Just to summarize briefly so that you will understand some comments along the way, the food and menu were excellent with a very high, even quality. As such, it was easier to pick out the dishes that were not as amazing as all the others rather than to pick the best dish(es). I thought that three of the dishes fell into this category, which I note in the comments after each dish.
They have expanded a bit and have added another room, which we sat in. It is a very small, cozy room served by two staff members. When we arrived at the main dining room entrance, a staff member met us outside, confirmed our name, and escorted us to our entrance.
Our table. We started with Henriot, Millésimé 2002, Reims, Champagne.
Unfortunately, as I had suspected it would, some medication I was taking was playing a bit with my taste buds (just enough to make the alcohol taste a bit strange), so I skipped the rest of the wines.
We were sitting right next to the wine, so looking at it kept us occupied until the food arrived.
Not a very big room with only three tables. About as close to private dining as you can get without having it. The flowers were beautiful. The tables, however, had no decoration whatsoever, which I missed.
The service is very low key and focused on preparing and serving the food. As you can see in the picture, there is a cutlery holder on the table, so they are not replacing cutlery in between each course.
They showed us the bread which would be baked for us. Nice to get fresh bread, but when you are hungry, it feels a bit too much like teasing when you are only allowed to look at the food and not eat it.
Along a similar line, they also introduced us to two living langoustines, which we would be eating in a few minutes. Talk about meeting your maker.
The evening started out with a “prologue” of five dishes with the theme “raw”.
Prologue “Raw” 1: Crispy CARROT with whipped foie gras
A food dessert to start (macaron). Foie gras is never wrong.
Prologue “Raw” 2: Thinly sliced belly of COD from the North Sea served with brown butter vinaigrette. Bleak roe from Kalix, dill, king crab from Trondheim and onions bound in a crème of farm eggs. Everything finished with freshly cut chives.
Very yummy. I of course wanted more.
Coarsly chopped LANGOUSTINE fished by Ingmar Johansson on the boat SD 137 Myra under melting pig’s fat. Served with grapefruit, rosemary, toasted Marcona almonds and emulsion of last year’s pressed apple seed oil from Blaxsta, almond oil, apple cider vinegar and lavender honey. Creamed apple purée perfumed with vanilla.
So this is what happened to the langoustine. A noble and very delicious end.
Then they told us about the wine pairings for the evening:
Henriot, Millésimé 2002, Reims, Champagne
Domaine de la Mordorée, Tavel 2007, Rhône
Michel Chapoutier “Les Granits” Saint-Joseph Blanc, 2007, Rhône
Domaine Martelet de Cherisey, Puligny-Montrachet 1:er Cru “La Garenne” 2008, Bourgogne
Domaine De Montille, Volnay 1:er Cru Less Taillepieds 2001 Magnum, Bourgogne
Geil, Rieslaner Beerenauslese 2009, Rheinhessen
Prologue “Raw” 3: Raw coal-grilled DUCK with rhubarb infused with raspberries and currants. The first beets of the season marinated in raw beetroot juice, minus 8 vinegar and hibiscus. Salad of beetroot tops and cress, sliced walnuts and the roasted heart of the duck. Finished with raspberry- and walnut vinaigrette and raw, grated foie gras.
I was very excited to get this dish as what is not to love? Duck, foie gras, raspberries! However, I would rate this as one of the three “good, but not as amazing as the others” dishes of the evening. I thought the fruit dominated the dish.
Prologue “Raw” 4: Chilled soup of fresh PEAS AND MINT with strawberries and pea shoots.
This was wonderfully simple and just delicious. At first the peas dominated, but then the strawberries dominated toward the end - like a food that turned into a dessert. And just the right amount of mint.
Freshly baked BREAD with tonight’s homemade butter.
The butter was very tasty, rich and creamy. I did not, however, think the bread was anything wonderful. The top tasted a bit too toasted for me.
Hand-dived SCALLOP from Trondheim in two servings: first, cooked over an open fire in its own shell served with creamed duck eggs and truffle.
I remember that the scallop dish was a high point the first time I was at this restaurant. Apparently someone here knows how to prepare scallops as they had created another amazing dish. I wanted to lick out the shell.
Hand-dived SCALLOP from Trondheim in two servings: then, tartar bound in roe confit with truffles served with a bouillon of dried scallops, seaweed and forest mushrooms.
The second phase of the dish was also excellent, although I thought the first phase was the best.
“SATIO TEMPESTAS” Today’s catch slowly baked with harvested vegetables from our gardens served with hazelnuts, beurre noisette and crispy scales from a sea bream.
This was also an amazing dish and not just because you were experiencing so many different flavors. The white sauce was especially good, but I am a sucker for mushrooms (in the sauce). Believe it or not, the toasted fish scales were also very good.
