Hi everyone. Welcome to Pot Luck Food Talks. Today we have a special guest, John Reggevald. He's a chef with a long track record. He's from Sweden, but he has worked for many years in Italy and for the last years in the Basque Country. And he's calling us from the Paris airport. How are you, John? I'm fine. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me, Eric. It's a pleasure.
Yeah, I just landed in Paris from Lebanon, actually, where I've been doing some work on a project we're doing right now. Nice, nice. So today the topic is new Nordic cuisine. And I wanted to talk with you about this because I know you've been lecturing about this at Basque Culinary Center and also you're Swedish. So first of all, how would you define new Nordic cuisine? Why is it? What is it? And why is it important?
Well, I would say new Nordic cuisine is probably important because of the effect that it has had like in the in the rear view mirror. I would say we've been talking about new Nordic cuisine now for basically 20 years. And I would really say I at least notice it has had a big effect on other contemporary cuisines from around the world. So that's why I'm saying in the rear view mirror, I think it has been a really, really important stepping stone as a contemporary cuisine.
And it actually, I mean, it started back in the early 2000s. And I would say that it's kind of characterized by minimalist presentations, but also this search for kind of going back to the roots and the original flavors of the territory, even though you might use innovative techniques in the kitchen, but still the focus is always kind of on the ingredients. And I would almost say kind of it's a reinvention or adaptation of a cuisine based on preservation techniques.
That's usually what I tell my students as well. We have a lot of preservation techniques, of course, in the Nordic countries as anywhere around the world, but very, very focused on a lot of fermentation, a lot of pickling and smoking and drying and so on. So of course, there's a lot of techniques, traditional ones that you can use even in a contemporary cuisine. But I would say the new Nordic cuisine is a little bit different in that way.
Instead of taking traditional recipes and giving them kind of a twist, you know, which might be the first approach, the first easiest approach, take a traditional recipe, give it a modern twist and you're good to go. Instead, what I see happened in the new Nordic cuisine was an exploration of the ingredients themselves as a starting point for innovation instead of starting from a ready-made recipe from our grandfathers or grandmothers or whatever, you know.
Which is what happened in the new Basque cuisine, that they wanted to take recipes from grandmothers and bring them to high-end restaurants. Well, correct me if I'm wrong, my way to define, so to say, a new Nordic cuisine, I would say, is a movement where the focus was towards not only, well, you mentioned ingredients, but to be more specific, local ingredients that weren't as valorized as before, if I understand correctly.
As it happened in many countries, high-end restaurants in the Nordic countries were more looking to France and to Europe instead of looking inwards. This was kind of the inflection point, is that correct, more or less? I totally agree with you there. I mean, in the Nordic countries, we had the same, you know, French cuisine movement, French cuisine-influenced movement during the 70s, 80s, 90s. So this was kind of a counteraction almost to create something really new but really local.
So not importing ingredients from France, not basing ourselves on French technique, but looking into our own terroir, into our own countries and seeing what ingredients do we have. Maybe even ingredients that we used to use back in the days, like hundreds of years ago, but had been forgotten or ingredients that you actually have to go out and search for yourself and forage because you can't find them in the supermarket, you know.
So it was a way to differentiate yourself from other regions and really look into what do we have in our landscape, in our forests. Where is the differential? What is unique from here? Was there a starting point, same as in the new, or are there like grandfathers of the new Nordic cuisine? In my perception, I would say, Bobec was doing new Nordic before new Nordic was a thing, or I don't know, was there someone else?
It's quite funny, this new Nordic cuisine, because there's really like, there's really a point, there's really a kind of a date where a group of chefs sat down around the table and they agreed upon a new set of rules for what they were calling the new Nordic cuisine. So there's actually a very clear starting date for this. But of course, there were people doing stuff like this beforehand as well.
I mean, I remember one of my first memories of when I was really surprised by someone doing things differently back in the 90s, it was the chef Magnus E from a restaurant Oaxen in Sweden. And he was doing what I would say would fit perfectly into the new Nordic cuisine way before it was even defined and written on a paper.
So we're talking mid 90s, and he really created his own local cuisine, naturally delimited by space because he was on an island, he was on the Oaxen island, and he was using ingredients from that same island. So it was very, very logic for him to have a very, very local approach to ingredients, a lot of foraging, a lot of using what was available on the island. But also he was very focused on using traditional old Nordic cooking techniques, preservation techniques.
So that's, Bobek is another example of people doing things before new Nordic cuisine was defined. But for me, I think Magnus Eck was probably the first one where I really thought like, wow, this guy is really doing something different when all the other ones are still in kind of a French Nordic cuisine. And would you say, what would you read your top list of strongest exponents? I don't know, Cox come to my mind, maybe Faviken, Noma. How would you build like a top five list in your opinion?
