Slow cooking: the Swedish restaurant that serves 10 people per winter night and 300 people per summer day

Victoria Stewart talks to the owner of Horte Brygge about leaving the city to run a restaurant in the middle of nowhere.
Horte Brygge
By Victoria Stewart20 March 2018

How many times have you heard someone say they’d like to quit the city to live in the countryside? Maybe even open a small restaurant, too.

Five years ago, two Swedish entrepreneurs, chef Martin Sjöstrand and his wife, sommelier Emma Andersson, did just that. Following years working in high-pressure Michelin-starred kitchens in Stockholm, they headed to the Southern coast of Sweden to the region of Skåne to begin doing up an old harbourside cafe.

This was the start of their restaurant business, Horte Brygge, to which many of their customers travel over an hour from the country’s third largest city, Malmo, or Copenhagen. In fact it was the remoteness of Faviken, the two Michelin starred restaurant in north western Sweden, and its owner’s approach to produce that played a huge role for Sjöstrand.

Following years working in high-pressure Michelin-starred kitchens in Stockholm, chef Martin Sjöstrand and his wife, sommelier Emma Andersson, headed to the Southern coast of Sweden to the region of Skåne to begin doing up an old harbourside cafe.
Horte Brygge

“To me, knowing your produce has always been an important part of cooking," he explains,"but when you see the way that Magnus Nilsson (Faviken’s chef patron) sources and treats his it’s amazing. After working there, I got back to Stockholm, and was like: how could we ever run a restaurant in a city? We should just go to Skåne, where we’d be near amazing vegetable growers and producers of pork and beef and so on.”

Horte Brygga offers a menu in tune with the seasons, but its founders run the rest of their business according to the season, too. In winter - apart from January and February “which we take off so we can visit our producers and plan the rest of the year” - they and two staff spend five evenings a week preparing and serving a Swedish tasting menu to 10 guests all seated around one table. Dishes on my visit in March included fresh ingredients as well as some that the team had salted or pickled last year, or that producers had preserved: roasted brussels sprouts with coltsfoot (a type of wild flower) and birch sap, langoustines with red and white cabbage, onion, and mustard seeds, smoked pork cheek with creme fraiche and ramson, and oatmeal porridge served with sea buckthorn and burnt sugar.

At this time of year, it’s warm and cosy, and there’s a sense that you are welcomed as if you are in a private home. Most nights one of the pair leaves early to put their children to bed, leaving their head chef in charge. This, says Sjöstrand, “forces us to trust other people to work how we do - then it’s more of a partnership and so it’s fine when I go away. It enriches the restaurant.”

If winter is their preparation season, summer is what Sjöstrand calls their “rock and roll service, which we love, where there are people and food and music everywhere.” Here they and 25 extra staff serve sharing food - meats, fish and vegetables cooked or grilled outside - to up to 300 people a day.

Dinner at Horte Brygge in the summer.
Horte Brygge

“When we get tired of this, after two months we’ll return to a slower service, and spend more time preparing more interesting flavours and focusing on each guest. What I like about this restaurant is how it’s completely different depending on what time of year it is,” he describes.

Running a restaurant that follows both nature’s and tourist seasons has been a process of trial and error. A lot of the stress of working in the city, Sjöstrand believes, is to do with executing decisions that one doesn’t fully agree with - “or doing things in a way that you don’t think is right. And if you’re doing that - like serving strawberries in January because someone says you have to - it’s going to be stressful.”

In Stockholm, he remembers working in a team of eight at the then two-Michelin-starred restaurant Mathias Dahlgren, where each person worked on a station. “Sometimes I didn’t even know what desserts we had because I was focused on [my] stuff - that made me want to cook more widely and also get into the dining room, meeting and serving guests… With [our own business], there is less stress as you can decide for yourself and see how it goes.”

Geographically, he is also closer to his producers now:

“Here we have amazing little vegetable growers, we also have great pork and beef producers - the smallest only has seven cows and two chickens, the biggest might have 100 cows. Some have been around for generations, some are [newer]. It’s so much easier because we can drive for an hour and visit them and see how they work; it’s important to get that connection.”

The region of Skåne in the southern coast of Sweden
Horte Brygge

Closing the restaurant early in the year makes sense first because there are fewer visitors, allowing the team to spend time with the farmers, their neighbours - “so many of them now trust us, and bring us so much produce to use!” and to plan the year ahead, something “you don’t really get in the city, because everything is all about the next service [and rent and] all those other things that means you’re forced to do things 24/7 because you’ve got to get that money. Here it’s different - in a way it’s bought us freedom.”

So does he ever miss the city?

“No - I still really like and need the city. We’re in Malmo four times a week because we have a lot of people that we work with there, and also we really enjoy it. But it is the best feeling being home afterwards in this tiny village with 50 houses and the ocean around us. It’s just ahhh.”

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