Touring the Mission with Magnus Nilsson

(By Sarah Fritsche, SFGate) - In recent years, Nordic food and cooking have increasingly become a part of the global culinary lexicon. This is thanks in no small part to Danish chef Rene Redzepi and his multi-Michelin starred Copenhagen restaurant, Noma.

Another key player in the Nordic food movement is Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson, who since 2008 has bee wowing diners at Faviken, a 16-seat restaurant that's located on the grounds of a 19th Century estate near the small resort town of Are in Northwest Sweden. At nearly 500 miles from Stockholm, dining at Faviken is an undertaking, but thanks to Nilsson's daring and hyper-local menu, which has garnered the restaurant a spot on the World's Fifty Best Restaurants list, diners are more than willing to make the trek.

Now Nilsson is on the road, wrapping up a whirlwind tour to promote his new book, “The Nordic Cookbook” ($49.95; Phaidon). Last week, during his brief San Francisco stop, Inside Scoop got to spend some time with the high-profile chef and learn a bit more about him and his new cookbook.

Rather than stay indoors for our interview, we decided to take Nilsson on a mini tour of the Mission, which included a lunch of tacos and Mission burritos (Nilsson’s first ever, which he found very “tasty”) at Pancho Villa Taqueria. This was followed by dessert at Bi-Rite Creamery, where not only did Nilsson love the ice cream (for the record, he ordered vanilla and Blue Bottle coffee), but he was recognized by two employees as that guy from “Chef’s Table” and “The Mind of a Chef”.

Our tour continued with a stroll through Dolores Park — in true Dolores fashion, strangers attempted to sell us illicit substances (which we politely declined). After our outdoor adventures, we briefly popped in Omnivore Books so Nilsson could sign copies of his book. The afternoon was capped off by a special book launch dinner at the Swedish American Hallthat was hosted by Dinner Lab and featured a Nordic-focused menu by fellow Swede, chef Emma Bengtsson of New York’s Aquavit.

Here are some highlights:

Magnus Nilsson outside Pancho Villa Taqueria.

Diving deep: Unlike his first cookbook, “Fäviken,” which centers on his restaurant cooking, “The Nordic Cookbook” contains none of his own recipes. Instead, Nilsson spent three years traveling around his native Sweden, as well as Norway, Iceland, Finland, Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, interviewing people about how Nordic countries cook and eat today.

The chef also established an web-based poll where home cooks could share recipes and answer questions about their food culture. Nilsson started with about 10,000 recipes, eventually whittling the list down to about 700 for the book.

“I thought I knew a lot about Nordic food culture because I have a special interest with the restaurant and everything. It turned out pretty quickly that I didn’t know almost anything. So I learned a lot of stuff and how much diversity there really is in the region.”

Nilsson’s very first Mission burrito. (Yes, he’s using a fork. Don’t judge.)

Swedish food is more than pickled herring: While the chef received a lot of family recipes for pickled herring, one of the most popular dishes in Sweden today is something called “taco quiche.” A blending of fake Tex-Mex seasoning kits, which infiltrated the Scandinavian market in 1980s, and a more traditional Scandinavian meat pie.

According to Nilsson, who includes a recipe in the book, if you search for “tacopaj” (the Swedish term for “taco quiche”) on Google, you’ll get over 175,000 hits for recipes. “To me that was really important to the book to give a snapshot of food culture as it is consumed today and not just of a romanticized fairy tale version of something.”

Nilsson enjoying Dolores Park following ice cream from nearby Bi-Rite Creamery.

Hot dogs are a big deal in Nordic countries, especially Sweden: “Our only fast food culture that’s truly Swedish is the hot dog culture,” says Nilsson. The first hot dog was served in Sweden during the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897, says Nilsson, and since then, it has evolved into something that doesn’t exist anywhere else. This includes unique variations, like the tunnbrödsrulle, which could be considered Sweden’s ultimate drunk food — consisting of flatbread that’s filled with not only a hot dog, but also mashed potatoes, shrimp salad and pickles. (Nilsson’s book has several pages dedicated to Nordic hot dog culture.)

Nilsson is such a fan of the fast food that about a year and a half ago, he even opened up a hot dog stand, called Korvkiosk, at a ski resort near his restaurant. “It’s not a Fäviken hot dog place, it’s its own thing. We happen to own it because I like hot dogs,” says the chef.

Also on the menu, at Korvkiosk is soft-serve ice cream. Available in just one flavor, what the chef calls “milk,” is made with just milk, egg yolks and sugar. To perfect the recipe, Nilsson tested twenty different soft-serve machines to find one that could make the ice cream to his exacting standards, without having to use stabilizers, as is common in soft-serve. (He eventually settled on a machine made in Japan.)

Nilsson signing copies of his cookbook at Omnivore.

When it comes to signing cookbooks, Nilsson has a system: During a brief stop at Noe Valley’s Omnivore Books to sign copies of “The Nordic Cookbook,” Nilsson and his publisher’s executive marketing manager Peter Tittiger, revealed that thanks to lots of practice on the road, the chef can now sign about 300 books in 25 minutes.  While at Omnivore, owner Celia Sack showed Nilsson her collection of Nordic cookbooks. (Sadly, her collection of antique Nordic books had been bought out just a few weeks before by another Nordic cookbook author, Darra Goldstein.)

Nilsson and Omnivore Books owner Celia Sack in front of her Nordic cookbook section.

On what it’s like to operate such a critically acclaimed restaurant: The down-to-earth chef is very pragmatic with all the critical acclaim Fäviken has received.

“When I started, I thought that I wanted to run the world’s best restaurant — that you could actually decide something like that. After working for fifteen years with this now and being pretty successful, there is no such thing as the ‘world’s best restaurant.’ It doesn’t function that way. On that level everyone is pretty damn good at what they’re doing. Every time you make something that people like that’s kind of nice, and when they don’t like it, it’s not so nice. It’s the same with reviews. When you get a good review or listing, it makes you happy, but that’s very short. In the long run the only thing those things do is fill the restaurant.”

That said, Nilsson acknowledges that filling the restaurant allows him to create and try new things. “I’m going to continue doing it for as long as it’s fun and interesting, and for as long as people keep coming to pay for it.”

Sack shows Nilsson her collection of foraging books.

What’s up next for the chef: Nilsson will be wrapping up his book tour with stops in Australia this next week. After which, returns home to Sweden, where he’ll spend some quality time with his wife and three young children, as well as celebrate his 32nd birthday. In December, along with re-opening Fäviken for the new season, he’s slated to open a new restaurant in Stockholm. However, Nilsson’s first restaurant venture outside of the secluded Jämtland region won’t be a Fäviken sequel.

Instead, in keeping with the chef’s love for hot dogs, it will be another Korvkiosk.