Swede’s in season
Magnus Nilsson on working within the confines of flora and fauna and creating a unique menu indicative of Scandinavian terroir
Fäviken Magasinet is often described as the world’s most isolated two Michelin-starred restaurant and chef Magnus Nilsson tends to agree. “One should go once, maybe twice and it should enrich the rest of your year as a very unique experience.” Located in Järpen, in the north of Sweden, which Nilsson says helped with his philosophy on food. “It’s always a choice whether I want to relate to others or not. It is a very important principle to running a restaurant, whether in the city or countryside, the key is to make the most with what you have. In the city, you need to make the most out of the spectrum in terms of produce and the mix of cultures that is always prevalent. Whereas in the countryside, like where we are, it is a smaller slice or spectrum of that.”
Nilsson, author of Fäviken and The Nordic Cookbook, is known for pickling and fermenting produce, one of techniques in the traditional Nordic repertoire for prolonging the shelf life of food, earning him the title of “master of fermentation”. “It naturally came to be part of what we do in Fäviken,” he says. Fäviken is also known for its seasonal produce, most of which are stored foods from the year before; a lot of preserves, ferments, pickles and vegetables.
“A lot of the Asian fermentations are similar to Swedish. In the Nordics the idea is that you want to produce too much food in one season and preserve it by fermentation for another season where food is not as much. Here, that has never been the case. It’s more a factor of the humidity and hot temperature makes things go bad really quickly so it’s more like a natural way of making sure that you can make the most what you harvest, even if you’re harvesting six to eight times a year.
“This you can also see in the fermentations that are not made to last every long. They are made to last a few weeks or months, and that is different from the Nordics. Here you see open vats in the markets. [Nilsson was in Bangkok for the Re-Food Forum in March and visited Khlong Toey market]. The interesting bit is that it is the same process but for two different reasons and more often than not, here fermented foods are condiments whereas in the Nordics it’s more common that they are main products, like fermented herring.”
Nilsson’s favourite season is always “the next season”, but he says spring and summer are seasons that help plan the rest of the year. “We always have things that we are working on and things that are coming up, but it is pretty hard to say when it is going to happen. One of the things that we work a lot with and look forward to in spring and summer is freshwater fish, like perch, which is a slightly neglected produce in Sweden.”
Fäviken has two big gardens where Nilsson grows almost everything. One garden grows summer vegetables, like leafy greens, peas and beans, which is harvested throughout the summer months. The bigger garden, which is more for winter production, supplies the restaurant with cabbage, onions, beetroots and celeriac.
“Because we are far North we have very long days in the summer so a lot of the vegetables that grow here, despite the warmth and humidity necessary, can’t grow because the days are too long. They start flowering. I have tried growing a lot of Asian cabbage, like pak choi, but it is impossible to grow there. It grows like crazy and then starts flowering, because of the day length. It is the same with spinach, which doesn’t like long summer days.”
Since the winters are long and almost nothing grows throughout most of the Nordic region, traditionally food culture is based on storage and overproduction in the summer, and the knowledge of how to store those things in the winter. “It’s really about making the most of what’s available when we have sunlight and incorporating that into the restaurant because it feels like the natural thing to do. We think it gives a unique profile to the restaurant.”
Despite being relatively isolated, Nilsson doesn’t let that dampen his creativity, in fact he insists it’s for the good. “It is very easy today if you have a restaurant and it’s successful. Especially a restaurant like Fäviken, which is quite expensive. Technically you have access to everything you want — all the produce you want, when you want it — to have everything is not very good for creativity. You need to have certain limitations. So for us, they are self-imposed. We don’t really use citrus fruits, but that is not because we can’t get very good citrus. We can still fly them up from the north of France, but we have chosen not to because it is not part of our natural flora. Also because it promotes thinking in different ways — like what to use instead of squeezing a bit of lemon on something.”
However, anyone who pretends that a restaurant like Fäviken is sustainable is incorrect. As Nilsson stresses “that’s not the point either”. “No restaurant like Fäviken can ever be sustainable. We can do the best we can but it’s not a restaurant where people should eat often. It’s the same with all of these extreme cultural expressions that the main goal can’t be sustainability. They can’t do it. I rather eat meat and think about how I live really carefully most of the time and do things that are extravagant and fulfilling some of the time.”
For Fäviken 32 courses work, “though sometimes it can be dreadful to have that many courses over four hours”, laughs Nilsson. “At Fäviken you sit down at 7pm and you sit down again for coffee at 9.30pm, so it’s not very long,” he points out.
“I consider my food intellectual property. It is things that we come up with. And though diners don’t see it, in the same sense of a musician who sees his work as copyright. It is intellectual property in the sense that we put a lot of resources into producing the ideas that generate the dish. It is very important to acknowledge that because it is not something that happens effortlessly and turns into something,” Nilsson adds.
Despite his mind-boggling creativity seen in each dish, Nilsson is a self-proclaimed procrastinator.
“Absolutely. But I have a really good team that can help out and get stuff done. I do a lot of the development and they do most of the execution. That has been the evolution at Fäviken. In the beginning I did pretty much all of it, but you come to a point where you have to decide whether to do it yourself and just do that, and not do anything like the Re-Food Forum. I felt that my time was best used producing new content and doing other things. So I took a step back from the physical execution of everything, every day.”
Despite having said that, Nilsson has a different approach to when cooking actually starts. He believes it doesn’t start when the cabbage is bought or pulled from the Earth.
“For us it is more that we know now that we want to serve cabbage in November or December — end of 2018, beginning of 2019 — so we have seed catalogues to choose our seeds. We decide what time of the year to plant it, so it will perfectly mature exactly when we want it and it will grow in a way that produces the characteristics of the cabbage that we want and then we harvest it exactly when we need it.
“That is all cooking, from choosing the seed to serving it to the diner. This is a part of Fäviken that most people don’t understand. We know the length of the process and that it makes a difference. However, our dishes don’t turn out exactly how we plan them but it is interesting to see how you can influence a dish. It is equally important how you choose your seed and soil. The two gardens have slightly different soils, which also influences the end product but not that much.”
This perhaps, is also governed by the fact that there are a lot of factors that Nilsson cannot control, like the weather. Though Sweden doesn’t really see the worse bits of climate change.
In a 12-month cycle, Fäviken aims to have overall 30% new concepts on the menu. In a full year, maybe 10 or less new dishes are introduced out of the 32 courses served. And there are another 30% that are on the menu for longer but often they are allowed to become something else. The remainder are allowed a longer life cycle like the blood cap with the trout roe. They may not be permanent fixtures but just stay longer.
Fäviken has been an evolution for Nilsson because he never planned on opening it. He came as an employee, did things and stayed and it has evolved into what it is today.
“Which I think is interesting because it doesn’t happen this way with many ambitious restaurants today. More often than not they are opened on the scale they have to be, the end goal is always been there from the beginning. I am very happy that I got to develop Fäviken the way I did. And at the same time, I know it’s not going to be something I do forever. It’s now and for a few more years, maybe five years, I don’t know. But then it would have run its course.
“It is quite common that you see that there is meant to be other things coming. I think it’s natural. I just know that one day I am going to find it less interesting or that people are going to stop coming. One of those scenarios are going to happen at some point.”
At Fäviken a lot of resources are used to produce a very extreme expression of culture and fine dining dinner. As Nilsson says: “Who wants to live in a world where every single day we only use things we are allowed to have? We are never allowed to do anything exceptional, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing inspiring. That’s not the life I want to live.”
To have everything is not very good for creativity. You need to have certain limitations