Magnus Nilsson, the 32-year-old chef at Fäviken, Sweden’s premier fine-dining restaurant, is not fond of repeating himself, but there is one sentence he repeats with such frequency and resolute force that it takes on the quality of a koan: “Do it once, perfectly.”

He says it when observing that one of his chefs has failed to place the dollop of burnt cream in the same place on every dish, or when explaining why he paid so much for his elaborate recycling and composting facility, which has reduced the restaurant’s waste to practically nothing.

This, too, was the guiding principle behind his most recent book, an encyclopedic record of the past several hundred years of Nordic home cooking comprising 730 recipes, including about 30 that Nilsson expects no one ever to cook. (“That is not the point,” he explained. “It is a documentary.”) When the publisher tried to strike one recipe from the collection because it was both impractical and, they feared, controversial (it included whale meat), Nilsson offered to return his advance and put the manuscript in a drawer, rather than publish it incomplete. He explained his reasoning with an amused shrug: “Do it correctly or do not do it.”

One of the central theses of The Nordic Cookbook is that a country’s dinner table reveals a great deal about its culture’s values, economy, landscape, religions, politics, and even family structure. This idea is not original to Nilsson, but the Nordic Cookbook is the most exhaustive recent attempt to catalogue a segment of the world through its food. To compile it, Nilsson amassed 11,000 articles and 8,000 photographs, interviewed hundreds of people, and travelled to the farthest reaches of the region, from Sami country to the Faroe Islands. He did this in his spare time.

Nilsson’s day job, however, is running Fäviken. Set 375 miles north of Stockholm, deep in the forested province of Jämtland, Fäviken’s 32-course tasting menu demands a journey: an hour’s flight from Stockholm to Östersund, then a 75-minute drive north-west. Nilsson is quick to point out that the flight from Stockholm actually makes Fäviken relatively low-fuss in terms of destination dining – nevertheless, the restaurant is positioned like the prize at the end of a quest. Its setting is, especially to non-Swedes, otherworldly. In Jämtland, timberlands and mountain vistas unfold and unfold with little human interruption. There are only three people per square mile. At the height of summer, the sun shines for 24 hours a day. In the winter, the temperature drops to -40C. Reindeer wander the woods.

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As a home for a fine-dining restaurant, it is an odd choice, yet Nilsson’s embrace of this landscape has set him apart as one of the most important, innovative chefs working today. In the eight years since its opening, Fäviken has become a pillar of the “new Nordic” trend in food culture alongside René Redzepi’s Copenhagen restaurant, Noma. Like Redzepi, Nilsson is a forager – he is also a hunter and expert gardener – and much of his food is designed to bring you into some sort of encounter with its origin. One of his signature dishes is a single scallop poached in its own juices, which arrives at your table in its gigantic shell atop a bed of moss and burning juniper branches cut from behind the kitchen – the ocean meeting the forest.

Food as an exercise in high aesthetics has been part of popular culture since the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià brought his restaurant, El Bulli, and its pioneering molecular gastronomy “lab” to international fame in the late 1990s. But Fäviken is at the vanguard of restaurants whose food is also talked about as an expression of moral values. This comes, in part, from Nilsson’s commitment to regional and local sourcing: he cooks almost exclusively with ingredients that can be bought within a few hundred miles. His chefs forage moss, herbs, grasses, mushrooms, flowers and seeds from the grounds every day, and about half the produce for the restaurant is grown in their garden. During the long winter months, when the sun only breaks the horizon line for an hour or two each day and the land is sheathed in snow and ice, the kitchen serves mostly foods they have harvested and foraged in the warm months and then preserved. With his pickled hand-picked carrots and dried cloudberries, Nilsson is the man millions of aspiring locavores wish to be.

