Agrikultur
Agrikultur review at-a-glance
+Clear focus on local ingredients with impressive a la minute cooking
+Most dishes served directly by the chefs who shared their knowledge and passion with guests
-Seasonal cooking means you are going to get a lot of onions and preserved vegetables in the winter
Rating: 93/100
Verdict: There was something thrilling about my meal at Agrikultur. Chefs packed into a tiny kitchen. Food actually cooked instead of meticulously prepped beforehand and hen assembled. Spring had barely arrived but already found its way onto the plate. The ethos of new nordic cuisine was a throughline between all of the dishes but in a way that seemed to be spark spontaneity instead of limiting it. From the price point, timing (finally a tasting menu that only takes two hours), to a menu that seems to actually change with the seasons instead of just tweaking signature dishes - Agrikultur seems like a place tailored made for multiple visits. I thoroughly enjoyed my meal at Argikultur and know I will be back.
Price I Paid: 1100 SEK (with optional course) / €110
Would I revisit: Yes
Date Visited: March 2022
Value: 16/20
Agrikultur background
Agrikultur is a tiny one-star restaurant in Stockholm with only 24 tables including 3 seats at a counter overlooking the equally small kitchen. As common for Michelin restaurants in the Nordics, hyper-local, seasonal ingredients are the underlying theme through all of the dishes. Many things have been foraged locally and preserved with one chef, Wilhelm, particularly interested in the topic. Almost all of the vegetables come from a small farm a few hours from Stockholm that “writes” the menu each week based on what they send the kitchen. Seasonality will be taken a step further this summer as the restaurant is starting their own garden a stone’s throw from Agrikultur where they will plant some seedlings provided by their current farm partner. Meat, seafood, and dairy are sourced from small-scale providers who focus on a few niche products.
On my visit, I grabbed one of those three seats at the kitchen counter and I couldn’t recommend a better place to take in dinner. The kitchen staff is chatty and serves most of the food directly to you with detailed descriptions and ample knowledge to answer any nerdy food questions you may have. From this perch I saw something shocking for a new nordic restaurant - food was actually cooked instead of just assembled. Chefs used the wood fire oven to cook fish, scallops, and bread. The flat-top was used to cook beef instead of sous vide. In this way, I found the restaurants take on new nordic cuisine refreshing - not as restrictive and a little more playful.
Agrikultur has a single prix menu priced at SEK 845 (€85) which features four different courses, two of which were split into separate dishes that gave the meal a longer feel. Uncommon for a Michelin starred restaurant, Agrikultur actually turns their table so a meal takes around 2-2.5 hours - personally, I enjoyed this compared to 3-4 hour marathons you sometimes get that can be a slog. The wine pairing of three glasses comes in at a decidedly chunky SEK650 of carefully selected, but average-pricede, wine. A small number of wines by the glass were offered as well as a dry martini made with the house gin. This is Sweden so the price of the wine is about what you would expect and if anything the price of the food was on the low side by Stockholm standards.
What I ate at Agrikultur
Agrikultur receives hand-dived scallops almost daily which are selected painstakingly by divers t that aim to find scallops 5-7 years old for the best flavor (age can be distinguished based on the number of lines on the shell). Given the amount of effort that goes into harvesting the mollusk, the restaurant tries to use the entire animal by splitting it into two separate dishes. First, the roe sack was smoked and served as a croustade that was also filled with shallots for some balance. I didn’t think the flavor of the roe sack was particularly pronounced (maybe that is a good thing given it is usually discarded?) but the texture on the croustade was remarkable, the thinnest possible shell while still holding its shape. You’d be surprised how often even three stars do not achieve the perfect texture in these types of crisps but Agrikultur nailed it.
The second part of the dish was a scallop, baked in its own shell and topped with black truffle and a bouillon made from the scallop skirt. Baking the scallop in the shell meant it lacked a good crust you get on a sear but kept the scallop incredibly moist, trapping in all of its delicate flavors (and surprisingly not overcooking the shellfish even though it was baked in the hot wood-burning oven.). As good as the scallop itself was, the bouillon was even better with the deepness of scallop flavor shocking given it was just a reduction of water, scallop innards, and a bit of lemon thyme. I happily slurped up the last bits of the reduction with a bit of black truffle after the scallop was gone.
