THERE’S no escaping Scandinavian heritage in the Twin Cities. At every turn, there’s a billboard for Norwegian language-immersion camp or a “Drool if You’re Finnish” baby bib for sale.
But in food terms, it’s long been easier to get an authentic taco al pastor, Thai green curry or a grass-fed beef slider than a good kanel snegl (cinnamon roll). There hasn’t been a successful Scandinavian restaurant here since 2003, when Aquavit, a slick expense-account-fueled import from Midtown Manhattan, closed after a lackluster run.
“When I was growing up, if we wanted to have meatballs and lingonberries, we had to go to Ikea,” said Kathryn Anderson, a student at the University of Minnesota. “That’s how bad it was.”
There are plenty of good restaurants in the Twin Cities: at least one great Mexican tamale joint (La Loma), several Vietnamese pho specialists and storefronts that cater to the cities’ large Somali and Hmong communities. Several upscale places, like Tilia, Heartland and the Red Stag Supper Club, focus on local ingredients like bison, walleye, juniper berries and cheese curds. Wild rice, harvested by Native Americans in northern Minnesota, is braised relentlessly in cream at the restaurant Hell’s Kitchen until it finally lapses into a nutty, luxurious porridge. But last year, along came the Bachelor Farmer, a modern (even chic) restaurant that playfully blends Scandinavian design and tradition with a handmade-food ethos and the friendly unpretentiousness of the Midwest. With roasted rutabagas and reinterpreted cinnamon rolls, pickled Lake Erie perch and house-made rye toast, all served in an airy, reclaimed industrial space softened by country-Swedish wallpaper and cleverly deployed gingham, the Bachelor Farmer has given Scandinavian food a much-needed shot of adrenaline.
The Bachelor Farmer is not the only evidence that cooks in the Twin Cities are suddenly embracing Nordic heritage. A glossy new wing of the American Swedish Institute opened in July, with a cafe called Fika that serves top-quality Swedish treats like smorgas (open sandwiches) made from local ingredients, bakes its own sourdough rye bread daily and serves powerful coffee with kladdkaka (sticky chocolate cake) and thumbprint cookies, crusted with chopped almonds and filled with gooseberry, lingonberry or raspberry jam. Izzy’s, a playful, artisanal ice cream shop in St. Paul, has a flavor called Swedish Garden Party: elderflower ice cream with raspberry swirl and crumbled gingersnap cookies. At Haute Dish, a kitschy spot for reworked Midwestern classics, the chef Landon Schoenefeld has transformed the usual horseradish-spiked Scandinavian steak tartare into a composition of hot brioche toast, runny egg yolk, chilled raw beef and a shot of bloody mary. And although Minnesota is not generally considered a nexus for new ideas in world cuisine, this Scandinavian surge is intersecting with the most avant-garde movement in food today: New Nordic cuisine, based on cold-weather crops, traditional foodways and naturalistic presentations. “We kind of stumbled into the New Nordic thing,” said Eric Dayton, an owner of the Bachelor Farmer. “Our goal was something that was authentic to Minnesota, not necessarily authentic to Scandinavia.”
Paul Berglund, who is Swedish-American and originally from St. Louis, has been the chef at the Bachelor Farmer since it opened last summer. While developing the menu, he applied the skills he developed over seven years in the celebrated Italian kitchen at Oliveto, in Oakland, Calif. (like curing, smoking, pickling, foraging and cheesemaking) to a Midwestern palette of ingredients.
“I knew that I would be able to make pork sausage with allspice and ginger, instead of chile flakes and fennel,” he said. He did research on foods like smoked reindeer, pickled herring, dried mushrooms and cardamom, a popular spice in Finnish baking.
But he did not know that, halfway around the world, chefs like René Redzepi, Magnus Nilsson and Mathias Dahlgren in Scandinavia were doing similar research and developing the cuisine that has become hugely influential globally at restaurants like Noma, Relae and Faviken — and now at United States restaurants like Acme and Frej in New York, and Plaj in San Francisco.
After decades of French-based cuisine, followed by Mediterranean flavors and then Spanish modernism, the most trendy ingredients for chefs to work with now include preindustrial Nordic staples: root vegetables, fish roe, wild greens, venison, dried mushrooms, seaweed and cow’s milk.
This might not seem like a promising basis for a popular Midwestern restaurant. But by serving comforting foods like popovers (a nod to legendary ones at the restaurant in Dayton’s department store in Minneapolis) alongside invented dishes like dill-cured sea bass scattered with flowers, Mr. Berglund has threaded the needle. And he’s developing his own versions of less-familiar Nordic foods like Danish krydderfedt, a spread for toast made from rendered fat of various meats, some The Bachelor Farmer’s sophisticated aesthetic is both controlled and bankrolled by its owners, Eric and Andrew Dayton, the sons of Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton. The Dayton family owned a string of department stores in the Midwest in the 19th century, then founded the Target chain, and have become, essentially, the Kennedys of Minnesota — with a dash of Rockefeller, as Dayton money has built many of the city’s major institutions. President Obama held a fund-raiser here in June; donors paid up to $50,000 for face time with the president and chef Paul Berglund’s house-smoked pork breast.
