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Forbes
14-05-2025
- Forbes
Beyond Salmon, Discover These 5 Regional Norwegian Food Favorites
'Sodd' is a traditional Norwegian soup with mutton, seasoned meatballs, potatoes and carrots. Brunost, the caramel-colored 'cheese' with its unmistakable tang, and fresh salmon pulled from icy fjords are two of the most familiar elements of Norwegian cuisine. But across the country, regional specialities offer a deeper and more surprising culinary story. Norway's rugged climate shaped a long tradition of food preservation. Drying, salting, fermenting, and curing were everyday necessities that gave rise to staples like stockfish from Lofoten and salted lamb, many of which remain important today. In recent years, Norway has also earned acclaim for its bold new-Nordic cooking. From Michelin-starred restaurants in Oslo to seasonal tasting menus in the Arctic, chefs are reinventing tradition with modern flair. To truly understand Norwegian food, it's worth stepping away from the fine dining scene. While the country's cuisine doesn't enjoy a glowing international reputation, many of its most beloved dishes are simple, hearty and deeply rooted in local tradition. You'll find them at mountain lodges, roadside cafes, and family kitchens across the country. Here are five regional favorites that may not make international headlines, but are well worth seeking out. Known as bidos, this traditional stew is a cornerstone of Sámi cuisine in Northern Norway. 'Bidos' is often cooked and served inside around a fireplace at Sami villages in Norway. Made with tender cuts of reindeer meat, potatoes, and carrots, bidos is a simple dish that relies on the quality of its ingredients rather than elaborate seasoning. The result is a rich, gently savory broth that highlights the natural flavor of the reindeer, a meat that's prized for its leanness and gamey depth. It's both a comforting meal and a cultural expression, closely tied to the Sámi people's reindeer-herding traditions and often prepared over an open fire and eaten in communal settings such as lavvu tents. While once a home-cooked staple, bidos can now be found on the menu at several restaurants and lodges across Northern Norway, especially those offering Sámi culinary experiences. If bidos isn't available, other popular reindeer dishes include creamy stews with wild mushrooms and juniper berries, or thinly sliced smoked reindeer served cold as a starter. You might also come across reindeer hot dogs or cured reindeer meat known as spekemat, usually served with crispbread, sour cream or lingonberry jam. Crossing a fjord by car ferry in western Norway might seem like a purely practical part of your journey. But for many Norwegians, it comes with a beloved tradition: a warm, fluffy svele. The best place to sample a Norwegian 'svele' is on a ferry as you cross a fjord. These thick, slightly sweet griddle cakes are often cooked fresh on board and served folded in half with a generous smear of butter and sugar, or sometimes a slice of tangy brown cheese. The scent of batter on the hot griddle and the gentle hum of the ferry make for a uniquely Norwegian moment. It's best enjoyed with a strong coffee and a panoramic view of the water. While sveler can be found in cafés and bakeries across the country, they're most commonly associated with Norway's extensive network of car ferries, especially along the west coast. For locals, it's a nostalgic snack. For visitors, it's an unexpected delight in the middle of a travel day. Stockfish (tørrfisk) is unsalted cod that has been naturally dried in the cold Arctic air for several months. This ancient method of preservation has been practiced for over a thousand years in the Lofoten Islands, where rows of wooden racks filled with hanging cod remain a striking feature of the landscape. Once rehydrated and cooked, the fish has a firm, chewy texture and a deep, concentrated flavor that some find challenging. But for many Norwegians, it's a taste of home. One of the most common ways to enjoy tørrfisk is in bacalao, a hearty stew of dried fish, tomato, onion, and potato with Spanish roots that has become a coastal classic. Stockfish (tørrfisk) is air dried on wooden racks in the fierce winds of Norway's Lofoten Islands. You'll also find tørrfisk in a much more portable form: thin, slightly crispy strips sold in supermarkets, especially in the north and along the west coast. These fish snacks, often enjoyed with beer, are coastal Norway's answer to jerky. Known by different names across the country but most commonly raspeballer, these dense potato dumplings are a beloved comfort food, especially in Western Norway. Made from grated raw potato mixed with flour and often a bit of boiled potato, the dumplings are typically boiled and served with salted meat, sausages, and a generous helping of melted butter or syrup. Traditionally, raspeballer are eaten on Thursdays in many local restaurants. In some versions, a piece of meat is even hidden inside each dumpling. A ceremonial dish with deep roots in the Trøndelag region of Central Norway, sodd is a clear mutton or beef soup served with potatoes and carrots. What sets it apart is the inclusion of finely seasoned meatballs, cooked separately and added just before serving. With a history dating back hundreds of years, sodd is often reserved today for weddings, confirmations and national holidays. However, it can be found year-round in certain regional restaurants or in supermarkets across Central Norway ready to heat up and enjoy. Best served piping hot with flatbread.
