Niklas Ekstedt – “I grew up in Järpen, a little village in Jämtland, northern Sweden. Like most young people, my attitude to where I came from was to turn my back on it. When I trained as a chef, we had it drilled into us that the Nordic region was not the place to look for good ingredients. I fell in love with Italian olive oil and French poulet de Bresse. When I opened my first restaurant at the age of 21, the focus was on ultratrendy molecular gastronomy, serving dishes such as asparagus cloud and deep-fried rice paper. It couldn’t have been further away from the rustic slow cooking of the Jämtland forests. But one day I felt the urge to return to my roots. What was I going to do? I was 33 and lost. In the eyes of the media and the public I was the lightweight TV chef from “Niklas mat”. Time to do something big. It was now or never… How could I put my own personal stamp on New Nordic Cuisine?”
Ekstedt opened in November 2011 in central Stockholm, with a fire pit, a wood fired oven and a wood stove. Plenty of people said I’d made things too difficult for myself. But since then I’ve continued to make things more and more challenging for myself and my team. Because that’s what makes us better. And now we also have the stone-age equivalent of a microwave oven, a smoker and extra fires burning. We continue to explore age-old techniques and to learn more about a lost art of cooking.”
Rest. Ekstedt
Humlegårdsgatan 17,
114 46 Stockholm,
Sweden
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Rest.%20Ekstedt/360023140713646/
https://www.instagram.com/ekstedtrestaurant/
