Tour Sweden's Rising Culinary Scene
By Raphael Kadushin
Photography by Gentl & Hyers
Originally published on CNTraveler.com
THE GIRL WITH THE CRAYFISH TATTOO
“That’s the Bread Hotel,” my friend Per tells me, when we drive past the bland facade of a Stockholm building. “They claim it’s a five-star hotel.”
It doesn’t look like one. In fact, it looks a bit blank and shabby, less five-star landmark than the sort of place where drunks go to sleep it off.
It isn’t until I wander into the hotel on my third day in Stockholm that I realize my mistake. This is, it turns out, such a luxe retreat that, according to manager Åsa Johanson, each guest is guaranteed “love and attention,” though she admits the five-star hotel designation is a bit of a joke. That’s because the property is really a bakery, and all the coddled “guests” are actually starter loaves of bread—dropped off by Stockholmers too busy to cook, secure in the knowledge that their batch will be stored in a cozy jar and fed the daily rations of water and flour which ensure a fine sourdough baguette.
“Every dough,” Johanson tells me, “has its own character.” That Stockholm can claim a bread hotel, and see something soulful in the eyes of a seeded loaf, evokes the city’s maternal devotion to cultivating seriously pedigreed cuisine. And it says something about the New Nordic Kitchen. While the seductive kitchens of southern Europe will always get the gastronomic heart thumping, it is the frozen bloc of Nordic countries that is emerging as Europe’s most exciting culinary center. At the 2011 Bocuse d’Or, the fiercest of the global culinary competitions, a Scandinavian triumvirate cleaned up: Denmark took gold; Sweden, silver; and Norway, bronze.
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Sweden may come as the bigger surprise now that Denmark can claim the very visible Noma restaurant (which flaunts enough press clippings to qualify as ElBulli North) and since Sweden, extending into the Arctic Circle, has especially frigid odds to overcome. Start with its larder. Why have gastronomes traditionally headed to the Mediterranean? Because birch sap, musk ox, Arctic bramble, beetroot, and herring (even, or especially, herring served twenty-five different ways) are a tougher sell than olive oil, foie gras, and Valencia oranges. Reindeer and elk tend toward the gamey; lichens and nettles, ripped out of the earth, make for a withered cookbook. If southern Europe is one sunny, relentlessly ripe fruit bowl, the scrappy Swedish terroir can look like a bona fide terror.
Add the intensity of the Nordic seasons and things seem even worse. The mythic five-month winter is Sweden’s prevailing, inescapable fact. Whatever crop did bloom, until recently, was a complicated harvest that seemed to offer little in return for so much work—all the busy pickling, curing, smoking, and preserving that kept mouths chewing through the annual big chill.
The new Swedish cuisine, resolutely Nordic in ingredients and inspiration, reflects the country’s Bergman-esque moods. Here, a view from a suite at Stockholm’s Grand Hôtel.
So how did the prickly country surface as one of Europe’s surging culinary stars? I’d come to Sweden to find out, and the best place to start was in Stockholm, at one of Mathias Dahlgren’s eateries. But Dahlgren—the country’s granddaddy of top chefs at the tender age of forty-three—doesn’t want to meet at his kitchen. He wants to drive me out to Rosendal’s Garden, ten minutes from Stockholm’s center, and when we get there I can see why. Who says the earth is bald up here? The fruit orchard is thick with apple trees, the rose garden is wafting perfume, the greenhouse café is serving fresh-baked bread, and the whole blooming utopia looks like a vindication of the revolution Dahlgren helped launch, in September 2004. That’s when he signed the New Nordic Food Manifesto, along with eleven other Scandinavian chefs, including Noma’s René Redzepi and Claus Meyer. The main tenet of this culinary declaration is simple: “Chefs should dig wherever they are standing,” Dahlgren explains, “and use as many local ingredients in season as they can. The only next trend in gastronomy is whatever is growing next season.”
This of course is the locavore rallying cry that has become almost hectoring by now. But it still sounded radical in Scandinavia in 2004, and the happiest shock was how much the Swedes found once they began recovering their neglected bounty. The more than fifty species of wild berries alone—cloudberries, blackberries, bilberries, lingonberries—came tumbling out; the buried treasure of all the Scandinavian root vegetables suddenly demanded respect. But Dahlgren—who grew up in a small village of five houses, total, in northern Sweden—always knew what was growing under his feet. “We were copying for a while, but now we are creating our own language out of our own roots.”
