Neo-fjordic cuisine: How one young chef turns nordic food on its head

“So this little ball of depressing stuff represents the past of Norwegian food,” said chef Christopher Haatuft as he lovingly set down a drab bite of smoked mackerel butter on rye-pumpernickel bread.

“This one is the future, the way it should be,” he said, pointing to a snowy pile of sugar-and-salt-cured halibut, garnished with horseradish shavings and baby alfalfa.

“And this last one is just for fun,” he added, a tiny Scandinavian “shawarma” of potato flatbread wrapped around pickled herring. It’s a nod to the late-night street food Haatuft, 37, knew when he was a teenager here, thrashing around in the punk scene – and a joke about Norway’s inexorable, traditional diet of potatoes and herring.

In three bites at Lysverket, Haatuft’s restaurant here, he conveys everything he wants the food of Norway to be: nostalgic, sustainable, creative, delicious and witty. He’s a Bergen native, but his mother is American. Dual citizenship allowed him to spend two years in ambitious kitchens in the United States, like the ones at Per Se, Alinea and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, after he completed culinary training in Europe.

When he returned to Bergen in 2012 to open his own place, he first had to figure out his relationship with New Nordic cuisine – an inescapable label for modern Scandinavian chefs. Its commitment to local, pure and beautiful food has proved to be more than a trend: It is a durable international movement, led by chefs like René Redzepi of Noma and Christian Puglisi of Relae in Copenhagen, Gunnar Gislason of Agern in New York and Esben Holmboe Bang of Maaemo in Oslo (the first restaurant in Norway to earn three Michelin stars).

Many of the New Nordic chefs are guided by solemn manifestoes about nature and culture. They often restrict themselves to Scandinavian ingredients, eliminating tomatoes, olive oil and peaches in favour of elderflower, sea buckthorn and pine needles. (The last, Haatuft said, is part of “the eternal Nordic quest for acid that isn’t lemon.”)

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Since he is the opposite of solemn, he coined a new term for the food at Lysverket: neo-fjordic.

“At first it was a joke,” he said. “But the fjords are what make Norway different, and that’s what I want my food to be.”

Many things are different about Norway’s geography, most of which make Haatuft’s work more difficult. Compared with Bergen’s rugged terroir, the area around Copenhagen, the birthplace of New Nordic, is as bright and balmy as the South of France. Here, rain falls more than 230 days a year, only about 3 per cent of the land is arable and the winter is so long that it is divided into two parts. (Morketid, the “dark time”, starts in October and lasts until January’s Soldagen, “sun day,” when the sun reappears but the weather grows colder.) Denmark has more sun, a longer summer and land that is flat and fertile enough for farming.

Because of these harsh conditions, restricted land ownership and the frigid isolation of many rural areas, preindustrial Norway was singularly inhospitable to the small farmers who made up most of the population. In the late 19th century, hundreds of thousands of Norwegians – eventually, a third of the entire population – began leaving for the United States.

“The big question for Norwegian farmers was not which kind of apples to grow, but how to not starve to death,” Haatuft said. Deliciousness, he said, was a luxury they could not always afford.

“As recently as my grandmother’s time, people used cod liver oil as a cooking fat when there was nothing else,” he said. “You could smell it for days.” That is one tradition he is not interested in bringing back.

Instead of foraging in the past for inspiration, Haatuft asked himself a hypothetical question: “If western Norway were a region of France, what would the chefs here brag about?”

His theory is that the prestigious classic cuisine of France is “farm food that was beautified and refined” to suit the tastes and whims of rich people. In Norway, he said, there was never enough wealth to transform food into cuisine. (That changed after oil production began in the North Sea in the 1970s, making modern Norway one of the world’s wealthiest nations.)

Traditional Norwegian food is famously bland, with infinite recombinations of fish, potatoes, flour and milk. But those porridges and dumplings were often spiked with intense tastes like smoked lamb and reindeer, salt-fermented salmon, goat salami and pickled root vegetables. The country has top-quality dairy products, berries that grow sweet in the 18-hour days of summer and complex aged cheeses. Extraordinary fresh seafood is harvested from the cold waters of the North Atlantic and the North Sea, and preserved using time-honoured traditions that are just as complex as French charcuterie.

“A French chef here would brag about the smoked mackerel,” he said. “He would clean out the dark parts to make it beautiful. He would add butter to make it rich and smooth, and make the flavour of the ingredient shine.”

That is precisely what Haatuft does at Lysverket.

Fiskesuppe, a traditional Bergen fish chowder, was traditionally thickened with flour. In modern times, cooks have added egg yolks and sour cream to enrich the broth. But to lift the flavours, Haatuft adds a bright green drizzle of leek oil, and diced carrots and celeriac pickled in distilled vinegar. “That’s what the grandmothers used,” he said. “Why should I use wine vinegar?”