This Wildly Creative Restaurant Turns Campfire Cooking Into Fine Dining
Nicolai Tram cooking at Knystaforsen
Eva H. Tram
'We are Boy Scouts who are full of themselves,' says chef Nicolai Tram. He has a hint of Scandinavian self-deprecation, but he also makes a valid point.
He means that he and his international team at Knystaforsen, in the dense forests of Halland, Sweden, aren't just part of today's global fire-dining trend. With all respect to the flame wizards of Asador Etxebarri, Francis Mallmann and Niklaus Ekstedt, what they're doing is different. Let's call it campfire dining.
It came about almost accidentally—backward, as Tram says. He and his wife and co-owner, Eva Tram, started Knystaforsen in 2020, the same plague year that saw so many others leave the business. But they had been laying the groundwork for a while.
Nicolai had grown up with childhood dreams of fine dining. He trained in the classic French style, then went to Spain to work at the height of El Bulli's reign. 'Ferran Adrià had 5,000 chefs; he didn't need more,' he recalls. So he found something better, a role with Paco Roncero documenting the entire El Bulli back catalog.
Eva and Nicolai Tran in front of Knystaforsen
Courtesy of the restaurant
He returned to his native Copenhagen just as the world was losing interest in Basque molecular gastronomy and swooning over the rigorous New Nordic purity emerging from Noma. Tram says he felt 'redundant' but persevered, ran a restaurant in the Danish capital for years, and found his way into television, eventually working as a celebrity chef on a national morning show. His plan had not included opening another restaurant. He had explicitly sworn never to cook that way again.
Eva, meanwhile, earned sommelier credentials, traveled as a food writer and photographer, and became the Danish editor of the influential White Guide to Nordic restaurants. They found success; the glam jobs, the nice apartment, the aspirational dream—except they rarely saw each other, or their children, and somehow they never had much money at the end of the month.
And so about nine years ago, they sold everything, packed up the kids and moved to the Swedish forest to 'build a family life that was less fragmented.' They found an abandoned sawmill, built in 1871 in Rydöbruk, which they turned into their home and—much to their surprise—eventually into their restaurant.
Tne outdoor fire kitchen at Knystaforsen
Eva H. Tram
It wasn't just the house. They went all-in on forest living: hiking, camping, backyard food. 'Until we moved to Sweden and lit a fire, I had no interest in cooking anymore,' recalls Nikolai. 'But cooking in the backyard tapped into something from the past—very primal, instantaneous. I needed to learn more.'
Soon after, he began seeing the forest as a supermarket. 'There's food everywhere!' he exclaims. 'Lingonberries. Birch trees full of sap. A lake full of pike, eels and trout. Moose, deer and rabbits all around.' The learning and discovering led to showing and sharing, and with Eva's photographs, they created a cookbook. Then they made a couple more.
Around the same time, they went to a local park, where a young cook at a street food stand was making grilled asparagus sandwiches using premium local products like wild dill and grated Camelia cheese. It was another awakening. Even with his campfires, Tram could experiment with elegance, refinement and complexity.
Burned leek with a sauce made of buttermilk and dill oil
Eva H. Tram
They began having increasingly ambitious dinner parties, with food made by Nicolai and special wines chosen by Eva, and then, to make it financially feasible, 'inviting' strangers who would pay. In the beginning, it was every couple of weeks, downstairs in the family home, with the couple picking up toys and sending the kids upstairs in their pajamas right before the guests arrived. Sometimes the family cat wandered through.
Once they admitted they had a restaurant after all—'this was a hobby, but it got a little out of hand'—they embraced it. They found another place to live, then renovated the entire mill into Knystaforsen (the name refers to water and rocks, as in the river that flows in front) and built a full fire kitchen outside and a cozy bar and lounge upstairs. They hired staff—including that asparagus sandwichman, Hampus Nordahl, as head chef. They turned an old hotel, a villa and a guesthouse into accommodations for the growing number of food lovers who traveled from afar to see what they were up to.
