Some foods you eat with your eyes. Some dishes you smell before you see them. This one we heard. We'd finished off the beets, a smoky dish to convert a carnivore: bloodred beetroots charred in the dying embers of the fireplace, a spoonful of cream laced with vinegar-fermented beer, a few dark drops of sweet birch syrup, scattered shavings of dried cod roe for salty depth. The plates were cleared and a sated calm settled over the room. The civilized clink-clink-murmur-murmur of happy diners toasting their own good taste and good fortune at finding themselves here in this warmly lit old barn in the untrammeled meadows of Järpen, in northwestern Sweden.

Then the commotion began and we all turned to look. At the center of the room, two cooks in white were bent over a giant bone. It looked to have been salvaged from a Swedish stegosaurus but was actually an old cow's shinbone. The cooks swayed back and forth, pulling on a two-man saw to cut the big shin in half. Loudly.

Now that he had our attention, chef Magnus Nilsson scooped warm marrow from the bone and set a bit of it in a bowl for each of the diners. He added diced beef heart, red and raw. Over this he shaved a carrot and sprinkled green sage salt. We spooned it onto toasts and the room went silent again.

The sawing and scraping was a nice piece of dinner theater, perfectly in keeping with the unadulterated aesthetic of Fäviken Magasinet, Nilsson's remarkable, deservedly talked-about restaurant set on 20,000 acres of farmland far from just about anything. With the food world's attention turned from the far-out foams and spheres of the late, great El Bulli to the more earthbound edible-dirt and hyperlocal naturalistic style of René Redzepi's Noma in Copenhagen, Scandinavia is the place that food trackers are looking to for signs of what comes next. So when Redzepi—who pretty much single-handedly created and continues to define the template for modern Nordic cooking—told me: "If I had a chance to go anywhere in the world right now, I would go to Fäviken," that settled that.

In early May, I spent a few days in Copenhagen getting current with the latest crop of restaurants opened by former staff and friends of Noma (highlights: baby pig with caramelized kohlrabi at Geist; a bar snack of chewy dried sunchokes with foamy mustard at Relæ). For old-school reference, I took Redzepi's advice and had lunch at Schønnemann, a 19th-century dining room specializing in Danish smørrebrød, the elaborately topped open-face sandwiches. Now I was ready to head north to Sweden to see what the future of Scandinavian food was all about. To get there, I flew to Trondheim, Norway, and drove east for a couple of hours over still-snowy mountain roads. There are many MOOSE X-ING signs. Nobody warns you about the darting furry lemmings until it's too late. Near the Swedish ski resort of Åre, I turned onto what seemed sure to be the wrong-way road to nowhere and, after a few passes, found the sheep-dotted fields of Fäviken. The next big thing turns out to be really, really small: Fäviken has 12 seats. It's dinner-only, unless you're staying the night in one of the six lodge rooms on the property (and you should—where else would you go?), in which case Nilsson will set out lunch on a picnic table: slices of his cured ham, a jar of carrots pickled in whey, a loaf of homemade brown bread, and a yellow hunk of salty butter.

To understand what makes this tiny, remote restaurant relevant to any discussion about the bigger world of current kitchen catchwords (local, seasonal, sustainable) and the evolution of restaurants in general, it's best to follow the soft-spoken Nilsson as he makes his rounds on the property. After lunch, we walked to a pond where he'd rigged up a kind of permanent fishing pole: two bobbing hooks attached to a rope drawn across the water by a pulley system. That morning he'd caught a trout, which he would grill over birch coals for our dinner. The quietly intense chef might believe in a bit of drama in the dining room, but Nilsson has little time for the parlor tricks of molecular cuisine. He eschews the laboratory precision of sous vide , preferring the open flames of the large grill he built in his kitchen. "I don't even allow any thermometers," he says. "You have to develop your own sense of cooking and touch and smell."