The food isn’t just appealingly local; it’s a seemingly “authentic” expression of a place. All the ingredients have a story, which you hear before each course, and the meal made from them is an edible heirloom. Nilsson’s preparations draw on hundreds of years of regional food culture, which has naturally adapted to accommodate the environment’s extremes: the caramel for a tart is made with brunost, a sweet, fatty Norwegian cheese, and the bitter herb sauce served alongside it comes from techniques and ingredients of the native Sami people. The chocolate-like disc melting under your cut of meat comes from the wildflowers that overtake the mountains in the summer.

Nilsson has been showered with accolades and attention: rave reviews, multi-hour documentary series from PBS and Netflix, liberal use of the word “wunderkind”. A season’s worth of reservations in Fäviken’s 24-seat dining room sell out in minutes. His food is not popular, exactly – it has been deemed important cultural material. (Nilsson himself recently referred to his food as “intellectual property” in a speech to his staff.) People have started restaurants with similar philosophies as a kind of homage. Google has invited him to give presentations at their headquarters. Diners flock from every country in the world. One recent guest in Fäviken’s dining room told me that he and his wife were not there just for the food. “We think of him [Nilsson] more as a philosopher or poet than a chef,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Magnus Nilsson, with Fäviken restaurant in the background. Photograph: Per-Anders Jörgensen/The Observer

If our dinner plates reveal who we are, what does Nilsson’s rise to fame say about our fantasies and obsessions? The vast majority of people fascinated with Nilsson will never visit Fäviken, so they follow along at home, watching him on TV or checking his Instagram, which recently featured a picture of what appeared to be two mouldy pellets of Frosted Wheat. It was mycelium growing on a bale of straw, the caption explained, “waiting to be turned into broth before being served with a small lump of cultured butter”. That nearly no one knows what mycelium is (it’s a fungus) doesn’t bother his followers – the thrill seems to be that somewhere in an imagined wilderness, a hunter-chef is cooking it perfectly. This is our contemporary fairytale: a Swede making magic out of mould.

My introduction to the Fäviken kitchen was this: I watched two men spend several hours auditioning asparagus. It wasn’t clear at first what they were doing. One would pick up a green stalk from the 10 that had been selected and turn it over in his hands gently, considering how best to peel it. Then the other would pick a stalk up and frown at it. After a while, one of the men, Nilsson’s chef de cuisine, a young Italian named Jakob Zeller, picked up a small paring knife and with meditative care traced a light cut around the circumference of the stalk, just below the crown.

He then placed the asparagus back down on the cutting board and, taking up a traditional vegetable peeler, made delicate strokes from the incision to the base of the stalk. A haystack of asparagus wisp collected on his board. Next to him, the sous chef, a Swede named Neil Byrne, tested ways to remove another stalk’s buds, hoping to make it look as though they had not been removed at all but that the restaurant had found magical asparagus that never had them to begin with. It took these men 35 minutes to peel three stalks.

It was mid-May, and Fäviken was coming to the end of its eight-week yearly hiatus. The period of rest meant that the staff needed to retrain to execute the 32-course meal served at the restaurant. There were only three days until a trial run for family and friends, and four days until paying customers arrived. The Fäviken team was deep in rehearsal mode, deciding the final details of dishes being introduced in the new season, memorising their responsibilities, and learning how to do every job perfectly.

On one side of the kitchen, an older sous chef trained a younger chef on the meat station, reminding him to consider the four seconds it takes to cross the room from the stove to the plate when planning cooking time. Nilsson’s head chef, a tall, rosy-cheeked Swede named Jesper Karlsson, had two apprentices practising arranging trays, memorising the positioning and shape of the plates for each course. Over in the corner, the new chef in charge of vegetables had been cutting the same stalk of rhubarb for an hour, perfecting his technique for a garnish that would accompany a braised lamb’s tongue.

The chefs’ workspace is perhaps the most beautiful room at Fäviken, bright and calm, with white tiled walls and stainless steel worktops, appliances and cabinets. A large coal brazier stands in the middle of the room. Sunlight pours in through wide, gridded windows. The entire kitchen, from its floors to its hardware, is immaculate. The traditional ruckus and raised voices of the professional kitchen are absent. The chefs, dressed in white double-breasted jackets and pert caps, tread lightly, never clatter their implements, and speak to each other in soft, accented English.