If Dahlgren makes the point at Rosendal’s, he underscores it when he drops me off at his Matbaren food bar, overlooking Stockholm’s central harbor. The casual brasserie, sitting across a foyer from the chef’s more formal, sedate Matsalen dining room, is buzzing; there is a horseshoe bar in the middle, and the red-painted wood chairs are draped with wool blankets. Per Styregård, the editor of the White Guide—Sweden’s homegrown answer to Michelin—joins me, and together we plow through the menu, paying special attention to the section proudly labeled “Produce & Products from Our Country.”
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“It’s not just the focus on what we already have here at home—the lean reindeer and elk meat, the crayfish from the lakes, the apples from Skåne instead of oranges from Spain,” Styregård notes. “The best Swedish chefs are also exploring a flavor profile that’s entirely new to the world, a different, exciting experience people aren’t used to—the concentrated taste of moss, forest, lichens, wild herbs, and woods.”
Granted, that can sound like a mouthful of mulch. But in the hands of local chefs, it makes for a pristine plateful. The proof is our dinner: Östermalm venison paired with boar sausage and spicy cabbage; sweet Sankt Anna Archipelago perch poaching its deep, woody flavor from a forest mushroom emulsion. Even the Matjes herring materializes as a bright sunny bowl, an egg bleeding its very yellow yolk over beets, capers, and sliced potatoes. I am, it turns out, an easy convert.
That first meal, though, resonates in larger ways. The dinner’s sheer exuberance—turning herring into something downright seductive is no easy trick—says something about the Swedish sensibility. The intensity of the seasons, that grim winter leading to the sudden euphoria of summer, breeds a split personality, the defining clash of sober and sensual, melancholic and whimsical, that I start to see everywhere.
AN IN-DEPTH LOOK AT FÄVIKEN
But I’m already prepared for that split because my twin spirit guides are that pair of doppelgängers Ingmar Bergman and Pippi Longstocking. Bergman, who is ripe for a revival, evokes abiding Nordic gloom; he too often gets reduced to an almost comically bleak punch line—death playing chess on the beach—while his happy, sensual midsummer romances are overlooked. Pippi, on the other hand, counters with buoyant Swedish joie de vivre. I thought I understood her well, having read all of Astrid Lindgren’s books as a boy because I appreciated the fact that Pippi, like any dedicated enfant terrible, teaches what to do by refusing to do it. Call her the forerunner and muse of that other best-selling Swedish sprite, the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But the next morning, I discover a story I don’t remember when I pull a volume from the shelf of a bookstore where every other cover is emblazoned with an image of Pippi, her red pigtails sticking straight out of her head like bolts of sizzling, high-voltage energy. In Pippi Goes to a Coffee Party, the anti-heroine attends a formal tea and proceeds to consume the large cream pie sitting on the tea table in one indulgent moment. “Now you mustn’t feel bad about such a little accident,” she tells the tea party matrons when they confront her, pretending she isn’t talking through a face dipped in whipped cream. “The main thing is that we have our health.” The peerless line pretty much sums up Bergman’s more nuanced Nordic themes too. If death is lurking and winter is working on its first blizzard, you might as well enjoy that momentary bliss of the enormous, beguiling cream pie. And don’t just take a ladylike bite. Open wide and cram the whole thing in.
That’s what everyone is doing, in some form, this day in May as I walk through Stockholm, the entire city giddy now that the sun is shining, preparing for the alfresco celebration that runs from summer festivals through long island weekends to the crayfish parties of August. Sunbathers are planting their white bodies along the harbor, down the strip of the café-lined Kungsträdgården (King’s Garden). Men are casting long, delicately arched fishing poles off harbor bridges. And in the Gamla Stan, the medieval town that sits just south of the center, even the old stone houses seem flushed with joy. That’s because all the facades lining the cobbled back alleys are washed in a shade of golden yellow designed to contain the dusk, so that the streets become one long, luminous sunbeam in the late-spring afternoon, as if lit from within.
Maybe the biggest part of the percolating early-summer party is the ravenous feasting. And what a lot of locals still want to eat is a cozy kind of Nordic soul food. The payoff is a country that offers a double treat. If you can sample the grown-up, pared-down elegance of contemporary Swedish cuisine, you get to eat your cake too—a really big sloppy cream one—and dine out on the childlike fun food that is the counterpoint to the New Nordic Kitchen. That’s especially true at the Östermalms Saluhall, an enclosed market where I go to ogle classic open-faced shrimp sandwiches buckling under the weight of mayonnaise piled up like snowdrifts, and princess torte cakes bundled in green marzipan.
At Fäviken, 70 percent of the food comes from the 20,000-acre estate. Here, roasted scallops on a bed of juniper and twigs.
