Restaurants of the Month

Restaurant of the Month, Sweden Meet, mingle and dine – Spanish style

The Spanish cuisine provides the perfect sharing experience and is, with its many delicacies and native wines, a popular choice for both small and big events. Tapas, pintxos and seafood all make for amazing sharing dishes and can certainly set the tone for a joyous dinner or work party. This is the vibe at Boqueria, a restaurant located in the Mood Shopping Centre in Stockholm.

By Hanna Andersson | Photos: Boqueria

“Boqueria is Spanish for ‘a place to meet’. We offer a fun and dynamic way of eating, where the food comes out as soon as it’s ready and we present each dish with a story of where it comes from,” says Boqueria’s CEO and owner Napolyon Sürer.

Visit the dining hall or ‘the square’ Boqueria consists of a dining hall with high chairs and cosy interior where guests can enjoy a delicious dinner in a chill environment, and ‘the square’ which is the ultimate venue for lunch, after-work drinks, and pre-drinks before a night full of adventures.

“The square offers the popular concept Pintxos - small Spanish dishes which are perfect for an exciting after work session or some mid-shopping nibbles. You can simply grab what you like the look of and continue to mingle with your friends and colleagues,” says Napolyon.

“We usually have two DJs, one in the dining hall and one in the square. At around 9pm, we turn up the volume in the square to provide the perfect mood for our guests. We want it to be a dynamic hub where people meet up for both food and drinks,” he continues.

Try something new, every time The menu is extensive and changes often, which contributes to the dynamic vibe. It is adjusted depending on the season and the produce available. “We have themes throughout the year where we base our menu around a concept or ingredient. Soon we’ll have a seafood feast with 20 different kinds of seafood from all over Spain,” Napolyon says. Suckling pig, squid, paella and music have been popular themes throughout the years, and it keeps the restaurant alive and thriving. “It’s exciting and you’ll have a different experience every time you visit Boqueria,” says Napolyon with a smile. “You will never get tired of visiting us.”

Boqueria has now extended, and you can visit the fun and innovative Spanish restaurant in both Gothenburg and Åre, where they provide the right mood for every occasion. And, of course, delicious Spanish food.

www.boqueriastockholm.se Instagram: @boqueriastockholm Facebook: Boqueria Stockholm

Restaurant of the Month, Finland Japanese ramen served with a side of excellent customer service

It’s no stretch to accredit the arrival of ramen in Finland to the people behind Momo Toko. The first restaurant opened in 2015 and now, with eight restaurants in Southern Finland, and two about to open in Tallinn, Momo Toko is showing no signs of slowing down.

By Ester Laiho | Photos: Momo Toko

Momo Toko is renowned for their customer service and hand-made noodles. When the owners learned the craft of making ramen noodles, they set the Finnish restaurant apart from ramen restaurants across Europe, which rely heavily on European importers. Today, hand-made noodles are a cornerstone of their success. All Momo Toko restaurants make them from scratch, as with everything on the menu, as a nod of respect to Japanese food culture and tradition. Even the sauce and broth recipes are their own and made in-house.

Unfortunately, along with every other business in the hospitality sector, Momo Toko had to alter their business model to survive COVID-19. “We launched takeaway products in Lidl and R-kioski. We also only sold takeaway for a while, and kept changing our model, depending on what the Finnish government guidelines dictated. We wouldn’t have done as well as we did, if it wasn’t for our amazing staff,” COO and training officer Jouni Quisbert explains.

Momo Toko may have started with ramen, but today, their menu includes rice-based dishes – such as donburi, gyozas and edamame. Momo Toko’s most popular dish is an excellent representative of the company’s ethos and dedication to traditionally crafted Japanese flavours: Original Tonkotsu. It is made from Tonkotsu pork broth that has been boiled for ten hours, ramen, oven-roasted pork belly, house-made soy-marinated egg, wakame sea-

weed, sugar snaps and corn. This dish is garnished with rocket, fried garlic and black garlic and sesame oil. Even though making a ramen broth takes ten hours, the base concept of the restaurant is fast food of a high quality. This is all made possible by a highly skilled workforce who enjoy their work, and therefore serve a quality dish every time.

