🇸🇪 Sweden · Swedish cuisine · b. 1983
The Fäviken chef who built a 12-seat restaurant in remote Jämtland into a global pilgrimage site.
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.
Place — and the willingness to live by it. Nilsson believed that a restaurant in northern Sweden had no business serving food that could not have come from northern Sweden. Fäviken cured its own ham, salted its own fish, dried its own berries and forced its guests to confront a near-total local sourcing rule. He has described the project as 'an experiment in honesty' rather than an aesthetic.
Twelve-seat destination restaurant; closed December 2019 at peak of fame.
These recipes from our database reflect the swedish cooking tradition that Magnus works in. They are not direct reproductions of Magnus's copyrighted recipes, but traditional dishes inspired by the same culinary heritage.
“I do not believe in cooking food that comes from another climate when I am living in this one.”
“Closing Fäviken was the most honest decision I ever made about a restaurant.”
“Tradition is not the enemy of new cooking — it is the library we get to draw from.”
Begins stages in Paris, including with Pascal Barbot at L'Astrance.
Joins Fäviken as sommelier; takes over the kitchen later that year.
Publishes Fäviken; restaurant enters the World's 50 Best.
Publishes The Nordic Cookbook.
Fäviken peaks at #19 on the World's 50 Best.
Publishes The Nordic Baking Book.
Closes Fäviken.
He announced the closure in May 2019 and closed in December that year — at the height of the restaurant's fame. In interviews he said he no longer wanted to be away from his family in the kitchen 80+ hours a week and that he had stopped enjoying the lifestyle of running a destination restaurant.
Fäviken seated only twelve guests, was located fourteen hours' drive from Stockholm in remote Jämtland, and sourced almost everything — meat, fish, vegetables, dairy — from the surrounding land. The kitchen did its own curing, smoking, fermenting, drying and ageing.
He trained in Sweden and then in Paris with Pascal Barbot at L'Astrance, one of the most cerebral fine-dining kitchens in France. He returned to Sweden in 2008.
Published in 2015, The Nordic Cookbook is Nilsson's 768-page reference work documenting over 700 traditional recipes from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. It is widely considered the most important single book on Nordic cuisine ever published in English.
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