I’m tempted to pack a picnic. But I opt, my second evening in Stockholm, for a classic Swedish smorgasbord at Ulriksdals Wärdshus, a 19th-century gingerbread villa sitting on the grounds of the 17th-century royal Ulriksdal Palace. If the smorgasbord represents the ultimate spring splurge, it also functions as a lesson in Nordic restraint, because you can’t just—and trust me on this point—approach the table randomly. There is a prevailing etiquette, which my waitress lays out: Start with the herrings (about fifteen kinds here, from fried to herb pickled to, my favorite, curry); keep your composure and move on to the salmon and cold fish; sample the cold meats (especially the pistachio sausage) and then the hot dishes (meatballs, minced elk, and the supernal anchovy and cream potatoes); and finish, like the controlled adult that you are, with a few sparing desserts. Don’t, whatever you do, go back and repeat the process or your fellow diners will glance at you with looks of thinly veiled contempt (I’m just guessing).
The smorgasbord seems like good training for the multi-course tasting menus favored by the youngest front of the New Nordic Kitchen. There are a lot of contenders for the mantle of Stockholm’s cutting-edge maestro, but the most passionately outspoken of them is probably Björn Frantzén, the co-owner, with Daniel Lindeberg, of Frantzén/Lindeberg.
“I hate herring,” the 35-year-old wunderkind tells me, sounding distinctly unpatriotic, when we meet for lunch on my third day in town. His miniature restaurant, on a cobbled street corner in the Gamla Stan, is already wreathed with mainstream prizes (including two Michelin stars after two years in operation). And when he interrupts our conversation to take a call from his lead fishmonger (“We’ll be serving perch just caught in Lake Mälaren tonight”), he is underscoring the point that drives the New Nordic Kitchen. As much environmental curators as foragers, the muscular neo-Viking chefs are dedicated to nurturing an ingredient if they can’t find it. That passion has resulted in a network of artisanal specialty suppliers—bespoke farmers, line fishermen, breeders, dairy producers—and a mission to root out every last possible flavor from a stubborn ecosystem. The point is clearly made that night at the doll-size restaurant when I’m handed a manifesto instead of a menu. “The access of ingredients,” the scroll of paper reads, “will decide and direct the evening menu. We are giving ourselves freedom to only use the absolute best products.”
Just-picked currants at Fäviken, where even the plates look as though they were pried from the landscape.
The 16-seat dining room is spartan because the attention is fixed on Frantzén (Lindeberg is off that night) and his fellow cooks, jockeying for room in the open kitchen. First, my very serious waiter brings a loaf of raw sourdough (later to resurface baked and crusty) in a miniature wooden coffin of a box. Next, a live langoustine lands on the crowded table, only to reappear in seconds as a glistening sashimi amuse-bouche, brightened by lavender, melted pork fat, almonds, Swedish seed oil, and a vinaigrette of apple cider honey.
That one bite, a flowchart of synchronized flavors, justifies all the self-conscious ceremony. So does Frantzén’s signature 35-ingredient salad, which showcases everything plucked that day from the restaurant’s two experimental gardens in southeast Stockholm (on this night, the haul ranges from white deadnettle and dried leeks to maple flower and yellow primula, topped by the crunch of sea bream scales). But it’s the duck breast that makes the most dramatic statement, cooked in front of me while I consider diving for cover as my server blasts the bird with a blowtorch, shooting through white oak charcoal with the steady hand of a hit man. Who needs molecular hijinks and the affectation of complicated equipment when you can pare things down to the original, most organic form of cooking and work with an open fire (or wood-burning oven and grill)? “Then,” Frantzén says, “you’re mixing two living things—your ingredients and the flame.”
That march back to the almost primordial—the open fire, the free-line fishing, and the foraged forest floor—suggests that Sweden’s culinary revolution is anything but an urban one. Everyone I talk to recommends at least one kitchen somewhere outside Stockholm, so the whole country—which is long enough to stretch from Denmark to Italy’s boot—starts to look like a snaking smorgasbord. There is Bastard in Malmö; Salt & Sill on the far western island of Klädesholmen; and 50 Kvadrat and Krakas Krog on Gotland, where you can catch the ferry to Ingmar Bergman’s island of Fårö, framed by a haunting ring of jagged Ice Age rocks. But I choose Grinda for my first excursion, because the islands of the Stockholm Archipelago are the essence of the midsummer Swedish idyll, and Grinda, two hours by ferry from Stockholm, is the essence of the islands. Its only landmark, a butter-yellow villa, has been turned into the classic Grinda Wärdshus inn and restaurant. When I arrive, everyone is digging into a shellfish casserole capped with aioli and rhubarb crème brûlée, on the wide front terrace overlooking the Baltic Sea. Even here, though, in what should simulate Pippi’s sunny Valhalla, a Bergmanesque sadness settles too.