The second course was skrei cod from Norway with onion, lovage, grilled endive, and a butter sauce made with chicken broth. The skrei in the name of the dish is in reference to the time of year when cod are swimming upstream to mate which means they are eating more, giving the flesh of the fish a slightly firmer, fattier texture. Much like the scallop, this was cooked quickly in the wood-burning oven which kept the fish moist and full of flavor. I quite liked when kitchens pair a fish with a meat-infused sauce so the chicken broth based sauce worked very well for me. On the side was some grilled endive on top of onions that had been strewed with cod roe. The seasoning on the endive was spot on and it provide an appropriate bitterness to counterbalance the rich chicken butter sauce.
After this, I went with the optional course (SEK 255) which paired a classic Swedish ingredient, vendace roe, with potato puree. This might sound simple but quite a bit of technique when into making the potato puree which was flavored with roasted hay and brown butter, adding a fantastic nuttiness to the entire dish. The last step of plating the dish was a spritz of attika (aka Swedish vinegar) which I couldn’t detect on my palate. This was a very comforting dish with high-quality roe pairing well with the potatoes. The ratio of potatoes to roe could have been improved slightly as I felt like there were not quite enough potatoes for the amount of roe.
The main course was centered around a Swedish mountain cow from Puttersjaus farm on the island of Gotland. The first part was the topside served as tartar with beetroot, and dill, cumin, & elderberries cremes. Lots of good flavors and textures here. The beetroot had been baked in salt and sliced very thin which gave it a tremendous texture that played well with the various cremes. On the flip side, the beef was diced very finely (too finely in my mind) and the flavor did not pop as much as I thought it would. While the tartar didn’t blow me away, the kitchen showed off its broth-making chops once again by adding a consommé made with morels and black truffle halfway through the dish which had tremendous umami flavor.
The second part, which served as the proper main course, was chuck served with various herbs from the farm. This was a dish that showed the bad and good of Agrikultur’s ethos. The good, this felt like spring on a plate. The various morels, ramson, and herbs that ringed the plate made me feel like winter was over almost as much as the sunny weather outside. The downside of the hyper-local, no waste cooking is the beef was chuck instead of a more premium cut. The restaurant buys several mountain cows each year and tries to utilize the entire cow so naturally, every dish can’t use the best parts. The piece of beef was very well cooked and served with a skillfully made reduction so the kitchen can be commended for making a piece of chuck taste so good but it still does not stand up to say a ribeye or strip steak. In the middle of the plate was a brilliantly prepared onion, cut the right thickness and cooked just enough to take away the dreadful assertiveness of raw onion but still retaining a substantial texture and balancing sharpness. As well as that onion was prepared, a slight quibble (and perhaps an inevitability when you are going so hyperlocal during the end of Stockholm winter), all dishes used shallots/onions for balance which was a tad repetitive.
Paired with the main course was the bread of the evening which had been baked a la minute from a dough made of a trio of wheat milled in-house. Served with butter made from the aforementioned mountain cows, the roll had a truly impressive lightness to it. The mountain cow butter was interesting to try as the breed is specifically known for producing particularly good dairy products. Personally, I thought it was very good butter but a notch below the very best I have had.
Dessert was centered around forced rhubarb with a mousse flavored with vernal grass and a strawberry rhubarb ice cream. Forcing rhubarb involves taking a young rhubarb plant and growing it in darkness. While this might seem counterintuitive, the lack of light causes the ruhbarb stalks to grow faster as they search for sun. More importantly, the glucose it typically uses to grow its leaves remains in the stalks, giving it a sweeter taste and avoiding the intense sourness early season rhubarb can have. Ignoring the growing technique, this was a very pleasing dessert with great variations of texture and a good balance between tartness and sweetness. The vernal grass, foraged by the team the past summer and preserved, added an additional dimension of flavor.
The last bite was a small cloudberry tartlet. Cloudberry is quite local to the Swedish north so seems to be a favorite ingredient for these types of restaurants to show off. Personally, the seedy texture of cloudberry is not my favorite but this was a fine enough bite. Sadly the tart did not have the same stunning texture as the croustade in the first course but was still well made.