The contrarian restaurateur

Sweden has more skilled cooks per capita than most other countries. Paul Svensson is one of them. Born in Helsingborg, he would have become a bricklayer if it had been up to his father. But Paul had other ideas in mind. He loved working with his hands and would no doubt have been a godsend to the construc-tion industry. Instead the culinary arts were blessed with a practitioner whom few can match.  read more…

– the sensational Swedish whisky

The year was 1998. A group of friends, four women and four men who had attended Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology together, were planning a ski vacation in the mountain village of Sälen. Each of them was to choose a bottle of liquor to pack with their gear and share with the others over the course of the week. Flushed and excited after the first day on the slopes, they unwrapped their libations.
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We stand there awestruck by the billowing ballet of the goddesses. Like galactic emissaries to the darkness and piercing cold, the Aurora Borealis illumines the arctic night. But we are snug in our warm clothing and are about to sleep on reindeer skins at the Ice Hotel. Tomorrow we will take a dogsled to a Sami village.
We are in Jukkasjärvi on the outskirts of Kiruna, the biggest city in Lapland. The famous hotel will be only one of our many unforgettable experiences.
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A  hotel is usually described as a “home away from home,” but this one however feels like a grander version of that, more like a “world within a world.”. Now, I am not sure if that is partially a great result thanks to the incredible marketing, or the very glamourous opening they recently had – there are so many potential reasons, but whatever the exact one may be, there certainly is no other hotel like it in Stockholm or in Sweden.
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