After several attempts, Zeller and Byrne peeled an asparagus satisfactorily enough to consider cooking it. Zeller reached for a plate and arranged the stalk in the middle – in its final form, the plate would hold only one stalk and a scoop of caviar. Zeller placed the model before Byrne. They took a step back and each assumed a thoughtful pose: arms crossed, eyes narrowed. Zeller cocked his head to one side and Byrne cocked his to the other. Finally, Byrne shrugged. “Yeah, it’s OK,” said Jakob, agreeably if not enthusiastically. The asparagus was sent to the steam oven for four minutes.

Just then, Nilsson entered the kitchen without a word and walked over to a cut of beef sitting on the counter waiting to be prepped. (Nilsson wears his hair shoulder-length and loose, and he is the only person in the kitchen who never wears a hat.) He lowered his nose to a half-inch above the meat, nodded, and then watched as the asparagus came out of the steaming oven. He stared at the vegetable for a few moments, made a few deft slices and popped a chunk in his mouth.

Nilsson and Zeller compared notes: even with the lightest touch, the peeler had stripped too much off the stalk, but how to get less than that? Nilsson disappeared to the dishwashing station and returned with a clean sponge. He took a raw stalk from the bin and gently scrubbed it down. “Ah, OK,” said Jakob, nodding and grinning. They would have to order more sponges.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Magnus Nilsson’s book on Nordic home cooking contains 730 recipes, including about 30 that Nilsson expects no one ever to cook Photograph: Per-Anders/The Observer

Two hours later, the asparagus preparation had been decided on and it was time to complete full rehearsal of another dish: a cut of beef served over a thin disc of “chocolate” made from lupin beans. The sous chefs set all the component parts on the pass – the area where dishes are assembled before being sent to the diners – and the entire staff gathered around in silence to watch Nilsson model how this course would be composed on the plate.

The plating, with its fastidious preparations, varied implements and tiny dishes, was carried out with the hush of a surgical procedure. Nilsson turned on an overhead lamp and then leaned over the dish with his brow furrowed. He dipped a brush in softened butter. “Where is the salt?” he asked. Three young chefs lurched across the kitchen.

Eventually, he stood up, and the staff leaned in to look. “It looks a bit on the dry side,” Nilsson said to Peeter Pihel, the elder sous chef of the meat station. He waited for the younger chefs to take pictures for later study before slicing the meat and taking a bite, gesturing for his head chefs to follow.

“Add some chives,” Nilsson said. “The meat has been hanging too long over here. It is maybe a little bit over-rested.” Everyone chewed pensively. “Yeah,” he pronounced. “Very good.”

He crossed the kitchen to hand me a hunk and explained: “It has been hanging too long in our aging area, so it’s too close in texture to charcuterie.” The meat tasted rich and vibrant and unfamiliar.

“Did you marinate it?” I asked.

“No, it’s just butter and salt,” he replied. “But it’s a dairy cow, which is much older than the beef anyone else cooks with and it’s more difficult to cook because it’s leaner and there’s more connective tissue to break down. But if you cook it properly, it is very good.”

“So that’s just the flavour of the meat itself?”

He smiled, pleased. “That is what beef is supposed to taste like.”

Rehearsals continued through the end of the week. Monday would bring the trial for friends and family. Hatim Zubair, the formal, natty Canadian front-of-house manager, led three young women servers through the elaborate process of greeting guests. One server would stand on a little bench, looking out for approaching guests from the room’s one, high window, and announcing when someone was approximately 15 feet away so that Zubair could sweep open the door, as if by magic, right as they reached the threshold. Guests would then be ushered to the bar for champagne and cured meats. Together, the staff practised their routines multiple times for imaginary guests.

