Swedish Food

I was in Sweden last week and wound up having an amazing and unexpected dining experience. My previous experiences with Swedish cuisine haven't been all that memorable - for example, heaping plates of cold baby shrimp on lettuce isn't my idea of a mid-morning snack, but seems to be a national dish. A colleague wanted to try someplace he'd never been before in old town Stockholm, so I said let's go.

We wound up in the basement of a hotel at a restaurant called Leijontornet - Lion Tower in English. It turns out that the restaurant sits on top of an ancient outer wall of Stockholm and they actually built the dining room around some of the ruins. Parts of the wall we could see were almost 700 years old. I attached a picture. I didn't have my camera so I had to take pictures with my phone. I apologize for the horrible quality. There are much better pictures on their website.

We were the only two people in the restaurant - I guess Tuesday nights are slow. Two parties showed up later in the evening. The menu showed three choices - four course seafood meal, four course meat, and a seven course combination. The meat menu was interesting and included duck liver, ox tartare, and lamb, but we both decided on the seafood menu (picture attached). I couldn't pass on lobster and truffles.

So we needed a white wine. Our very funny Norwegian server brought out the list (my companion was Danish, so they both compared notes on Swedes throughout the evening - apparently Swedes are an inferior species). Then they let us go down into the wine cellar to look around (benefits of a slow night). It was full of first growths and ridiculous burgundies plus high-end wines from all the other areas of the world. I decided to pull out the personal credit card and we wound up with an '04 Leflaive Batard-Montrachet (picture attached). I'm a sucker for white burgundy and we needed something worthy of the menu. The wine kicked ass all night - we couldn't have picked a better match for the food.

About the food. First thing that came out was what's in the bottom picture - a four item sampler that included a salt pike lollipop, a very thin slice of reindeer jerky, some sort of cod skin and the Swedish version of a pork rind (the clear twirly thing in the left of the picture). The pork was like eating bacon-flavored air and everything else was equally good. Highlights were the mussels in the first course (I'm not a mussel fan at all - these were the best tasting mussels I've ever had), and the lobster, of course. Everything was fresh and from Sweden - even the raspberries and truffles.

I had my eyes opened to good Swedish cuisine. It's not just meatballs and herring. If you get to Stockholm, check out Leijontornet.