The Swedish city of Stockholm embodies almost EVERYTHING THAT IS GREAT about Scandinavia, writes TIM MAGEE
Scandinavia could build a wall. They don’t need anything from the rest of us now. They couldn’t have done it 20 years ago but that was before oil, Lars Van Trier, and a food movement that is the envy of the world, Scandi noir, Alexander Skarsgård and Saga from The Bridge. Behind their wall they could use Nokia and Eriksson to talk to each other. Sweden alone could dress everyone in H&M and her sisters, Cos and & Other Stories, and supply us all with flat pack furniture, which we’d assemble listening to Spotify.
Scandinavia has all the energy it needs. This new micro continent could plough on with the stuff we keep arguing or dreaming about. Hydroelectricity already powers Norway’s electricity, geothermal all of Iceland. The Danes are masters of the winds and Norway’s gas and oil bonanza can cover the rest, and then some. Behind their wall they could keep making great television and books about murder and odd but loveable detectives. They could host clean summer and winter Olympics when they like all the while giving their Nobel prizes to each other. There might be savage competition for best city to live in though.
For quality of life surveys Helsinki and Copenhagen are in and around the top ten every time globally as it is (Oslo is too boring, Reykjavik too nuts). Stockholm is always there or thereabouts too. Stockholm is like Venice and Budapest had a baby. A very pretty baby that went to live in a pristine nature reserve. Such a peaceful child too. The Danes and Norwegians had Hitler to contend with, and the Finns had Stalin and other big bad bear handlers at their door, but Sweden has had over 200 years of peace. It defines it. You can feel it in the air in the capital. Until you hear the screaming that is.
I hear this screaming from the tiny boat I am staying on in between Djurgården and Beckholmen, islands near the centre of Stockholm. My boat, the Prince Van Orangiën, is a little Dutch beauty from the 1930s that is all oak, rosewood and marble. It’s a bijou hotel now but looks like the river boat from a Tarzan film and feels like you are on the set of a Poirot movie. It’s like a floating version of the Orient Express, but less formal and with bigger beds.
The screaming is coming from children who are doing pretty good Tarzan sounds themselves. I don’t like noisy holidays but this is distant and happy enough to make you chortle, and the hollering is deliberate as they shoot up, down and around a very classy funfair, Stockholm’s Gröna Lund. There must be something subliminal about screaming joy that had me pottering around my boat with a smile all day.
The city is spectacular, laid out across 14 islands. Some with tiered wedding cake buildings, some modern, others medieval, some just green – all pristine and linked by water. Stockholm is not the Venice of the north – here there’s room enough to breathe and locals outnumber Pac-a-macs. Fourteen islands is too much to see on any single trip so just pick a district or two like Gamla Stan or Södermalm. Gamla Stan, the medieval heart of the city is touristy but not tacky and still thronged with a diverse population going about their business in a warren of streets and lanes from the middle ages. Södermalm or Söder is the opposite of Gamla Stan, more Berliner, with slightly more bearded and pierced restaurants, cafés, bars and clubs.
This trip though, as usual, was for food. I’d arrived by train from Copenhagen, which is a nose ahead of the Swedish capital in a Scandi two horse race. Stockholm has been quietly catching up in a very efficient Swedish way though. Most of all it’s a town with a solid foundation of casual dining. You could dig into that foundation starting with the city’s best meatballs in Bakfickan (hip pocket), a tiled and wooden diner at the back of the opera house. Then get over that with cocktails in the retro Erlands Mat & Cocktailbar. If you are still greedy then take your greed to Rolfs Kök, to Babette for pizza, or to the Flying Elk for not so traditional pub food, always ending with a glass of wine in Gaston. If you are a restaurant junkie then go to one of Stockholm’s stars, like the wood-burning oven heavyweight, Ekstedt, or the more accessible Wood.
Another one of Sweden’s brightest stars is related to and almost touching distance from the boat where I am staying. The Prince Van Orangiën and its sister restaurants Oaxen Krog and Oaxen Slip are a nuclear family of dreamy treats on the site of a 17th-century shipyard whose parents are chef Magnus Ek and his wife Agneta Green. Krog is a destination dining gentle two-star. Next door and serviced from the same kitchen is Slip.
The night after the edible theatre of Krog, I dined exclusively on just the snacks and sides from Slip’s bistro menu while watching fat whole fish, the best bits of well minded animals and wild things get carried out to happy families, generations out together over dinner. Simple food but each dish having some mark of the two-star brilliance from next door. You could stay on the boat, and commute across the little wooden bridge to those two restaurants, never see the rest of Stockholm and still have the perfect time. You wouldn’t even need to pack a coat.
When I did pack, saying goodbye to my sweet Prince and arriving at the airport (tip: go through security before deciding to eat anything) the absence of police or military was enough to stop you in your tracks. Maybe the Swedes have already built a wall of sorts that has, so far, reduced the kind of fear that currently terrifies most of the rest of the western world. Their wall isn’t made of bricks and mortar, but is a solid structure built of cop-on and peaceful decades of model democratic socialism with some of the world’s best diplomats to explain it all. It’s not Utopia – every country has its problems, its faults, even Sweden – but it’s pretty close.
Tim Magee @manandasuitcase
This article appeared in a previous issue, for more features like this, don’t miss our November issue, out Thursday, November 3.
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