The trouble with choosing a name in a foreign language for your restaurant in Stockholm is that you may not have fully grasped every possible nuance and connotation. Take “nosh” and “chow”, for example. Now, is it just me, or are there certain sexual undertones to those particular verbs?
I imagine the restaurant owners sitting round a big table, brainstorming ideas and Googling English words for eating… Obviously no one thought to check with a filthy-minded, foul-mouthed Londoner. This is why international branding companies exist.
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter because it’s a jolly memorable name and sex – more than food – is what this new restaurant from the people behind Stockholm stalwart Berns Hotel is all about. Hot concept, smoking designer – even the toilets are stunning. They scoured the globe to find the most exciting architect to do up their new four storey, city centre townhouse and they found him in Barcelona. No one does cool, pure, elegant design like a Scandic designer, but to get the kind of drop dead gorgeous, eclectic, ever so slightly unhinged effect that Catalan artist and architect Lázaro Rosa-Violán has created at Nosh and Chow, you need to head south.
The interconnecting dining rooms, lounges and bars range in style from wood panelled wine-lined old-school gentlemen’s club to high class hooker’s boudoir. Rosa-Violán’s penchant for oversized lamps, antique tiles, personally sourced salvage pieces, trendy exposed piping and mirroring galore ties it all together. The ground floor restaurant is just the beginning – there’s an intimate speakeasy-style private members’ bar one floor up and – when I visited – the architect was busy waving his magic wand over a second 60-seat restaurant and four vast suites.
When I informed her that 75% of Swedish men – gay and straight – also shave their balls, her shock was complete
Have you noticed I haven’t mentioned the food yet? Well, it confused me. In keeping with Berns’ long-tradition of “bringing the world to Stockholm”, the dinner menu at Nosh and Chow is a constantly changing, peripatetic globetrotting experience that gave me jet-lag just looking at it.
There are four separate menus on one page, with arrows pointing to vague areas on a map – one arrow seemed to be indicating somewhere in the Öresund between Denmark and Sweden, but linked to Alpine dishes such as smoked knuckle of pork with spaetzle, apples, red onion and deep fried ginger. Others pointed to somewhere in South America, North Africa and Southeast Asia. You can choose a Southeast Asian starter, have your main course in North Africa and remain there for pudding. Which is exactly what I did – and so enjoyed “frog porridge” (frogs thighs bulging obscenely like a bodybuilder’s, served with squishy rice and masses of whole fried garlic); tagine of rooster with dried apricots and chickpeas (a vast portion which would easily have fed my four children and which was made, disappointingly, with boring old chicken as they were out of rooster) and mint tea sorbet with grapefruit and pistachios (divine). Apart from the pudding, which was outstanding, the food was filling and tasty but no more subtle and sophisticated than that of a keen cook with plenty of gap year stamps in their passport. Service was care of a sweet, smiley and extremely knowledgeable girl who in any other country would probably be earning squillions as a model, but here in Stockholm is simply a very good waitress.
The people watching at Nosh and Chow is as just as fun as eating your way around the world in 80 minutes. My dining companion, new to Stockholm, was alarmed by the amount of hair product used by Swedish men. A group of four tall, attractive gents sat down near us midway through dinner and Jules couldn’t take her eyes off them. “They all look like they’re from a 1980s pop video!”, she squealed. When I informed her that 75% of Swedish men – gay and straight – also shave their balls, her shock was complete and I had to tell her to stop staring. But seeing and being seen is as much the point of Nosh and Chow as the food. The dazzling interiors provide a perfect theatrical backdrop for Stockholm’s beautiful people to slink from restaurant to bar to lounge to bar again – slick, sparkly, and in most, but not all cases, perfectly smooth. C
Nosh and Chow, Norrlandsgaten 24, 111 43 Stockholm, Sweden
+46 8 503 389 60; noshandchow.se
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