Yeah, I would say, of course, I mean, everyone knows René Recepio of Noma. I would say a little bit later as well, Magnus Nielsen of Faviken, Espen, Holmer Bann of Maemo, of course. I think Magnus, no, sorry, sorry, Matthias Dahlgren as well in Sweden was doing, he was doing kind of a, in the 90s, Southern Europe inspired kitchen. But he pivoted to a really, really Nordic cuisine in a very natural way, which also I find was very interesting.
As I said before, of course, Magnus Eck of Aarxen and maybe even Klaus Meyer. He's not really the chef that the other ones are that we've been mentioning, but he's more of an entrepreneur and he was one of the persons that really got the snowball rolling on this whole new Nordic cuisine actually. So we talked about Noma. I think it's worth to make like a special mention on what did Noma that was so great, how did it became the best restaurant and the most influential in the world.
I remember the first time I heard about Noma, I was working at Mugaritz back in 2005. I heard about this place and one of the first things they said, it was that they weren't using olive oil and chocolate because it was not a local produce. And for me, this was so counter-intuitive for a restaurant in Europe, you know, no chocolate and not olive oil. So this really opened my mind to see what are these guys doing in Denmark? Well, you've been there eating a couple of times, right?
You actually worked there. Yes, I did as well. So yeah, I kind of, yeah, I understand what you're saying.
Of course, the whole fact of just looking for the most local ingredients, which is a little bit actually in the case of Noma, Noma, yeah, they talk about ingredients from the Nordic region, of course, but if we look at a map, the Nordic region is huge because also the sourcing at Noma was anything from Denmark, of course, which I would say is quite local, but all the way to Iceland, to Greenland. So geographically, Noma was sourcing from a huge area.
But more, I mean, more than just geographically, we're talking about an area that has a climate that's very similar. So it's more about the kind of products that you can find in these countries, the kind of climates, the kind of preservation techniques, cooking techniques, the flavors that bringing those ingredients and those cooking techniques together, the kind of flavor that it creates.
So that's why even though, I mean, we're talking about kind of locally sourced, but the Nordic region is huge. So it's a little bit kind of counterintuitive talking about local ingredients and then sourcing from the whole Nordic area.
But it's, I would say what Noma did differently was just being very, very, very decided on using only ingredients from that area and finding a way because it would be so easy to just like fall back on the ingredients that you know would work imported from other places. But being just so firm in the philosophy, I think that's one of the main reasons Noma became what it became.
Yeah, I can't think of anyone who did that before because for instance, it comes Santi Santamaria to mind at Trancotecan Palace in Catalonia. He was doing like a very comparable thing in his restaurant, but he would source ingredients from all over Europe. And I know that because I worked there. But I mean, he was also like sourcing local products that weren't being used anymore.
So and also another thing from Noma, I think they redefined the concept of what an ingredient is, like using whey or different types of grasses or things that you wouldn't normally cook with. Exactly. Yeah, ingredients that maybe up until that point were considered either just plants, just plants, like something you see in the forest or in the park, or things that you would consider animal feed, maybe like hay or something like that. And then they made it actually into an ingredient, you know?
Yeah, or things that nobody would dare serving in a restaurant like, I don't know, bear heart or things like that. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, but the sense of redefining what an ingredient is, Nordic food labs come to mind. I remember one of the researchers from Nordic food lab saying once, everything is an ingredient. Whatever you see in the forest, you could transform it some way into something edible. Yeah, no, absolutely. I totally agree.
As long as an ingredient isn't toxic for a human being, it has all the potential in the world to be an ingredient in a dish, definitely. You have been Swedish and having eaten in so many of these places also worked. What would you say are memorable dishes that are really representative of the Nordic cuisine movement? Well, let's see. Memorable dishes, yeah, there are of course. No, what are those? Memorable dishes, yeah, there are probably too many to list them all.
But what comes up now like that, I would say Nomaz pickled vegetable dish with bone marrow and pork jus is one of those dishes that really struck me as well as a unique dish in a way that because it changes every day. So it's a dish that has a base of pickled vegetables, six different pickled vegetables, smoked bone marrow and pork jus. But half of the dish was this actually like the garnishes, the flavors coming from foraged herbs, from flowers.
That part of the dish changed every day based on the season, based on what flowers were blooming that day or what fresh little herbs could we get that day. So that was definitely, I would say, a signature dish of Noma.
But then also moving on to dishes where Noma started incorporating ants into the dishes, which is probably also like a kind of groundbreaking moment in the new Nordic cuisine serving, for example, ants on a tartare, on a beef tartare, something that had never really been seen before in the region, actually. And Maemo as well, very well-known restaurant in Oslo. Langerstein cooked with spruce is one of their really super famous dishes, I would say.
Or fettik in the northern part of Sweden, which they did because they're closed by now. A scallop cooked over juniper branches. So there are a few dishes that I could think of right now. I can think, if I think about new Nordic cuisine, I would also think of subcategories like the more sea-oriented, more forest-oriented, grill-oriented. And this brings me to this time and place, which is also like a big statement inside the new Nordic. What would you say time and place is in this context?