The repetitions continued in the kitchen as well with final tests of the lamb’s tongue, which was new to the menu. The tongue was to be served whole, braised slowly according to a method Nilsson found in a Swedish cookbook from 1768, and garnished with brined dandelion and slivers of rhubarb. In the same manner as before, the chefs gathered around Nilsson as he assembled the plate, arranging the dandelions in three shambling piles over the curving tongue. “The rhubarb is too thick,” he observed, glancing at the chef de partie responsible for vegetables. He then poured a bright green sauce around the base and placed a few thin discs of rhubarb over the top.

Nilsson and Zeller watched as the three younger chefs, who would be in charge of plating this course in the dining room, attempted to emulate his work.

“Don’t pour the sauce on the whole thing, then there’s no contrast while eating,” said Nilsson.

“And don’t have all the dandelion pointing in the same direction as the tongue because it will look boring,” added Zeller.

The apprentices took more dandelions and tried arranging the dandelion over and over.

“No, see yours does not look like mine,” Nilsson said. “See how mine began in three piles and then connected it a bit? Yours is just spread out.”

They did it again. “You are taking too long,” Nilsson said mildly. “It should be very quick.”

Upstairs, two different chefs were debating the perfect angle for the pot handle during service of a burbot fish stew.

At first, it is difficult to see why Nilsson’s meal requires such preparation and repetition, but once you grasp the magnitude of the undertaking, a few days of rehearsal seems barely sufficient. The meal at Fäviken can vary from 29 to 33 courses, each with two to six component parts that need to be prepared à la minute. “Most kitchens prepare in advance and then they assemble in the moment,” Nilsson explained. “We cook right up until the moment.”

For that many courses to feel palatable or interesting to a diner, their pacing needs to be varied and strict. “What fills people up is time,” Magnus said. “You can eat lots in 45 minutes, but if you spread the same amount of food out over four hours, you feel tired and full. If we do it right, they will eat everything.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The vegetable garden at Fäviken produces about half the restaurant’s produce. Photograph: Erik Olsson

The kitchen is guided by a giant digital clock blinking each second in fluorescent red. The first seven courses, such as the linseed vinegar dip with mussel sauce, emerge from the kitchen every 100 to 120 seconds. After a pause, the larger dishes begin: burbot stew, the famous scallop, the lamb’s tongue, and several others, which arrive every six minutes or so, until the pace accelerates again to about once a minute through to the brown cheese pie. The pace picks up and slows down like this until the end of the night.

Every part of the evening is choreographed. The dining room occupies the second floor of an old barn, and to get to it, you ascend steep wooden stairs with no railing, past a full-length fur coat installed on the wall. Aging joints of meat hang from the wall, near to an enormous harness for unidentified livestock. The look is spartan-luxe, as if designed for a big man by another big man, which makes the pops of delicacy – the long stems on the wine glasses, the narrow vases of wild herbs – striking. Pinspot lamps are tucked discreetly in the rafters, shining tightly on the prettiest and most rustic pieces of decor. Like the food, the room is crafted to feel sylvan and wild, somehow more essential and real than your own life. It is theatre, but when it’s working you don’t care.

There is something faintly absurd about all this, which is exactly what makes it appealing to so many people. One of the premises that has elevated Nilsson’s work to international acclaim is that food is art and therefore deserving of painstaking care, auteurship, intellectualisation, and occasional worship. To some, this truth seems evident, but it is hardly a given – for hundreds of years, food had no such place in culture. (And, of course, even now only the privileged can afford to engage with it this way.) Writing for the New York Times in 2012, the critic William Deresiewicz issued a corrective: Both food and art, “begin by addressing the senses, but that is where food stops … an apple is not a story, even if we can tell a story about it. A curry is not an idea, even if its creation is the result of one.”

One of Nilsson’s charms is that he acknowledges that his level of care and craftsmanship is extreme (“ridiculous, if you think of food as fuel”) while still making it seem like a reasonable, desirable, even practical approach. Though he is a tall and substantial man, Nilsson’s round, pink cheeks and winning smile emphasise his other boyish qualities: enthusiasm, curiosity, cheerful amiability, impatience. “You can see the shining in his eye if he is happy,” Zeller told me. “And the other way around as well.”

