So, where are the fat people? What have you done with them? I’ve been in Stockholm for four days and I’ve yet to see anyone who can’t touch their toes or give themselves a bikini-wax without a mirror. Every city has fat people, if only to make the rest of us feel better. But then, you already feel good enough about yourselves. I suspect that in your Swedish, liberal yet sternly prescriptive way, you’ve rounded them all up, and there is an island out there in the archipelago that is a caring chubby gulag for the weeping obese.
Being dropped into a city and told to eat objectively is impossible. Food is so instinctively woven into the fabric of society. Restaurants are built on cultural nuance, snobbery, vanity, nostalgia, history - the last thing they’re really about is mere hunger. And the tourist is always going to be at a loss to understand the subtleties of hospitality and the pecking order, the etiquette. The first thing I look at in a restaurant is who else is eating. You can tell a lot about the aspirations of a dining room by the people it wants to feed.
Except in Stockholm. Everyone here looks the same. I mean, you all dress similarly. To an outsider there’s precious little to identify a postman from a banker, a hooker from a housewife. You’re all very conformist, very aware of fitting in, or perhaps not standing out. It’s not a criticism. I understand; you’re warm, clean and on a budget.
I’m here to judge the best restaurant to take a visitor to. This isn’t the same as the best restaurant; it’s not going to be Thai, or a Mexican place. It’s not going to be pizza. It will be somewhere that feels authentically rooted. So straight from the airport my girlfriend The Blonde and I drive to a stall on a motorway roundabout that sells warm fish on bread. Street food is always a shorthand for the heart of a city. London hardly has any at all, which tells you quite a lot about London. There is a kinship in the countries that value herring; they are northern-European, Dutch and German, Nordic, English and Scots. It’s the bony, oily taste of chilly Protestantism, hard working, hard drinking, taciturn Europe. Biting Europe. Go south and you’re into sardine Europe. That’s the distinction of our continent, the dividing line is between herring and sardine.
Warm fish on bread are wonderful, proper standing-up food, where you have to lean forward like and expectant heron because the flavour and the greed overwhelm the physics. My first sit-down restaurant was Aifur, the only Viking restaurant in Gamla Stan. This came recommended to me as being owned by a man called E-type, who must be world famous in Sweden. “No, you must have heard of E-type,” insisted my guide. “He wrote that pop song, the one that went da dadadadada?” Oh, that one. No, I don’t remember it.
The restaurant is a themed basement. There are many rules to being a customer…don’t steal the silver, don’t lick the waiters. Very near the top is don’t ever accept food from someone in fancy dress. And never, ever out anything in your mouth that might be a prop from a Discovery Channel documentary. This was relentlessly appalling. The stuff was vile, thoughtless, spiced and seasoned by a careless troll. There was hideous music and plenty of bellowing bonhomie that made you want to claw off your own face in embarrassment. This is the only Viking-themed restaurant in Stockholm, so that’s a blessing. But it is still one too many. You should invite the Saxons to come and sack it.
Considering how much the rest of Europe suffered from the bloody Vikings, it would be a cruelty to make a visitor relive the trauma here. “But,” my guide said “Our Crown Princess comes here.” And that’s supposed to be a recommendation, is it? What else would you let a royal, any royal choose for you? Your ties?Your haircut?Your girlfriend?
Mistral is a southern wind that’s supposed to drive you mad. Mistral the restaurant does. It’s not easy to find. My taxi driver drove round and round saying ‘I don’t think there’s a restaurant here, I know a nice Viking place in Gamla Stan.’ In the end a waiter ran into the street and waved. He was the only person in the street. When we got into the restaurant, we were the only people in the dining room. Another couple did eventually join us, but they don’t like to encourage visitors. The sign above the door is for a defunct pram factory. The waiter wasn’t a waiter, he said, he was a cook. He said it in a small, whispery voice. They’d done away with the need for waiters by the clever ruse of discouraging customers. Next month they’d probably be able to do without cooks.
Our table was decorated with the sort of things that solitary children who worry their parents pick up; old corks, bits of rotten pumpkin, bones and shells. It could have been evidence for a Nordic murder mystery. The food, the cook-waiter told us, was bio-dynamic, and a surprise. Bio-dynamism is, he said, the spirituality of food. More like a religion than catering. The ingredients were grown by a very old man who delivered them in a very, very old van. I suspect he also guards a secret well, speaks in rhymes and spins straw into gold.
The first course was a single carrot that had been cooked for four hours. Unsurprisingly, it was black on the outside and soft on the inside. What was surprising was that it still tasted of carrot. It was at this point that I started giggling. The Blonde caught it, and we wept with silent, swallowed mirth for the rest of dinner, like naughty schoolchildren in a hushed room. The memory of seven different things to do with pumpkin will remain with me for years. As dinner, it was pretty disastrous, as comic theatre of the absurd, it was a triumph. “We used to have a busy restaurant in Gamla Stan,” said the waiter, “but we moved here; it’s less hectic.” We waited for 40 minutes while our taxi got lost and gave up.
Two traditional restaurants that I would have been very happy to be taken to, and hope to return, were Pelikan, the big, elegantly functional room with attractive murals and a simple menu, and the best waitress in Sweden. The blonde had pork knuckle, as did pretty much everyone else in the room. I had meatballs, which are now the benchmark against which I will judge all other meatballs. And Prinsen, a warm and bohemian café that had the comfortable feeling of past glories worn like family pearls. I liked the fact that it had a raised table that stood in as a window display. A pair of attractive ladies were sat there to lure hungry men. I had a herring selection that was good, and the wallenberger, a great improvement on most hamburgers, with lingenberries, which of course the rest of the world never gets to eat.
The runner-up for best restaurant is PA&Co; a crowded, hot and svelte dining room with a bar and tables crammed together like an Ikea sale. The food is fine, but not really the point. The Blonde’s smoked and salted prawns were excellent, my beef Rydberg was ok, it’s the customers. They have the unmistakeable air of people who, through luck and looks, find themselves in the right room at the right moment. They are the newly, vaguely and amusingly famous. All completely anonymous to me, of course, but still we loved the atmosphere and the feeling of being let in. This is the only place we found in Stockholm with people who had made any obvious effort to dress up. The bar was crowded, the conversations were extrovert, but unlike New York or Rome, or Paris or London, the volume never rose above a singsong hum.
The winner for visitors’ restaurant is Gastrologik, a new, and when we went for lunch, empty restaurant that embodied so many of the attributes the rest of Europe garland Scandinavia with. It was a beautifully simple room; white with burnished copper lampshades and a sea-green glass wall hiding the kitchen. The chairs were unmistakeably Nordic, the table furniture carefully and ergonomically chosen. The menu was completely blank. It just said two or three courses. ‘Would you like sausage or cod,’ asked the waiter. I’d like both. ‘Three courses then.’
The cod was an unimpeachable tranche of the freshest fish, accompanied by taut, pale-pink prawns, a pile of freshly-grated horseradish and a spoonful of lightly-browned butter. To keep a dish this minimal, to trust the ingredients and their relationship to each other, to trust the taste of your customers is a prodigious act of nerve. The sausage was fresh, coarsely-milled pig with fennel, a nod to warmer Italy. And for me, ideally, there was sweet, sharp, cloudy apple juice. It was all modern, elegantly intelligent, friendly and understated. It had the great blessing of brevity and was unmistakeably Swedish.