So time and place is basically one of the first concepts that Noma came up with when they started the restaurant and when they really focused on the local cuisine and the traditions from the Nordic country.
So time and place was basically a wish for, that they wanted the client, they wanted the people that sat down at the table to be able to, just by them eating there, just by looking around, just by the atmosphere, understanding what time of the year it was and in which place of the world they were actually seated in the restaurant. So they wanted the menu to be that unique over the course of the year, right?
During the different seasons that you would actually be able to notice through the dishes that now it's summer or now it's autumn, now there's a lot of game meat and mushrooms on the plate. So of course it's autumn. So that was kind of the original thought with the concept of time and place. Could you think of any chef that are perhaps less recognized, that deserve more recognition, that are really representative of the New Nordic Cuisine movement that you would recommend?
You actually mentioned before the grilling as a technique, right? As a concept. And there's an interesting chef that has a restaurant in Stockholm that is totally focused on everything that has to do with wood-fired cooking. So this is Niklas Ekstedt of restaurant Ekstedt in Stockholm. And his restaurant, he doesn't have any electrical devices in his kitchen. It's totally wood-fired. So all the techniques are like grilling or slow grilling or smoking or drying with smoke and so on.
And I think it's really interesting. He's done a lot of interesting work for kind of revitalizing ancient cooking methods like that. Do you actually know the head chef of Ekstedt because I worked with her at Campalas. She's an Argentinian. Oh yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, Florencia. She's a super badass chef. What else? I would probably name drop a few more. Maybe Sasu Larkanon in Helsinki as well.
There's a lady called Heidi Björkan in Trondheim in Norway who has a restaurant called Credo. So extremely very nice local cuisine, does a lot of sustainability work as well. So she's definitely interesting to check out in the southern part of Sweden. I would say Daniel Berlin, also a name that might not be as well known as the other ones, but definitely interesting to check out. And abroad, is there anyone doing Nordic cuisine?
I know that Charles Mayer opened a restaurant in New York and also that Aquavit that is a super old Swedish restaurant in New York that used to be run by Marcus Samuelsson, now pivoted into like a new Nordic thing. Can you come up with any other examples? Yeah, it's true. Aquavit was the Swedish, like really kind of traditional restaurant in New York, even back in the 90s. And they've also pivoted to a more modern, more contemporary Nordic cuisine.
Another one in New York is Aska, which is definitely more towards a new Nordic style of cuisine. I think those would be the examples right now. What do you think about that? Does it lose the whole concept of ultra local cuisine doing it in New York or abroad? Or what is your opinion on that?
Actually, I mean, traveling around the world as well, and now during the last years, of course, after this big influence of the New Nordic cuisine, I've seen a lot of chefs and restaurants around the world copying sometimes even straight off dishes from the New Nordic cuisine. And I think that's the wrong approach of doing it. Of course, they can still be very good, amazing dishes, but it's not linked to your territory.
If you're in Latin America or you're in Asia or any other place, it's not really you only get half the experience. So I think much more than copying a dish straight off. What we could do and what we should do is be inspired by the concept and what we've been talking about the basis of the New Nordic cuisine, right? Going back to the ingredient stage, looking at the ingredient, exploring, analyzing the ingredient and take it from there and do that on a local level.
So go with your own ingredients. Then you can apply as many techniques from the New Nordic cuisine as you wish or just think about the concept, right? But use it on your own ingredients. I think that's so much more interesting than just copying a dish straight off. Okay. My last question is, first of all, is the New Nordic cuisine still alive? And since the Kingdom of Ferran Adria in the mid 2000s until now, I think it has made the dominating trend in the high end. Is there still a new trend?
What can you tell us about that? I would say it's very much still alive. What I see that kind of the transition have been lately is that what might have started off as a high end, a little bit exclusive cuisine during the first years of the New Nordic cuisine has kind of trickled down to a very, very normal restaurant, like your neighborhood restaurant level.
So actually I would say in the Nordic countries, it has inspired a lot of chefs that are not doing both cuisine or high end exclusive cuisine, but actually chefs in restaurants where anyone of us could go any day. And I think that's probably the most positive effect that I've seen for me personally.
And also it has brought a lot of awareness in general to the general public of what are traditions, what our traditions are, what our ingredients look like, what our territory like looks like, what foraging is. There are so many aspects that really, I would say it has brought an awareness to normal people that are not working or are not active in gastronomy. I would say that's probably the most, the biggest effect it has had. But for me, it's very, very much still alive.
I mean, there's so many combinations, there's so many ingredients that you can still explore, you can use with any combination of techniques. So it's kind of never ending. You just have to keep going and let there be an evolution to the New Nordic cuisine as well. That's it for this week's episode of Potluck Food Talks.