Nilsson grew up in the nearby city of Östersund and it seems as though his ambitions for food were always titanic. When he was 15, he wrote himself a letter planning out the next 20 years of his life and promising that he would run the best restaurant in the world. He left home that year to go to cooking school in Åre, the ski resort town just over the mountain from Fäviken. After school, he moved to Paris and took a position at l’Astrance, a small Michelin-starred restaurant run by Pascal Barbot. He spent three years there, and then returned to Sweden, where he became so frustrated with the limited selection of produce and the feeling that he could not capture an original point of view with his food that he quit cooking altogether. He enrolled in sommelier school, thinking he might write about wine.

Through local connections, he met the owners of the Fäviken property, who asked him to come and organise their wine collection. Gradually, he found his way into the kitchen, and in 2008, he took over officially, revamping what had been a small moose-and-potatoes restaurant into a stranger, more ambitious project.

Nilsson’s mind is connective, kinetic, multi-track. He once, in the kitchen, interrupted his own rapid-fire corrections of the five things going wrong with a course to ask whether I had noticed the pair of reindeer grazing at the edge of the woods, a thousand yards out the window. He talks with equal ease and interest about butchery, American regionalism, book publishing, the economics of dairy production, the history of Swedish socialism and the molecular life cycle of a raspberry. In his spare time, he likes to invent new ingredients or new ways of preparing food. One summer, he became fixated on making soft-serve ice cream. How to use only natural ingredients – milk, eggs, etc – and still get the texture? He figured out that the problem was that most soft-serve machines come preprogrammed to settings that would ruin natural custard, so he found a highly specialised machine from Japan, flew it over, and tested ingredients and settings several dozen times until he had the perfect, soft vanilla.

These experiments are primarily a way to keep himself entertained. They also, often, come from a sense that the status quo can – and therefore should – be improved upon. This was the impetus for Nilsson’s biggest extracurricular project: his charcuterie company, Undersåkers Charkuteriefabrik. Several years ago, Nilsson learned that the only pig farm in the area, which had been owned by the same family for generations, was bankrupt and set to close.

He brokered an arrangement: Fäviken would buy the pig farmer’s entire annual output, purchase and convert a charcuterie factory 20 minutes away from the restaurant, and begin industrial manufacturing of cured meats to be distributed to grocery stores all over the country. “The idea was to make everyday charcuterie that was just better than other everyday charcuterie,” said Nilsson. They would also open a roving hot dog truck, the Korvkiosk, which would drive around Stockholm selling Swedish hot dogs known as korv and, because it pleased Nilsson, soft-serve ice cream.

As we walked through the factory one afternoon, Nilsson exuded excitement and conviction. He is the only chef of his calibre doing this kind of mass food production, and he is quick to acknowledge that fine dining does not prepare you for commercial production. So why do it? It couldn’t be to build a brand: neither Nilsson nor Fäviken are mentioned anywhere on the packaging or marketing materials.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fäviken’s dining room. Photograph: Erik Olsson

The answer combines Nilsson’s brand of idealism and intense practicality. For one thing, he wants to counteract the exodus of people leaving Jämtland in search of work. “I think it should be possible to live in these parts of the world, the rural parts,” he said. “Also I don’t think that there is any benefit to producing most foods for consumption somewhere else and shipping them back. It doesn’t make sense to me.” Unlike many chefs, he is uninterested in opening more and more restaurants. “But I like doing this,” he said, facing the factory in front of us. “I would like to do more of this. The best way of pushing [the world] in a direction that you want is to make the change yourself rather than go to food conferences and make little statements that people don’t really care about.”

A relentless commitment to the idea that the right choice is also practical in the long run is the hallmark of how Nilsson works. If you can increase the creative productivity of your restaurant by closing it eight weeks a year, you should do it. If you can keep open an excellent producer with local history and make good food available to more people, you should do it. Change, he hopes, begins with the revelatory first-hand experience of true quality. If you do something the right way, people might take notice and – maybe – want to do the same.