It is no overstatement to say that the restaurant has generated as much pride and publicity, in culinary terms, as if the Minnesota Vikings had finally won the Super Bowl (the team has played in four of the big games, and won none). “The Lake Wobegon image of Minnesota is a huge part of the local psyche,” said Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, who writes about food for Minneapolis-St. Paul magazine, and who said the restaurant made a “huge splash” because it was so familiar and yet so sophisticated.
“To see that image carried forward, with those iconic dishes like pancakes and Swedish meatballs — for Minnesotans, it was like seeing their name in the newspaper,” she said.
Norwegian bachelor farmers are often the subjects of tales spun by Garrison Keillor on “A Prairie Home Companion,” where he also jokes about “hotdish,” creamy casseroles that are a staple of Scandinavian church suppers in Minnesota and Wisconsin. (Many have irresistibly intriguing names like Hearty Hodgepodge, Crusty Wild Rice Bake and Salmon Surprise.)
“We call cream of mushroom soup ‘the Lutheran binder,’ ” said Eric Dregni, a Norwegian-American academic and the author of “Vikings in the Attic,” who studies the cultural heritage of Scandinavians in the Midwest. Mr. Schoenefeld, the chef at Haute Dish, worked for months to refine his version of tater tot hotdish, which serves as the signature dish for his restaurant and, frequently, as lunch in the Minneapolis-St. Paul public school system. (At the Bachelor Farmer, there is no hotdish on the menu as yet.)
The original Vikings are not forgotten here, but their food traditions have become something of a punchline. At best, traditions like lutefisk (lye-cured cod) and homemade lefse (soft flatbread) are resuscitated at church suppers and at Christmastime. At worst, they are the butt of frequent jokes about the general awfulness of Scandinavian-American food: white, bland, creamy and fishy.
“Even here, when you talk about Scandinavian food, people don’t really know what that is,” said Michael Fitzgerald, the chef at Fika. More than a museum cafe, this bright spot is a serious attempt to integrate local ingredients in dishes that are faithful to the tradition of “fika,” an institution in Sweden. Fika is a coffee break with food, like smorgas and sweet treats like cardamom buns and almond cake; it can take place any time of day, and the word itself can be used as a verb or a noun.
Mr. Fitzgerald is an experienced chef but has no Scandinavian background, so he uses the many Swedes and Swedish-Americans who work at the institute as research assistants and guinea pigs.
“I couldn’t get the bread right no matter what I tried,” he said, referring to the slow-raised multigrain breads that are so loved in Scandinavia. It wasn’t until one of his sous-chefs brought in a sourdough starter borrowed from a Finnish-American neighbor that he nailed the tangy, earthy bread that underpins toppings like fresh white cheese with watermelon radishes, or lemon-spiked shrimp salad. “Everyone here said it tasted like home,” he said.
The upper Midwest, with its forbidding climate, wasn’t thickly settled by American immigrants until the late 1800s, a period that was marked in Scandinavia by widespread food shortages. Thousands of Swedes and Finns, and even more Norwegians, arrived in this region, where timber and flour mills, mining and dairy farming were thriving. Some Danes immigrated as well, but according to Mr. Dregni, they found the conditions and climate even harsher than back home and many returned to Denmark.
“But for the Norwegians, this was a huge improvement over the old country,” he said.
In particular, Mr. Dregni said, the plentiful butter and cream that immigrants found in America guided the food culture. Butter was in short supply and often heavily taxed in Scandinavia. “There was almost a worship of butter among the early settlers,” he said, a cult that lives on at the Minnesota State Fair, where every year the heads of 12 “dairy princesses” — the finalists for the statewide title Princess Kay of the Milky Way — are still sculptured in butter and displayed in a refrigerated case.
For Mr. Berglund, too, Minnesota’s dairy products were a big draw. A serious 35-year-old who could not possibly look more Scandinavian, he went to college at the University of Michigan, then served four years in the Navy as a junior officer. Not until he was stationed in Japan, he said, did he grasp how cooking might be shaped into a serious career.
At Oliveto, his element was fresh pasta, tomatoes, olive oil and all the extraordinary produce that drives California cuisine. But when he visited farms and creameries around the Twin Cities, he said, it convinced him that he could build a great menu around butter, milk and cream. “In Scandinavia, bread, butter and fish are central to how people eat,” he said. “It couldn’t be more different from what I was used to. And that was very liberating.” smoked and cured; it makes a salty, luscious base for lean, mustard-pickled perch.
