30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASE
Fäviken Magasinet was located in Järpen in Jämtland, around 600 kilometres north of Stockholm and a considerable distance from pretty much everything else, with room for only a handful of guests each evening. Magnus Nilsson took over the kitchen in his mid twenties and within a few years turned the place into one of the world's most talked about restaurants, with two Michelin stars.
The premise was uncompromising. Everything served came from the surrounding area, which in that climate means that most of the year has to be covered by what was preserved, fermented, dried or buried during the months when anything actually grows. The restaurant therefore did not build a menu but a larder, and the menu was whatever the larder allowed.
The book contains 100 recipes and 150 colour photographs and is as much about the landscape and the preservation system as it is about the dishes. Its tone is restrained in a way few restaurant books dare to be.
Its significance lies in what it proved. Before Fäviken, there was an unspoken assumption that world class cooking required a major city, with the deliveries, staff and audience that come with it. Nilsson showed that isolation could be the prerequisite rather than the obstacle, and an entire generation of chefs drew conclusions from it. The restaurant closed in 2019, voluntarily and at its peak.
Format: Hardback
Language: English
First published: 2012
The Kitchen Lab Selection
From a Swedish perspective, this is the single most important restaurant book ever written. Almost every great restaurant book is about somewhere else: the ingredients are unavailable, the climate is different and the seasons do not match. This one is about a larder that lies outside your own door. Much of what is described as radical consists of things Swedish households did for generations without calling it gastronomy, and seeing them treated with this degree of seriousness changes the way you look at your own.
The restaurant no longer exists. The book is therefore not the documentation that sits alongside the work. It is what remains of it.