Forbes
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
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.
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Nord, Liverpool: ‘It's very much a win'
Nord, 100 Old Hall St, Liverpool L3 9QJ. Snacks £6.50-£11; small plates 315.50-£27, large plates £20-£36, desserts £11-£16, wines from £32 A midweek night and the restaurant is completely empty. Music thrums and staff drift about looking purposeful, despite being a little short on purpose until we show up. This has nothing to do with Nord and everything to do with football. At the exact time of our booking, Everton are kicking off against Liverpool, two miles away at Goodison Park, for what has been described to me as not just a game, but the game. As well as being a local derby, it's also the last ever match to be played between the two at the stadium before Everton move to their new home at Bramley-Moore Dock. Even a blithering football ignoramus like me can recognise the significance of such a game to a city like Liverpool and why that might suppress bookings. On the upside, the emptiness provides a serious opportunity to perv over the design of the restaurant, tucked into the ground floor of one of Liverpool's most famous buildings. Now called the Plaza, it's a vast 60s block twice as long as it is high, which was once the headquarters of clothing catalogue company Littlewoods. The foyer has been given a sleek polished marble makeover to play up its 60s origins, with a few appropriate swirls of colour. The bar and dining room behind takes all that a little further. There are olive-green banquettes and bucket chairs, huge upside-down bowl-shaped ceiling lamps, peach-coloured fascias and, along one side, booths tucked into smooth, curving caves. It's part Austin Powers shag palace, part Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars. It really is groovy, baby. For GSG Hospitality, owners of various businesses across the northwest, the design has adaptability. It could become almost anything they want it to be. For now, however, it very much suits the cooking of Liverpool-born Daniel Heffy, who returned here in 2022 after years in Stockholm, including a lengthy stint at the three Michelin-starred Frantzen. At Nord, he insists he looks northwards for inspiration, hence the name, but if so, he does that without being annoyingly doctrinaire or earnest. Or especially northern. The imperative to feed clearly trumps geography every time. Among the snacks, many a raucous celebration of the deep-fat fryer, there are shredded-duck croquettes with a lip-smackingly sour plum sauce. It's a butch riff on crispy duck with pancakes. There's a bowl of deep-fried olives flavoured with rosemary and lemon, which rustle against each other when you shake the bowl. A magnificently engineered quail Scotch egg, the meaty casing flecked with green herbs, comes with a smooth, sweet aïoli of roasted garlic. You could get kicked out of the New Nordic clubhouse for daring to allow racy, sunkissed things like olives, lemons and that wantonly promiscuous bulb garlic into your kitchen. And yet here they are, amid culinary ideas from higher latitudes; the sort that have watched the gloomy films of Ingmar Bergman and have opinions on them. The result is a restaurant that manages to be ambitious without being overbearing. Ambition, of course, is risky because it may not always be realised. That's the case here. But I'd much prefer Heffy's slight misses than the unambitious hits of safer cooks. Because when he gets it right, my heart simply beats faster. His steak tartare is made extra beefy with the addition of what he calls a 'tallow emulsion', as against an olive oil-based dressing from southern climes. Give him extra points for employing the word tallow, associated with the harsh soaps used to clean up filthy Dickensian urchins, rather than for dinner. The beef-fat dressing does boost the flavour. But it's the inclusion of squeaky macadamia nuts from that bit of the north called Australia which are the gamechanger, adding texture. The tartare is topped with a generous fall of microplaned parmesan, and on top of