And they got deeply serious about the guest experience, even while maintaining the relaxed feeling of welcoming diners into their home. Their 30-person team received a Michelin star in 2022, just two years after opening. Somewhere along the way, a forager showed up with a box of forest treasures, maybe pine shoots, recalls Nicolai. The mountain man said, 'You need me.' The chef agreed.
A room in the Knystaforsen villa
Eva H. Tram
Now, says Nicolai, they're cooking the forest and the lakes—a balance between fire, nature and craftsmanship. It's a journey into the wild, where simplicity meets excellence. Virtually everything is foraged, grown on a small farm or killed humanely by a hunter.
He doesn't have a radius or a strict dogma: He avoids ocean fish even though it's not geographically that far away, because it's part of another (conceptual) ecosystem. He's not afraid to import black truffles from Croatia or buy the occasional free-range pheasant from a farmer.
He doesn't buy whole animals or preach some zero-waste, nose-to-tail sermon (though they're doing plenty well in the sustainability department, with a Michelin Green star to match the shiny one) but he's not afraid to work with the parts that are usually discarded. Lately, he's been investigating the possibilities of deer testicles.
NIcolai Tram at work on the watercolors that decorate each guest's menu
Eva H. Tram
For now, there's nothing quite so out-there, although deer blood is the star ingredient in the final dessert, a chocolate-ish (but cocoa-free) fondant served with hazelnut praline and malt ice cream. Before guests get there, though, there are about 18 other manifestations of the seasons of the Swedish forest. Everyone starts upstairs in the lounge, where they're greeted with inventive cocktails and crackers dotted with pickled birch leaves, and given a chance to pick their pairing. Eva has assembled four options: classic wines, adventurous vintages, creative non-alcoholic alternatives and a hybrid that takes a bit from each.
Downstairs, where there are full-wall windows with views of the forest and a pervasive aroma of burning birch wood, the courses arrive at an energetic pace. Along with each plate, servers add a slip of paper describing the food, and at the end, they bundle it up with a watercolor that Nicolai painted at the beginning of that evening's service.
The papers are helpful because there's quite a lot of complexity to remember: moose tartare on a traditional Swedish waffle with smoked mayonnaise, grated horseradish and pickled elderflower. Grilled oyster mushrooms on a crispy pancake with reduced cream and grated Camelia cheese. A lingonberry cracker with pike perch (the Swedes were initially horrified!) in garum emulsion and wild rose granita. Grilled duck hearts with burnt silver onion, red currant capers, and pheasant and burnt hay sauce. Jellied bouillon of mushrooms with grilled yeast, smoked and grilled eel, pickled green strawberries and a wild hops apple cider sauce. It's all quite cerebral, yet also wondrously delicious. It doesn't force you to think; you can simply enjoy.
Not deer blood, but another outstanding dessert: birch syrup ice cream sandwiches on biscuits made of birch bark
Eva H. Tram
Toward the end of the four-hour dinner, there's the seemingly obligatory invitation to the kitchen, or in this case, to the campfire. Guests get a quick tour of the main fires and are then given cups of hot berry juice (optionally spiked with white rum) and shown to seats around a campfire. In winter, there are blankets for cozying up.
A chef comes over to explain that they're about to make a version of æbleskiver, a beloved, donut-like Danish Christmas snack. Except theirs are filled with pickled white gooseberries and slow-cooked wild boar that has the texture of pulled pork. They're drenched in tallow using a flambadou (an old-fashioned cast-iron grilling cone designed to melt fat quickly). The Danish and Swedish customers appear to take a Proustian pleasure, all smiles in the flickering firelight.
Everyone else gets their moment of childlike sense-memories back upstairs in the lounge. After the dinner concludes, there are coffees and whiskies and a few final sweets, like grilled Madeleines (again with the Proust!), licorice-scented cotton candy and lingonberry gummies. And of course there's one last flame. This one kisses fluffy woodruff marshmallows, melting and charring them into one last moment of camp scout delight.
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