Magnus Nilsson

Magnus Nilsson is a Swedish chef best known for Fäviken Magasinet, the twelve-seat restaurant in the remote Swedish province of Jämtland that he ran from 2008 to 2019. Born in Östersund and raised partly on his grandparents' farm, he trained classically — including stages at L'Astrance in Paris under Pascal Barbot — before returning to Sweden to take over the sommelier role at the small hunting-estate restaurant Fäviken in 2008. Within a year he had taken over the kitchen as well.

Fäviken was unlike any other restaurant in the world. The dining room held twelve guests; the menu changed nightly; ingredients were almost entirely sourced from the surrounding forest, the estate's own farm and game from the Jämtland mountains. Nilsson and his small team cured, smoked, fermented, dried and aged most of the larder themselves. By 2012 Fäviken was on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list (peaking at #19 in 2016) despite being a fourteen-hour drive from Stockholm and requiring a near-religious commitment from guests.

In 2019 — at the height of the restaurant's fame — Nilsson closed Fäviken and stepped away from professional cooking. He has since spent his time on his food-writing and on the Nordic Food Lab. His encyclopaedic 'Nordic Cookbook' (2015) — over 700 traditional recipes from across the Nordic region — and 'Fäviken' (2012) and 'The Nordic Baking Book' (2018) are widely regarded as the most important reference works on Nordic cuisine in any language.