Totally Stockholm 1
Gastrologik open from 18:00, but when I am let in
to 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 13