“Even if customers only drop in for a quick bite, we want them to feel welcome – from being greeted at the door until they finish their last scoop of matcha ice cream,” Quisbert explains. It’s a collaborative effort between front of house and the kitchen: guests are treated to a warm and attentive service, while they taste the love in the chefs’ skilfully cooked Curry Katsu Chicken Donburi or Chicken Karaage.

Quisbert himself joined Momo Toko as a restaurant manager in Espoo, after a friend who worked there recommended it. After being promoted to training officer, he worked his way up to COO six months ago. “I appreciate the open workplace culture we have. It’s very encouraging and everyone’s opinion is heard. We are also very hands on in our management team. This way, we ensure our employees and customers both enjoy their time,” he explains.

Quisbert and the Momo Toko team are excited about launching a new menu – but he is coy about what precisely it will entail, revealing only that it reflects the ideas of their employees and wishes of the guests. “The new menu will represent what we’ve done thus far: Japanese flavours made possible by fresh Finnish produce – but now with more vegetarian and vegan options, which I’m very excited about.” The new menu will be rolled out in all restaurants, while the two new venues will open their doors for the first time in the Telliskivi Creative Hub and in the Noblessner harbour area in Tallinn, later in the summer.

While ten Momo Tokos for Southern Finland and Tallinn might sound like a lot, Quisbert reframes the number: “There are over 30,000 ramen restaurants in Japan, so we’ve got a lot of work to do to match that!”

www.momotoko.com Instagram: @momotoko Facebook: momotoko

Restaurant of the Month, Denmark Authentic farm-to-table dining in an urban green oasis

Though Fasangården is just a few minutes by metro from Copenhagen’s vibrant centre, you’d never guess so. Nestled in Frederiksberg Gardens, the restaurant occupies an old brick farmhouse from 1682, on parkland once used for royal pheasant hunts during the reign of King Christian V.

By Lena Hunter | Photos: Marie Louise Munkegaard

“It’s very peaceful here. Some of the trees around us are over 200 years old. It feels like you’re in the countryside,” says head chef Anika Madsen. Inside, the restaurant balances rustic charm and restrained Nordic elegance, mixing heritage patterns with sleek, white furnishings. A balance of nostalgia and inventiveness goes for the dining experience too: “The red thread is the feeling of homeliness, but we want to surprise on both the food and the wine front,” says Madsen.

All day dining Fasangården serves a three-course lunch and four-course dinner menu, all-day à la carte and a laidback Sunday dinner of sharing plates and snacks – “The kind of good food we ourselves would like to eat on a Sunday,” says Madsen. “Here on the old farm, we get eggs from our own chickens and vegetables from our own garden. Outside of that, we use other small farm suppliers and growers around Denmark. It’s our way of keeping a farm mentality in the middle of a big city,” she says.

The kitchen adapts the menu according to the fresh produce available each season, and the same goes for the European wine list: “We don’t order in huge batches, we pay attention to what’s drinking really well right now,” says Madsen. “We take the winemaker’s story into account when we select bottles. For us it’s vital that we pay respect to the producers by sharing the stories of where our dishes and drinks come from with our guests.”

Autumn’s harvest October is the beginning of the wild season. “We love to use wild deer instead of beef in our tartare at this time of year. We’re very proud to work with a high-quality sustainable supplier involved with wild deer population control in Dyrehaven park in Klampenborg, just outside Copenhagen,” she says.

Here’s not just a stunning spot to enjoy autumn’s harvest, but the changing colours in Frederiksberg Gardens. Combining cultural history, innovative cuisine and a farm-to-table approach, Fasangården offers the best of the city and the countryside under one roof.

www.meyers.dk/restauranter/ fasangaarden Instagram: @fasangaarden_frb Facebook: Fasangaardenfrb

Quale, romesco and chantarelles at Bon Lio. Cato Pedersen Wara grew up in Mallorca and brought his Spanish cooking to Oslo.

Restaurant of the Month, Norway Wonderfully Spanish

Going out for a meal in Norway used to be a formal undertaking. It was perhaps because Norwegians didn’t use to go out so often, that when they did, they preferred for things to be a certain way. But in 2013, in an old wooden house in Fredensborgveien, a new kind of restaurant was born.

By Eva-Kristin U. Pedersen | Photos: Margrethe Myhrer

Inspired by high-end Spanish chefs that opened small gastrobars and served cuisine in less pretentious scenery to make ends meet during the financial crisis, Bon Lio set out to give Norwegian clients something new: superb food in a very relaxed atmosphere.

