TOO COLD FOR PATIOS?
Heed this advice from diners from Alaska, Scandinavia — even the South Pole
Wayne White is spending his third winter at the South Pole. How's the weather, Wayne? “It's warm here,” the site leader at the Amundsen- Scott South scientific research station tells me. His degree of warmth is relative: 60 below.
“Not that this would ever be a chosen environment, but it does allow for” richer foods, including fondue, and even “picnics in the back country, albeit quick.”
Practising what she preaches, Laura Cole, chef at 229 Parks Restaurant and Tavern in Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska, halfway between Anchorage and Fairbanks, recently picnicked outside when it was 30 degrees below zero.
The unspoken message is either “you can do it” or “buck up, eaters!”
In frigid Minnesota, the Twin Cities celebrate the approaching season with an annual festival called the Great Northern. When life gives you the cold shoulder, “we need to invigorate mind, body and soul,” says Kate Nordstrum, the organization's executive and artistic director.
“This is going to be a harsh season for our restaurant community.” She sees the cold as a way for diners to get as creative as the industry and come up with different ways to promote camaraderie outside. On her wish list is creating the world's longest ice bar, although tighter restrictions for gatherings in the state might push the idea into 2022.
One of this year's featured speakers at Great Northern is chef and caterer Sean Sherman, author of the well-received The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, and, like Cole in Alaska, quick to see the good in the cold.
“We don't mind it,” says Sherman, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. “Winter is very calming, especially in the woods, which are nice and silent.”
While he advocates preserving things from other seasons to last through the cold times, winter provides a singular pantry, including highbush cranberries, a member of the honeysuckle family. Sumac fronds and rose hips, he says, “are better as they get colder.”
Tea can be coaxed from conifers — cedar, pine, spruce — and tree bark is added to braises for “a flavour of the woods” that creates “food that tastes like where we are.”
Icehotel in Jukkasjarvi, Sweden, 320 kilometres from the Arctic Circle, owes its very existence to extreme temperatures. Like snowflakes, no two of the destination's 55 cold rooms are alike; each is designed by a different artist every year. The base for the beds is ice covered with a reindeer skin topped with a sleeping bag. The sleeping rooms are pitch dark and so quiet, “you can hear your heart pounding,” says the hotel's publicist, Josefin Lindberg.
Opened in 1989, the venue also has 72 warm rooms for visitors who don't want to sleep like polar bears and ice production facilities for designing customized dishware.
“We use what nature gives us,” says Linn Fjardbo, food and beverage manager. Cue Arctic char and reindeer on the menu and ice glasses in the ice bar. (Don't bother asking for an Irish coffee.) The material for the cups comes from the pristine Torne River. In summer, says Fjardbo, the custom is to throw your ice glass in the water and make a wish.
Not convinced you want to eat pasta in a parka? You have sympathy in high places.
“After four years as the ambassador to Spain, I'm not partial to the cold anymore,” says Lone Dencker Wisborg, the Danish ambassador to the United States. Still, she has a soft spot for hygge (say hoo-guh), Denmark's national preoccupation with getting cosy.
“Winters in Denmark are long and cold and wet and dark,” a predicament the diplomat says can be addressed by slipping on sweatpants, sharing a blanket on a couch, pouring hot chocolate or something stronger and illuminating the scene. When it comes to hygge, she adds, “candles are very important.”
The ambassador from Finland agrees. “Darkness is much more of a problem than the cold,” says the recently arrived Mikko Hautala, whose last post in Russia should prepare him for any variable Washington might throw at him.
“If it's cold and white, then OK.” Finnish children are encouraged to play outside, no matter the temperature, he says, and among the country's greatest concepts is the pleasure-pain experience of the sauna, where a spell of intense indoor heat is followed by plunges into cold water outside. Hautala, who says saunas “harden the body” against colds and flu, has three saunas at his disposal, one at the embassy and two in his residence, where invitations to become a member of the Diplomatic Sauna Society are billed as the “hottest ticket in town.”
(Heat seems to be a fetish for the Finns. The diplomat says his people drink more coffee than any other country, around 261/2 pounds per capita per year. “Hot and refreshing. It tells you something.”)
Masters of winter say the key to comfort is layered clothing. Explorer White relies on Inuit ingenuity, keeping warm with a custom-made anorak using the fur of Siberian wolves, along with a canvas-and-flannel number that's a replica of what Roald Amundsen wore at the South Pole in 1911.
Fjardbo advises wearing your warmest garments close to the body. “The warmth from the food will help to keep you warm,” too.
“In Finland, we think that there is no bad weather,” says Hautala. “Wear too many layers than too few. You can always remove the extra ones if you get too hot.”
The essentials include woollen socks, hats and mittens.
“If you'll be stationary for an extended period of time,” he says, “the cold starts to creep up in your bones.”
These days, I go through a mental checklist before heading to restaurants: Credit card? Mask? Blanket? Some places have introduced wraps to ward off any chill, but I prefer bringing my own. Ashish Alfred, chef-owner of Duck Duck Goose in Bethesda, Md., encourages customers to BYOB — bring your own blanket — partly to make outdoor dining more bearable for diners but also to keep his business going through winter.
Even people who revel in the cold see the value in balance and moderation. Living in the extremes requires protection from the elements, but also working with what you've got, like the vitamin C-rich lingonberry tea guests awake to at Icehotel in Sweden.
Sometimes, the best option is to hunker down inside. Weekends at the southernmost place on Earth feature Adventure Movie Night with Wayne, where White follows introductory screenings of say, Race for the Poles, with films set in the tropics. Hygge is something you tend to savour indoors, and so is the very Finnish notion of kalsarikannit, which Hautala spelled out succinctly via text:
“A drink. At home. In your underwear.”
Sounds like a recipe some of us have been following since March.