New Stockholm Cuisine

In this year's SAVEUR 100, we take stock of our favorite things: recipes, people, places. We consider every last one a new classic.

By Alexander Lobrano

Credit: Todd Coleman

The alabaster square of seared cod sat primly in a bath of golden foam, nude except for a tiny corsage of watercress and a transparent veil of pickled cucumber. The dish looked so pure, so innocent, I was not prepared for its potent, primal flavors: The sauce's sea-buckthorn berries were tart and bright, tempered by the lactic richness of good butter. Course after course, my lunch at F12 embodied the kind of modern Swedish cooking that has quietly transformed Stockholm into one of Europe's most intriguing food cities. F12, named for its address on the thoroughfare Fredsgatan, may have one Michelin star, but a meal here comes with none of the tedious hauteur or wilting fussiness you might expect from restaurants of this caliber in other cities. Great food in Sweden, I've learned, has never been locked inside the gilded cage of Gallic gastronomic conventions. The country's best restaurants reflect Swedish values—egality, yes; pretension and privilege, no.

Having lived in Paris for 25 years, I was a little flustered by the warm welcome I received in F12's sun-filled dining room, and also by the pleasant alacrity of the service. There was a light, happy atmosphere in the restaurant, and as I made my way through the meal—from a smoked and barely coddled hen's egg with shavings of local black truffles, to the dessert, a refreshingly tart pudding of Åkerö apples—it struck me that the Swedes just may be truer acolytes of the grand French gastronome and writer Curnonsky than the French themselves. What I discovered while eating my way through the Swedish capital recently is that the city's best chefs instinctively adhere to Curnonsky's famous adage: "Good cooking is when things taste of what they are."

I'd come back to Stockholm because I'd had a magical meal under the midnight sun at Mistral last summer. This restaurant is so plain it looks like the set of an Ingmar Bergman film. An endearingly frumpy doily hand-knit by chef Fredrik Andersson's mother decorated my bare wood table, one of only six in the dining room. A Swedish friend in Paris had raved about Andersson, insisting that despite the short Swedish growing season, he excelled at cooking with local seasonal ingredients.

Up to that point, aside from the "Swedish" meatballs that were among the best hot-lunch options at my elementary school, Swedish cooking didn't mean much to me. If pressed for other edible things that Scan-dinavia brought to mind, I suppose I might have said dill and herring.

So Andersson's tasting menu was a real education: A run of seven dishes, it began with an intriguing composition of cucumber, fresh almonds, candied fennel seeds, and yogurt ice cream served with cold green tea. There was also a stunning still life of baby beets, tomatoes, Swiss chard, kale, runner beans, zucchini, and just-set egg yolks with shellfish roe and powdered rhubarb; and roast veal with seared onions, a grassy herbal jus, milk "skin"—the layer that forms atop slow-boiled fresh milk—and sautéed nettles in brown butter with pike roe.