23/09/2026
There are restaurants built around a chef, an ingredient or a particular cuisine. E K S T E D T is built around fire.
No gas, no electricity. At Niklas Ekstedt’s Michelin-starred restaurant in Stockholm, everything is cooked using birchwood, smoke, embers and flame: a wood-fired oven, fire pit, smoker, cast-iron pans and techniques that feel almost primitive, applied with the precision of contemporary fine dining.
Ekstedt grew up surrounded by the forests of Jämtland, in northern Sweden, before working in kitchens including elBulli and The Fat Duck. Eventually, he returned to something much more elemental: the way humans cooked long before temperature controls and induction stoves existed.
And after mastering it, that philosophy is present throughout the menu.
Cold-smoked shrimp with buckwheat and smoked tomato; juniper-smoked reindeer with blueberry and cucumber; flatbread cooked in cast iron with vendace roe and crown dill; mackerel finished with a flambadou and sturgeon caviar; scallop baked directly in the embers with peas and lemon thyme.
Then langoustine with rose and lingonberries, juniper-smoked dairy cow, and hay-smoked quail with forest mushrooms and spruce.
Smoke is everywhere, but it never feels like the point of the meal. Fire becomes another ingredient: sometimes intense, sometimes almost imperceptible, changing texture, aroma and flavour depending on how it is used.
Alongside Ekstedt, Argentinian head chef Florencia Regina Abella brings her own perspective to a kitchen that remains deeply connected to Sweden, its seasons and its forests.
An experience that feels simultaneously ancient and remarkably contemporary.
📍 Ekstedt, Stockholm
