyday life.
─ I remember that first wedding so well. There were 225 invited guests, and it was so exciting!
A year later, she took over a beloved local eatery in Närpes, and suddenly she was running three different businesses at once.
A couple of years later, Maria wanted to try something new. She saw an ad in Vasabladet looking for a chef in Sundsvall, Sweden—an offer that appealed to her since a passenger ferry operated between Vaasa and Sundsvall at the time. She traveled there for a trial shift, and the first challenge was curry sauté.
─ I had no idea what that was, because back then Finnish food culture was anything but international.
But she managed to pull the sauté together, and as a result, she wrapped up all her businesses back home and moved to Sweden with her husband.
Back then, Swedish food was more different from Finnish food than Maria could ever have imagined. It was simple enough to prepare, but she didn’t know what it was supposed to include in order to be considered Swedish.
─ If I had known this before I left, I probably wouldn’t have dared move there.
But the years passed, and Maria learned a lot. Many of the chefs Maria worked with had previously traveled around Europe and brought those various influences into the restaurant kitchen. Today, this is a great advantage for Maria because she has learned to prepare dishes from scratch, but during the learning process, there were also quite a few mistakes.
─ I made several blunders in Sundsvall. Back then, there was no internet to look up recipes. For example, I deep-fried a banana with the peel still on, Maria says with a laugh.
After four and a half years in Sweden, Maria and her husband had two children, and they wanted the children to grow up in Finland.
─ We packed our bags once again and returned home to Närpes. My parents had retired, and we now had the opportunity to revive the greenhouse business at the family homestead.
At the same time that Maria and her husband became greenhouse growers, Maria was finishing her culinary studies, and she decided to renovate a small storage loft on the farm that was 15 square meters in size. It became her little catering kitchen, where she cooked for several hundred people at a time, and it was used extensively for eleven years.
During this time, Maria had expanded her catering business, and she now needed a larger kitchen.
─ I figured I could build my own event venue at the same time, and there was really no question that it should be in a greenhouse since we live in Närpes and also had our own greenhouses. Närpes accounts for the largest tomato and cucumber production in the country, and the vegetables are grown in greenhouses.
The loan officer for the project had a hard time believing in the concept, but he believed in Maria nonetheless. Today, the greenhouse restaurant has been around since 2005, and her concept has been featured in more than one hundred different articles.
─ The loan officer said, “it’ll be a gift from above if you can get people to come all the way out here,” and I did! He promised he’d eat his hat if it worked. I wonder if he ever did, says Maria with a laugh.
