Totally Stockholm 1
remains. So it becomes interesting in the way tha
t 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 14