The night of the trial run began, as each service does, with a checklist. Jakob, who acts as each evening’s traffic cop, stands before the staff holding a piece of paper with the name of every ingredient on the menu, from king crab legs down to the oils and garnishes. Every time he names an ingredient, the chef responsible for that piece of the meal affirms, “Yes.”

“Shallot?”

“Yes.”

“Seeds?”

“Yes.”

And so on.

The first time I saw this, Nilsson, who was whispering to me about the American electorate and Swedish regional politics, paused to explain that this ritual is the restaurant’s system of accountability. “When they say yes, it means they take responsibility for the ingredient from its beginning to its current state, and then all the way to the diner’s mouth.”

Fifteen minutes later, Zeller was still reading off the list: “Lupin curd? Marigold flowers? Ice cream? And the machine? And the basket?”

At seven o’clock, the guests began to arrive and a silence fell in the kitchen. The chefs curled over their stations, and one of the apprentices began laying out the wide, wooden serving boards over the pass in preparation for the first course. Nilsson interrupted him to point out that one of the boards was not completely dry. The apprentice, a skinny young man with a toothbrush moustache, apologised and went away, returning with four trays to choose from. Nilsson said, his voice a little tighter, that it makes no sense to bring four trays over. “Just choose two correct ones.” The young man paused. “And you can’t freeze, you need to be able to take correction and keep working.”

“Yes,” whispered the apprentice.

Service began half an hour late, and the first few dishes brought pandemonium: ingredients were not ready at the same time and chefs kept bumping into each other, scrambling to figure out who was responsible for small details, such as cloths for wiping, spatulas, chives.

An hour passed, then two. They struggled on through the courses – the asparagus was not set in the exact same place on each plate. The sourdough pancake was too big. The lupin curd gratin was a touch watery. Everything was too slow – the big red numbers of the clock counted to zero and when the alarm beeped the zero remained, blinking, and still the plates did not go.

As the night wore on, Nilsson’s mood darkened and his body hunched. His brow travelled downward on his face until it was set in a deep furrow. He took over plating. “Who is supposed to be wiping this after me?” he called. “Why are you not here?” An apprentice stepped up with a towel and thrust it towards the plate. Nilsson slapped it away. “But do not get in the way.”

No one could do anything right, and the general consensus in the room seemed to be that this was their fault rather than Nilsson’s. His occasionally vicious impatience is offset in other moments by his quick return to genuine friendliness with his staff, most of whom are his age. “I like that it must be very good all the time,” said Zeller later. “When he thinks something’s not right, he says ‘Is this the best you can do? Ask yourself what is the best.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The remote landscape around Fäviken, 350 miles north of Stockholm Photograph: Erik Olsson

Watching Nilsson in the kitchen, or anywhere, one gets the strong impression that this is the only level he can stomach. After a particularly rough episode involving a pork chop, he called a chef over. “OK, now you have a moment. Do you have any questions? Are you prepared to do everything perfectly for the rest of service?”

The young man began shuffling his notes, looking for his list of responsibilities. “I need to check.”

“Yes or no?”

“I believe so”

“Yes. Or no.”

Pause. “Yes.”

“OK.”

Nilsson then disappeared and popped back up in front of me, holding a glass of water. “I just realised you’ve gone all night with nothing to drink!” He grinned and settled in next to me, suddenly calm and chatty. “This is pretty good. We’ve had messier services.” He told me about the first night of spring season last year, which had been even worse: late dishes, skipped courses, imperfect execution. Only the next day did he find out that two emissaries from the Michelin guide had been there. The meal, messy as it may have been by Fäviken standards, earned the restaurant two stars.

The goal is for everyone to be on the road home by 11pm, but by that time the staff were just finishing service and preparing for their postmortem. The guests, happy and full, were finding their way from the dining room to the front yard to wrap themselves up and sit around a fire. In the kitchen, Nilsson took the team through the errors and success of the evening in the even, encouraging tones of a coach. The list of corrections, Nilsson admitted, was longer than it would normally be, but this was OK – they would do it all again tomorrow.

