Playing With Fire

Swedish chef Niklas Ekstedt is making his mark on London by bringing his unique fire cooking methods to Hyatt’s Great Scotland Yard.

Words: Heleri Rande • Portrait Photography: © Jakob Fridholm

I’m not the Francis Mallmann of Scandinavia,” smiles Niklas Ekstedt, as we sit down at his newly-opened London restaurant, Ekstedt at The Yard, forming part of Hyatt’s Great Scotland Yard. Although he is often compared to the Argentine chef famous for cooking with fire, their approaches are in fact, quite different. While

Mallmann has raised the profile of Patagonian barbequing methods around the world, Ekstedt thrives at reviving centuries-old cooking techniques from Scandinavia with the wood-fired oven in the heart of his kitchens.

The Swedish chef’s passions are twofold: skateboarding and cooking. He started his career at the other end of the culinary spectrum, focusing on French-style gastronomy using ingredients from southern Europe. “When you are young, you are more adventurous and want to escape your childhood,” he says. “At the end of the 1990s, new

Scandinavian cooking hadn’t yet gained the popularity it has now, it was very new. I didn’t think anyone would be interested in eating this kind of food in a restaurant; it was something you cooked at home for your family or friends, or out in the wild.”

Ekstedt quickly became a sensation in his home country.

By his mid-twenties, he was running a highly-successful restaurant in the harbour town of Helsingborg, and became a household name via his TV cooking show Mat, selling books and gaining traction across the country.

However, he felt that a piece of the puzzle was missing. “René Redzepi had helped me set up my restaurant and then moved to Copenhagen to open Noma while Magnus Nilsson was opening Fäviken; friends and colleagues were really making it on a global level but I found it quite frustrating trying to find my own identity,” admits Ekstedt.

The New Nordic Food movement that put many Scandinavian chefs on the world map was heavily focused on product. “They turned the culinary map upside down,” Ekstedt says. “Before that, everyone looked at southern Europe as the pinnacle of ingredients. You needed to use truffles and foie gras and Italian pigeons. Now, the sourcing of the ingredients came only from the north. That was inspiring.” He continues: “I wanted a smaller restaurant and I wanted to do something new, but using old techniques; my focus would not be the ingredients.”

Poring over old cookbooks at the Royal Library of Stockholm and hours spent researching ancient methods led to the birth of his unique style: the Nordic art of analogue cooking, as he now refers to it. But there were still hurdles to overcome. The major one was extraction and ventilation, and the question of how to use modern equipment for ancient techniques that originally only required a regular chimney. The beginning was challenging, with fan motors blowing up daily owing to the heat, and the food literally burning. The solution, it transpired, was to use dampened juniper branches to control

Ekstedt at The Yard’s menu features classic dishes from the chef’s repertoire

“If you go along the coast from Denmark all the way up to Norway there are so many different ways of smoking; every village and every family has their own peculiar way to smoke food.”

the temperature. Learning and adjusting every step of the way, the vision began to come together.

This analogue cooking concept, which combines elements of wood, fire, smoke and cast-iron tools, earned Ekstedt’s eponymous Stockholm restaurant a Michelin star in 2013. One of very few restaurants in the Michelin Guide to not use any electricity, the rusticity of his method has attracted food lovers and critics from all over the world. A glowing review by A.A. Gill, who understood the restaurant’s premise and goal, paved the way for the venue’s global success, placing it alongside Noma and Fäviken.

Wood – that quintessential Nordic material – is the centrepiece of the Ekstedt kitchen. The team exclusively uses birch for the cooking due to the consistency of the heat it produces. The chef stresses that there is a very specific distinction between cooking with fire and cooking over fire. “We use embers in a different way – we use them to cook on and primarily to bring flavour,” he explains, adding that smoke is the most versatile and exciting of the elements. “It is not standardised, so we can really experiment. If you go along the coast from Denmark all the way up to Norway there are so many different ways of smoking; every village and every family has their own peculiar way to smoke food.”

Transporting the ancient chimney method to central London has been an exciting venture for the team. The capital, where Ekstedt spent time in his childhood, had long been on his mind, although finding a site was probably harder than setting up the fire kitchen itself.

Perhaps surprisingly, the chef was looking for a hotel venue. “Before Dinner by Heston at Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, I did not even entertain the idea of a hotel restaurant, but Blumenthal really changed the perspective,” he elaborates. “Now everyone is doing hotel restaurants and hoteliers really see the value.”

Ekstedt at The Yard opened in September 2021. Here, where the equipment differs slightly, a special system of cleaning the smoke has been configured into the build. Ekstedt serves either a three- or seven-course dinner menu, bringing some of the best dishes from his repertoire over the years together in one setting. Guests can expect signatures such as oyster flambadou with smoked apple and beurre blanc nasturtium, ember-baked leek with charcoal cream, vendace roe and smoked deer and cep soufflé to finish. “There are great products and producers here in the UK, which actually surprised me,” he says. “The game here is fantastic and the vegetable season is longer than in Sweden, so I can prolong that on my menus.”

Guests can opt for either a wine or kombucha pairing – the latter driven by recent changes in consumer behaviour. “The shift in Sweden has been massive in the last five years; young people do not drink anymore, so we have had to find alternatives for the pairing,” explains the chef. Staff woes are also haunting the chef as workplace dynamics have shifted as a result of the pandemic and, of course, Brexit.

The question of what’s next inevitably comes up when talking with a chef of Ekstedt’s calibre. So much has already been achieved, what else is there to conquer? For the skateboarding Swede, it is returning to his roots; his childhood encounters with the indigenous Sami culture, whose traditions and food heritage he is keen to preserve. He grew up in Järpen in

“We use embers in a different way – we use them to cook on and primarily to bring flavour.”

Ekstedt’s focus is on reviving centuries-old fire cooking techniques from Scandinavia

the North of Sweden, and Sami culture formed a considerable part of his upbringing. “I was raised in a half-Sami, half-Swedish village,” he says. “Now, as we become more aware of the impact that indigenous people of Scandinavia and the world have on the environment, more attention should be directed to this. It is something I’m interested in from a philanthropic point of view, and culturally, it is easy for me to talk about it. I am often surprised by how little people know about it.”

Known for reindeer herding, traditional duodji handicrafts and oneness with nature, this indigenous culture is present across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. In summer 2021, Ekstedt returned to the Norwegian border with his eldest son for a six-day adventure of hiking, cooking and storytelling. “It was very personal to me,” he recounts.

“I cannot see how stopping serving game can be good for the environment,” he adds. “The indigenous people’s whole existence relies on the animals – herding them and killing them with dignity. Wild nature would be dominated by monotone foresting if it was not for hunting. Meat, game, ecology and biodiversity; eating animals is part of that system.”

By focusing on preserving the entire ecosystem that stems from his roots and culture, Ekstedt is taking a different stance on the plant-exclusive approach to restaurant cooking that many of the world’s top chefs have chosen to pursue in recent months. “It is really important that we educate people on this,” he underlines.

As Ekstedt digs deeper into Sami methods and techniques of cooking, preserving, reducing waste, and living harmoniously with nature, it will be exciting to watch both his flagship in Stockholm and his new London venue evolve. What’s certain is that he’ll keep the fires burning.