Nicolai Tangen is well-known in the investment industry for leading the in-house money manager of the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. But turns out, he's also trained as a professional chef.
Mr. Tangen, CEO at Norges Bank Investment Management, made the revelation on LinkedIn, in a video he posted last month showing him cooking his version of pasta alla Eoliana — Aeolian-style pasta.
The video was made as an introduction to a virtual social event before Christmas, a spokeswoman said, as part of the manager's focus on internal communication and to keep spirits up. A number of other employees shared their favorite recipes, she said.
However, Mr. Tangen posted the video to appeal to his "many thousand students" that he is connected with via the social media platform, given he knows from his own experience "how empty the bank account is this late in the semester."
In the video, Mr. Tangen said he had three months of professional chef training at the world-famous Le Cordon Bleu culinary school. There he learned basic skills and was graded on the taste, hygiene and presentation associated with his cooking.
"It's very hard. … I have a lot of respect for chefs," Mr. Tangen said in the video.
In case you fancy making Mr. Tangen's pasta dish, you will need olive oil, tuna, pasta, black olives, capers, red onion, tomatoes, fennel — "not mandatory, but if you want to be fancy you can have fennel" — and chili. "No food without chili," Mr. Tangen said.
NBIM manages Norway's sovereign wealth fund, Government Pension Fund Global, Oslo, which had 10.91 trillion Norwegian kroner ($1.27 trillion) in assets as of Dec. 31.— sophie baker