that are rounds of pickled vegetables. We are back in the north, and here, pickling rules. Against that a warm chawamushi or set savoury custard, topped with king crab and smoked eel, stutters a little. It works texturally, but it's a tricky dish to get right, as this one proves. It is simply oversalted. Today, the larger plates include a slab of seared monkfish on a glossy fish roe and chive cream sauce of a sort guaranteed to make a lachrymose Finn weep gently with joy. But it's completely overshadowed by a plate of chicken, both roasted and deep fried, with quenelles of mushroom duxelles on a fermented mushroom sauce tasting intensely of itself. The monkfish is pretty. The mushroom and chicken dish just elbows its way to the front of the crowd, waving and hollering. It's dinner with a capital D. Alongside that, for carbs, there are new potatoes, crisply roasted and squished until bursting from their skins, then drenched in garlic butter. There are also roasted baby carrots, which would have been terrific by themselves. But they come with bouquets of greens which, in a Nordic manner, have been seasoned with vinegar, just a little too stridently. The carrots are sweet. The greens demand we pucker up. That's fine. Let's just eat the carrots. At the bottom of the dessert menu, after the blood-orange tart with chocolate ice-cream and the almond, cardamom and vanilla millefeuille, there's a sour cherry and pistachio baked Alaska. If your eye does not drift downwards lasciviously to that listing, then you are completely dead inside. It arrives pert and proud: a spectacular ridged whorl of torched Italian meringue, enclosing a heart not just of the advertised cherry and pistachio, but also of frangipane. We attack it from each side, my companion and I, until the plate is emptied and we are required to lay down our spoons, sadly. It is enthusiastically priced at £16. We don't begrudge a penny. By now a clutch of other tables are occupied and there is the gentle hum of a restaurant engaging fully with its purpose. The service is relaxed without being annoyingly chummy although there is the sense that, given the encouragement to do so, Nord could become a little more serious and a little more formal. For £110 they will create a tasting menu, wine flight extra, which would make it a different type of restaurant but, I suspect, still a very good one. Over at Goodison Park the last ever local derby there has ended in a draw. Here at Nord, even allowing for the occasional missed shot on goal, it's very much a win. And that's the best stab at a football metaphor I have for you. The company behind Covent Garden restaurants The Petersham and La Goccia has announced their closure, citing the combined impacts of Brexit, Covid and last year's budget. In particular a spokesperson for the company said Brexit had resulted in an 'inability to recruit people with the right experience and skills'. The original Petersham Nurseries restaurant in Richmond is unaffected, as is the garden centre of which it is a part. Sandwich chain Subway has announced it is diversifying into jacket potatoes, with a range under the Spudway sub-brand being trialled across 170 of its UK stores. The baked potatoes will be fully customisable through a range of toppings, including tuna mayo, chicken tikka and taco beef. The baked potato market has seen a number of ups and downs over the years. Spudulike, originally founded in Edinburgh in the 1970s, eventually became a 40-strong chain, but the last one closed in 2019. Potato merchant Albert Bartlett then went into partnership with chef James Martin to revive Spudulike, but that also failed ( Chef Richard Turner, associated with meaty restaurant groups including Hawksmoor, Pitt Cue and Blacklock has stayed on brand with his latest appointment. He has become chef director of venerable American BBQ chain Bodean's, and will be relaunching the menu for the group on 20 March, with the introduction of pork and beef rib platters, Texas toast and what he's calling his 'bone suckin' sauce'. The original branch in London's Soho is also being refurbished ( Email Jay at or follow him on Instagram @jayrayner1
