The future of dining | Mathias Dahlgren

Eight years ago, when I opened Matsalen at The Grand Hotel in Stockholm, the idea was to make the most exclusive restaurant possible at the time. Matbaren, across the hall, was the modern bistro and was supposed to be visionary. We’d tried to look into the future, asking how people might dine in five years’ time.

That kind of modern bistro restaurant has become the norm now. It’s what a modern restaurant is today. So we asked ourselves, if that’s the norm, what’s the next generation of dining?

People go out and dine today and are very interested in the process of everything. Which is not how a fine dining restaurant was in the past. Before, you tried to hide the process and just show the plate. And it was very quiet in the restaurant. People think that’s kind of boring today.

So then, eight or so months ago, I said let’s create Matbordet – The Dining Table – where people can eat directly in the middle of process. It’s within the main dining room, with ten stools at the kitchen counter, and the style of cooking is spontaneous. For instance, I had never done Christmas food in my whole life in a restaurant. Now it’s like… maybe it’s interesting? What is the Swedish Christmas table going to look like in 10 years? Because it has been the same for the last hundred years. So much is happening with food in Sweden in general today, but not with the Christmas table.

We have the deepest respect for traditions, but here we are being a little bit playful, and opening up to using new techniques and new oriental flavors. A lot of Swedish food is very much about imported spices: cardamom, cinnamon, and stuff that we don’t actually produce. Coffee and a cinnamon bun is the most typical Swedish thing you can have, and we can’t produce the ingredients for either, but it’s still us.

Coffee and a cinnamon bun is the most typical Swedish thing you can have, and we can’t produce the ingredients for either, but it’s still us

Changes in food are happening faster now. I think it has to do with wealth. We are the first generation who can actually afford to eat, and really choose what we eat. Dining in Sweden has never been as big as it is today. If you go back 25 years, “luxury” was all about eating the most expensive products. It’s not exactly the most luxurious thing you can do today. Maybe it’s something totally different. I think it’s very difficult to judge what is luxury. I think you have to look at the guest’s perspective – what’s luxury for them? Perhaps organic is luxury today, since most people live in the city. Agriculture has become a luxury in itself, not necessarily to work with agriculture, but to come in contact with nature.

Chef Oskar Petterson at Matbordet

I was brought up in the 1970s. If you talk to a person who is 75 years old today in Sweden and you talk about “new potatoes”, that person would almost cry. If you talk to a person who’s in their 40s, my age, they’d say new potatoes are really good and they want to have them when they are in season and that they really love them because they had them when they were a kid. It was a special occasion. If you ask a person who’s 10 years old now, in another ten years, about new potatoes, they won’t care – they’ve always had them all the year round. Luxury is all about what is exclusive to you. And to judge what people will think of as luxury in the future is very difficult to say.

20 years ago, when I was a younger chef, I thought it was fantastic to go around the world and go to the most exclusive fine dining restaurants. If I travel today, I still find it interesting to go to one or two of those restaurants, but if I go away for 10 days, I don’t want to go to 10 of those restaurants. Maybe you want to go to a brasserie, you want to eat a pizza, you want to just have a salad. Maybe one day I just want to eat something in the street, and maybe you end up in a small place with some locals, and that’s fantastic.

The food in Matsalen remains very personal and different from Matbordet, but during the last summer we started bringing the Matsalen diners into the kitchen before they sit down, so there is interactivity between the guest and the craftsmanship in the kitchen. It opens things up so people get more in contact with food and they relax a little bit, because some people think it’s become a little bit stiff going to a fine dining restaurant.

The wealthy now create their own very exclusive kitchens at home, with a more industrial feel compared to how a restaurant kitchen was 10 years ago. They are keen to to try to create very extreme things at home. And while those people try to play at creating food for a restaurant at home, back in the actual restaurants, we are trying to make it simpler.

Maybe the changes in styles of dining are to do with the way people live in urban environments. A lot of people work a lot and lead single lives and don’t have a family at home. So they go to a restaurant to get the feeling of having a family – and that’s why we are creating family tables. It’s more about that warm, homely feel. It’s about making a great stew and putting it directly on the table and saying, “Smell this, it’s fantastic.” C

Mathias Dahlgren, Grand Hôtel Stockholm, Södra Blasieholmshamnen 6, SE-103 27 Stockholm, Sweden
+46 (0)8 679 35 84; mdghs.se