The 31 specific ingredients are:
Pike perch from Per Vidlund / Mälargös
Achillea millefolium (Yarrow / Rölleka)
Baby artichokes / Späd kronärtskocka
Black radish / Svart rättika
Broad beans / Bondbönor
Cress / Krasse
Daisies / Tusensköna
Dandelion leaves / Maskrosblad
Fish scales from a sea bream / Fiskfjäll från brax
Fleur de sel de Guérande
Fresh garlic / Färsk vitlök
Green asparagus / Grön sparris
Green beans / Haricot verts
Green zucchini / Grön zucchini
Hazelnut / Hasselnöt
Homemade butter / Hemkärnat smör
Hylotelephium telephium (Orpine / Kärleksört)
Lamiastrum galeobdolon (Yellow archangel / Gul plister)
Lamium album (White deadnettle / Vit plister)
Lamium purpureum (Red deadnettle / Röd plister)
Melothria scabra / Djungelgurka
Oyster mushrooms / Ostronskivling
Red cabbage / Rödkål
Rosé lettuce / Rosésallad
Spinach / Spenat
Spring cabbage / Spetskål (a type of pointy-shaped green cabbage)
Spring carrot / Primörmorötter
Spring onion / Vårlök
Unfiltered olive oil from Ivan Günther / Ofiltrerad olivolja
White asparagus / Vit sparris
Yellow zucchini / Gul zucchini
Frozen LEMON VERBENA AND CHAMOMILE
So good - light and refreshing. It’s a crime that one cannot buy this in a store. Perfect for summer and not too sweet.
SUCKLING SPRING LAMB from Mats Ferne and Anna Ståhl and their farm Ängbacken in Vimmerby in two servings. First, leek porridge with confit of the tongue, parsley and oyster soup, fried garlic, roasted sweetbreads and creamed fresh garlic.
Again, excellent. I don’t know what the kind of plant those petals came from, but, yes, they actually did taste like something.
SUCKLING SPRING LAMB from Mats Ferne and Anna Ståhl and their farm Ängbacken in Vimmerby in two servings. Then, roasted saddle with ramson onions and parsley velouté. Jus rôti, lamb liver, morels, cream of oven-baked leeks, dried ramson onion, oyster leaves and ash of leeks.
This was so good, especially a bite of the meat + cream + morel together. Scrumptious!
Freshly homemade FROMAGE BLANC carefully flavored with vanilla, served still warm in the whey. Bee pollen, yesterday’s bread and Sel de Guèrande.
Bread on cheese instead of cheese on bread. Good but not too exciting. I consider this the “low point” of the meal.
Trilogy of DESSERTS: sweet, salt, sour
Dessert 1 Sweet: Variation of TOMATOES with raspberries, vanilla and rose ice cream.
How amazing was this dish?! I had never thought of matching tomatoes and raspberries, but I will from now on.
Dessert 2 Salt: Sorbet of oxidized PEAR, salted emulsion of caramelized hazelnuts. Flat mead.
Another of the “good, but not as amazing as the others” dishes. I know Swedes tend to go crazy for hazelnuts, but I have been a bit damaged over the years. I do love pear though.
Dessert 3 Sour: LEMON with buttermilk from our butter production with vanilla.
This tasted like a scrumptious and not too sweet lemon meringue pie. So yummy! Reminded me of my grandma’s lemon meringue pies. RIP.
Flavors of the garden. MACARONS, rhubarb and violet, chocolate with parsnip and vanilla.
The chocolate and parsnip was the best of the two. My friend drank coffee from Rwanda, which he said was excellent, and a 10-year armagnac (I don’t remember which kind).
Again I say Frantzén Lindeberg is better than Noma. The meal was amazing with a high, even quality. Our conversation mostly took place when there was no food in front of us as while we ate most of the courses, we just sat there in silence making a few “mmmm” sounds.
The atmosphere is very low key, which is relaxing, although I personally think they could put some small decoration on the tables and the uniforms could be a bit more “formal” (I think the shirts’ checkered pattern was supposed to be a subliminal link to the farm/countryside).
During a discussion with a staff member at the end of the evening, he mentioned that they try to make service “non-intrusive” by having few staff members (of course also related to the economic scale of staff salaries in Sweden versus number of covers in and the size of the restaurant). Personally I do not think there is necessarily a direct relationship between number of staff and level of intrusion. I have experienced the most hierarchical service with five staff members serving one table and have it be non-intrusive, and I have experienced fewer staff members that created a stressful atmosphere because they were not coordinated. It all has to do with how good they are doing their job and to what degree they are exuding a sense of calm, collected coordination (versus chaotic disorganization) rather than how many of them are doing it.
The restaurant’s style has changed a lot since I was there 2.5 years ago (or 20 restaurant years ago, as they joked). At the time it was more focused on molecular gastronomy, which was all the rage at the time. Soon after that, they started focusing more on the product (local and seasonal), a trend which Noma has successfully manipulated to an extreme at the moment. Although I think that everything was excellent, I was a bit surprised that there were not really any unexpected/extreme elements left in the experience, e.g. technical, presentation style, taste combinations, etc. It felt as though they had stepped back from the innovational edge. It will be interesting to see how they develop in the future. I plan to go back (although there are continual variations, the menu is completely changed every three months).
On the way home we had an interesting discussion about this latest fresh+local trend in dining. First, we think that fresh+local (or at least fresh) should be the standard in dining, so we find this trend surprising. After all, how bad was it if fresh+local is now considered innovational? Second, we think that this trend is mostly only innovational in places like Scandinavia that have historically been copying other great cuisines. For example, of course you are not going to be using the freshest and most local products if you are trying to copy French cuisine in Scandinavia. Third, although French cuisine has historically dominated, the restaurant world is learning to appreciate contributions from other countries and cultures, e.g. Scandinavian. We think that all of these factors have contributed to Noma’s renewed “best restaurant” rating. As we said after visiting Noma, we do not think that it is the “best” restaurant, but it is probably the restaurant that passes in best with the current trend. Note, though, that Frantzén Lindeberg was voted “the one to watch”! Maybe next year...danskjävlar!
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