Gastrologik

Fine Dining in Swedish.

Working seasonally presents a challenge in a country where everything is frozen for about three months per year. How does a fine dining restaurant like Gastrologik manage to produce high-quality, seasonally-based dishes in the middle of the Swedish winter?

Gastrologik open from 18:00, but when I am let into their airy building at around 14:00, work has already begun. Out in the restaurant area, they’re busy with tasks like folding the well-ironed, fine linen napkins. In the kitchen there’s a similar level of bustling activity. Anton Bjuhr, one of the two founders, leads me through to a table where the other, Jacob Holmström, sits waiting with stylish coffee tableware arranged in my honour.

Anton Bjuhr and Jacob Holmström have run Gastrologik together for nine years, a fine dining restaurant that bases all its food on Swedish raw produce. They have been one of the key restaurants of the so-called New Nordic Cuisine movement, a concept based on seasonal menus with local raw produce. Among that wave, some well-known names would be René Redzepi’s Noma in Copenhagen, and, here in Sweden, Magnus Nilsson’s now closed Fäviken Magasinet up north. But Gastrologik are no less refined than those celebrated establishments. In 2014 they received their first Michelin star, and in 2018 they added another.

To fill their menus with Swedish ingredients is no problem at all during springtime, summer and autumn, when the forests are in bloom, the animals are fed and the fields are filled with good produce. But during winter, things are not so simple. The forest has withered, and the fields have turned to ice. How does one of Sweden’s best seasonally-based restaurants create food of the very highest quality during the Swedish winter? “If you had a restaurant with another philosophy, you would have been able to accomplish it, perhaps not the same taste, but the same feat, through simpler measures. By buying fresh ingredients all year round. We have to turn ourselves inside out sometimes to be able to surprise and impress people all throughout the year, and it’s not always visible. It’s not always that we even explain it either,” Jacob Holmström says.

How do you go about offering as good a tasting menu during the winter as you do in other seasons?

Jacob: We build up what we call winter storage during the spring, summer and autumn. That gives us a base from which we cook during the winter.

Could you give us some examples?

Jacob: Yes, for example you have the lactic acid white asparagus that we make during late spring and early summer. We cure and let it draw in lactic acid, and you end up with pretty much a normal prepared asparagus. It’s only prepared at room temperature, but it’s the lactic acid that does the work.

Anton: You work with all the preservations, generally. It’s a very cured taste so to speak. Cured and preserved. As there are so few fresh ingredients available. Cabbage is one of those few things, and root vegetables. Apart from that there’s just the preservations.

J: Yes, and animalic products. A lot of shellfish are in season, and game, still, until the end of January.

A: It gives such depth in terms of flavour.

How do you mean?

A: It’s fortunate in the way that everything gives off so much flavour. You can really taste the preservation. There, it’s like you have locked in the time. Just as we said with the lactic acid white asparagus or lactic acid berries. Even if they change because of how they are cooked, because of the bacteria some of their origin

remains. So it becomes interesting in the way that you have the preserved flavour that at the same time can taste of berries, even during the winter.

J: During the summer, there are a lot of natural ingredients, which hardly even need to be prepared. They’re a lot more tender. Winter greens tend to become pretty tough. Cabbage that has been standing above ground, exposed to weather and wind, it just becomes a bit tough and demands a lot more cooking.

A: In that way winter produce is probably more interesting to cook.

Why?

A: Nothing is free. Just look outside now. There is actually nothing to draw inspiration from. And then when we go to our storage at Gärdet, there are fridges, there are freezers. Things housed at room temperature. Everything in glass bowls and in vacuum bags. None of it comes for free. Colour or shape hardly exists. So there really is a challenge there for us to cook that food, and to create dishes from it.

So how do you work to ensure that you reach the same high culinary level?

A: It becomes more technical in detail just like Jacob said. A wild foraged plant in the forest, you want to serve that as it is. But if it’s preserved, like a berry that has been lying in lactic acid, you have to work more to create textures.

J: You have to work harder to find flavours and textures. And sometimes it just flies straight over the head of the guests. For example, there’s a curry that we make, a curry made from Swedish ingredients. The work for that begins during summer, with tomatoes that we press and put in a heating cabinet for two months at 60 degrees celsius. From that, we get a tomato purée that we build on. You know, you don’t bother explaining all of that [to guests], there’s too much information.

So what would you say is the best thing about the winter season?

J: That that particular season might be the most fun. You have a large storage of goodies to play with. It’s pretty fun when you go to your storage to have a look and see ‘hey, there are five jars of white asparagus here!’

A: The advantage of spring and summer is that the food is indirectly served almost the way it looks. That’s a luxury as a guest. You see, wow, I’ve seen this out by my summer house. You can connect to what you eat in a whole different way. The strength of the wintertime is that it becomes a lot more about storytelling from us. The food really shines in a different manner. You have been working on it a lot more.

If we go back to when you opened the restaurant. How did you find your way to this decision and challenge then, to make these kinds of menus during the winter?

J: A lot of experimenting and a lot of failure. We opened the restaurant at the end of October, without any storage. We had nothing and that winter we had to do some importing to keep our heads above water. For the second year, we had built some sort of storage, but it was nowhere near enough.

A: We have never had to change anything about how we portray the restaurant, and why people should come here. That has always been the same. But since then we have evolved, become better. You thought it was good then, but it cannot be compared to today.

J: When we set our philosophy, working with Swedish produce, we didn’t think we were going to have winter storage. That just became a byproduct of working with Swedish ingredients. And since that framework

has been so narrow all this time, it has forced us to cure and preserve. We don’t have a choice. Otherwise it would have been four servings of turnip and three leek dishes.

Before you started Gastrologik, you both worked in France, what did you bring back from that time?

A: We worked at a whole different, much higher, level. To be able to work at those three star-restaurants was fantastic. It was a new world. We were also beginning to understand the veneration for, and to respect, the raw produce. There is some sort of basic attitude there about how you treat the produce. Just the fact that such a large portion of the people go to buy their groceries at the local farmers market during weekends. That connection to the producer that you get, not just chefs, but everyone. For me that was an important part.

When did you have the idea that you wanted to work seasonally with local produce in Sweden?

J: That was probably when we moved back home. From seeing what people did abroad. There was no one who did Swedish cuisine on this level. There were those who did Swedish meatballs and herring, but no one did any sort of take on fine dining in Swedish.

I suppose it has become more normal today to work in seasons in fine dining.

A: It’s probably more healthy today. Many do it to some degree. When it was the most hyped, everyone was doing it, but they didn’t really know why they did it. Everyone jumped on the train because that was the popular thing to do. But today everyone has incorporated some aspects of it.

J: I would like to add that the New Nordic Cuisine has this approach. It has been a trend. But it has already peaked, and that has never been the reason why we did it in the beginning. We did it because we believed in it. We thought it was fun and that it was the logical thing to do. But at the same time I think many people followed the trend because it was popular, and now they probably do some other trendy thing today.

But you continue believing in this idea, despite it not being as trendy anymore?

J: With my hand on my heart, I know how to cook other types of food, but I probably cannot reach the same level by cooking in another way. We have worked this way for ten years now. I’ve never been at one restaurant for that long before.

A: This is what we are. To be able to create at this level without a framework, that would have been really difficult. Even having access to whatever you want, whenever you want. That would have been difficult.