“Food can never be worth this,” Nilsson said. It was the morning of the trial run, and he was sitting in the greenhouse he built in his garden in Mörsil, a small town 16 miles south of Fäviken, where he lives with his wife and three young children. We had been talking about the £250 cost of the Fäviken meal, and the even greater expense one has to lay out in airfare to get to the restaurant. One unsavory aspect of the notion that food is an expression of values – a notion Fäviken embodies – is that it divides the world into virtuous and unvirtuous eaters in a way that is unavoidably tied to class. The ethical food choices (“green”, “local”, “farm-to-table”, “non-GMO”) are luxuries. It may be true that we would all be better off if everyone shared Fäviken’s values when it comes to food, but few individuals are wealthy enough to make that choice, let alone eat at Nilsson’s restaurant. Did it bother him?

This is an age when a chef is required to be someone who has opinions and participates in a public space Magnus Nilsson

Nilsson’s answer was predictably practical: the meal is expensive because excellent produce and an expert, well-treated staff is expensive. But he was uninterested in defending the cost on principle. “The idea of paying that much for a meal is a little ridiculous in a way. The food can never really be worth it. But what’s interesting is that the experience can be.”

I finally ate the Fäviken meal on my last night in Jämtland. In the dining room arrived a pageant of dishes that was an almost hallucinatory assault on the senses. It was spectacular, but what was it that made this food meaningful? Was it the virtuosity? Was it the knowledge of what that virtuosity demanded? Everyone in the room had travelled hundreds or thousands of miles to be there. They ate their way through the courses carefully, comparing reality to expectation, appraising the experience as they would a painting by David Hockney.

By Nilsson’s calculation, maybe only 5,000 customers have ever actually been to Fäviken. At the moment, he seems most excited about the way Fäviken’s principles might be extended beyond the restaurant. “This is an age when a chef is required to be someone who has opinions and participates in a public space,” he said. “You have to be more than just your restaurant.” He reaches a much wider audience through the media, but finds that an “inefficient” way of changing things because those people cannot taste his food. The food, he thinks, is the catalysing experience, the challenge: if you notice how much better this is than any other food you have had before, will you think to ask why? If you know the right way to do things, will you pursue it? This is why he is so enthusiastic about the Charkuteriefabrik, which can have 50,000 customers a week across Sweden. “They don’t get as much information as you do at Faviken,” said Nilsson, “but the food product itself, the same quality, it carries our message to them.”

After his New York Times polemic against “food as art”, the outcry was so great that William Deresiewicz wrote a response. In it, he argued that food may be less the new art than the new religion. It is, he said, a way to “bring us into relationship with reality”. In the post-industrial age, in the post-electronic age, eating is one of the only remaining aesthetic experiences that is not reproducible. “You have to be there, have to be present, have to be in contact with the thing itself.”

Nilsson once said something similar in an interview, when he described what it was like to eat food by Michel Bras, one of his great masters: “A plate comes alive when he makes it, and it vibrates. Do you understand? It actually vibrates, especially if you’re open to that kind of experience. And I am.”

This experience may come from food that looks like a masterpiece, but Nilsson doesn’t think it has to. For me, that moment came after I had bid Fäviken goodbye, driven through the sunlit night to the nearest airport, and flown to Stockholm. I sought out Nilsson’s Korvkiosk, which was parked outside Trådgarden, a trendy music venue located underneath a major highway bridge. Its blue and yellow neon sign hummed cheerily in the late-breaking dusk as young people milled around it, on their way to and from a concert. A white-aproned cook handed me a skinny, slightly curved hot dog in a piece of fluffy yellow brioche, wrapped in paper. The meat was rough on the outside, pocked from charring, and dressed with a little ketchup. It was everything the Faviken meal was not: familiar, humble, a little bit ugly.

I ate it walking. It was perfect.

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