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“We have a ghost,” the inn’s owner, Jan Pfister, tells me. It is the spirit of Alfhild Santesson, the wife of the Nobel Foundation head who commissioned the circa 1908 villa and the mother of their four children. A Swedish Jew who discovered that her relatives had disappeared in the Holocaust, the distraught matriarch walked into the sea just outside the villa before the war was over. Her benign, comforting spirit, Pfister says, is visible only to children visiting the inn. Hanging on the inn’s walls are photos of Santesson’s own children, caught smiling in their bathing suits, perched on Grinda’s rocks, lit by a golden summer light that won’t admit defeat.
If Grinda is the summer pastoral, then Fäviken, 290 miles north of Stockholm, is the bleaker Sweden, the contrary landscape that seems to welcome winter and resist taming. But I make the trip (an easy forty-five-minute flight followed by a one-hour drive) because if you can make a meal out of this moody crop, you can fully vindicate the Swedish harvest.
And chef Magnus Nilsson does it handily. He’s there to welcome me, after a drive that takes me past villages sprouting so many umlauts they look like target practice, where boys used to urinate into barrels of lake trout to ferment the fish. Even this far north, everything seems to be blossoming at the top of the world: the lambs gamboling in the fields; the perennially snowcapped mountains in the distance where the cloudberries grow; the lakes stocked with fat fish; and the meadow that Nilsson proceeds to farm as we walk, plucking a wild broccoli he claims never dies. “You can even pick it through the snow in December,” he says, offering me a weedy bite. “This is one of Europe’s largest remaining areas of unspoiled wilderness. If you go straight north, you reach the North Pole.”
The generous landscape is what prompted Nilsson to move back to the area where he summered as a boy, on his grandparents’ small sustainable farm, after cooking in Stockholm and Paris (at two three-Michelin-star restaurants, L’Astrance and L’Arpège). “I can get more good fresh produce here than I could any day in Paris,” he says. Clearly that’s not true of everyone. But Nilsson is driven by a personal search for authenticity that makes him as much cultural ethnographer as chef. He uses only the direct heat of the open fire or stove top, reserving the oven for steaming vegetables or baking bread (“No molecular cooking or water baths for me; I don’t want to reduce a living thing to something you put in a bag”); he butchers and cures his meat on-site; he adapts old recipes rescued from crumbling cookbooks; and he produces fresh ice cream in a wooden bucket he found on the estate, in homage to the nineteenth-century dairymaids who inhabited the inn’s refurbished guest rooms and whose photos hang on the restaurant foyer’s walls. (My favorite: the dairy school’s class of possibly 1895—it’s hard to make out the date—who sprawl on a forest floor, wearing bleached bonnets and very white gowns, looking variously like tipped milk bottles or seriously overdressed wood nymphs.)
In summer, Swedes flock to the islands of the Stockholm Archipelago, including Grinda, a tiny lick of forest and green meadow two hours by ferry from the city center. The Grinda Wärdshus, a hotel and restaurant, overlooks the Baltic Sea. Here, one of the island’s rental cabins.
Dinner is in the 18th-century granary, painted red with oxide, and I feel like I’ve been dropped into a full-scale Norse saga. This is the real thing: the sprigs of dried herbs hanging on the raw timber walls of the double-decker dining room; the joints of pork belly and dried cod dangling from the beamed ceiling like an organic necklace; the two-man saw and a very shaggy, scary wolf-fur coat.
The only thing missing is Thor’s hammer. But Thor would probably have relished Nilsson’s multi-course supper that, like Frantzén’s oddly flamboyant rendition of dinner theater, approximates an animistic ritual. We start with an amuse-bouche of fermented char and sour cream, served in a long carved wooden spoon, followed by wild trout roe cradled in a crunchy croquette of dried pig’s blood. There are dueling lichens—a reindeer lichen topped with dried grated trout roe, and an Icelandic lichen wrapped in a cloudlike frizzle of egg. Cod paired with slow-roasted turnips is followed by a beef broth. The undiluted flavors—the uniquely exciting profile Per Styregård had promised, pushed to the limit—are something I’ve never tasted before. They are woody, mineral, a bit funky, hitting the palate with a wildness that first tastes raw and then, after a minute, utterly refined.
Just when you think dinner couldn’t become any more of a primal grunt, Nilsson comes out, places a mammoth cow bone on a butcher block, and saws through it, his long blond bangs flying, part Viking lumberjack and part shaman. Then he scoops out the marrow and mixes it with raw cow’s heart and freshly grated carrots. I’m almost relieved to see that dessert is a relatively restrained lingonberries and cream.
How do you top that kind of roiling culinary drama? You don’t even try.
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