So relaxed in fact, that it borders on disorderly. The music is a bit louder than in other places, the temperature slightly higher, the interior is somewhat disorganised. Even the food is continuously changing. Bon Lio aims for perfect imperfection. In short, it’s a mess. But it’s a good mess. It’s Bon Lio.

No fixed menu “We don’t really have a menu. It changes all the time, depending on what ingredients are available. We use whatever seasonal products are available and create from that,” says Cato Pedersen Wara, who owns Bon Lio together with his wife, Kitty Knutzen. “The most important thing to us is that clients feel welcome and relaxed while they’re here. We take care of them as if they were coming to our home.”

In this extraordinary atmosphere, guests can enjoy contemporary Spanish food with a twist: the ingredients are almost exclusively Norwegian. The only exception are those products that really cannot be reproduced outside of Spain, like the Pata Negra.

Quality and sustainability The reasons are sustainability and quality. Bon Lio takes extreme care to ensure that ingredients are the very best available and that they are in season. “It is very important to us to use local, organic food and to make use of the excellent ingredients we have available here in Norway. In the end, that’s what they do in

Spain and that’s what makes the food so tasty,” Wara says.

According to Wara, the most difficult to source are the vegetables. Tomatoes, for example, are only used for a few selected weeks and only from one organic producer who can guarantee the quality they’re after. “That’s why we’re able to make a really good gazpacho,” Wara says with a smile, underlining that while the base of the traditional Spanish vegetable soup is the same as in Spain, Bon Lio has personalised it.

Predominantly fish Another example of a ‘Norwegianised’ Spanish dish is Bon Lio’s turbot, one of their signature dishes. The chefs treat the turbot as if it were a piglet, frying the skin until it becomes crispy and then serving it with carrot purée. In general, there’s a lot of seafood at Bon Lio, thanks to the restaurant’s proximity to fish of supreme quality. “Out of 12 servings, only one is meat,” Ware says.

One dish you’d might expect to find at a Spanish restaurant, but is yet to be served at Bon Lio, is paella. The reason is that the ingredients just don’t make for a paella as good as the original. And if it’s not good enough, it will not be served at Bon Lio.

Wara explains that in spite of the twists, all dishes have a background. “The food speaks for itself but has undeniable Spanish roots. We’ve taken a lot of old Spanish

Bon Lio makes its guests feel at home.

Spanish cooking with Norwegian ingredients.

The atmosphere at Bon Lio is relaxed. Turbot with carrot purée is one of Bon Lios signature dishes.

recipes and turned them into our own,” says Wara. He grew up in Mallorca and is passionate about bringing not only Spanish food, but also the laid-back approach to eating it, to Norway.

Ambassador for Spanish gastronomy His and his wife’s efforts to ensure both quality and authenticity have paid off, and Bon Lio, which is now located at Grünerløkka, is the only Nordic restaurant to have been designated an ‘Ambassador for Spanish gastronomy outside Spain’. Apart from the approach to food, one of the criteria for the award is to have Spanish speakers available at all times. At Bon Lio about half of the staff speak Spanish.

To make sure Bon Lio is open to everyone, guests can opt for half a menu – or just for a glass of wine with a croquette at the bar after work. “We want to be a great restaurant but also a neighbourhood café,” Wara stresses.

Modern Spanish wine To accompany the food, waiters at Bon Lio are happy to suggest their preferred choices from the rich assortment of predominantly Spanish wine. “We use a lot of modern Spanish wines – most clients are very pleasantly surprised,” Wara explains, while adding that they have also selected non-Spanish favourites on the list.

Bon Lio is open from Wednesday to Saturday. The restaurant being closed for three days a week, staff can rest and recuperate and come back to work energised. “It’s a matter of sustainability,” explains Wara. “Being a waiter is a full-time job. In order for our staff to cope, we must make sure their salaries are good enough to live off, and that they get sufficient rest.”

Bon Lio’s next venture is to open a summer-only hub at where it all began – in Mallorca. Wara is excited. “We’re going back to the roots, but we are still searching for the perfect venue.”

The staff at Bon Lio is welcoming and friendly. www.bonlio.no