Magic Out of Mould: Inside the World’s Wildest Restaurant - Unit 11

C1 Advanced · Gapped Text · Ready for C1 Advanced 4th Edition, Macmillan Education

You are going to read an article about a famous chef and his restaurant in Sweden. Six paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A–G the one which fits each gap (1–6). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

Magic Out of Mould: Inside the World’s Wildest Restaurant

In an age when chefs are regularly compared to artists and philosophers, Magnus Nilsson is among the world’s most renowned. But is the simple act of cooking ever worthy of such worship?

This is made all the clearer when you hear the story behind each ingredient comprising a meal. What you are eating is an edible heirloom – something passed down through generations. So while Nilsson’s food is not ‘popular’, exactly, it has been deemed important cultural material.

This idea is not original, but Nilsson’s book is the most exhaustive recent attempt to catalogue a segment of the world through its food. To compile it, he amassed 11,000 articles and 8,000 photographs, and travelled to the farthest reaches of the region to conduct interviews, all in his spare time.

This comes, in part, from Nilsson’s commitment to local sourcing: he cooks almost exclusively with ingredients that can be bought within a few hundred miles. His chefs search for moss, herbs, grasses, mushrooms, flowers and seeds from the restaurant grounds, and about half their produce is grown in the garden.

This, too, was the guiding principle behind his recent book, an encyclopedic record of the past several hundred years of Nordic home cooking. It comprises 730 recipes, including about 30 Nilsson expects no-one ever to cook.

The belief that food is a form of art, and therefore deserving of worship, goes some way to explain Fäviken’s popularity. But there is more to it than this.

The vast majority of people intrigued by Nilsson will never visit Fäviken, so they watch him on TV or check his Instagram, which recently featured a picture of what appeared to be two mouldy squares of breakfast cereal.

As a home for a fine-dining restaurant, it is an odd choice, yet Nilsson’s embrace of this landscape has set him apart as one of the most innovative chefs working today. In the eight years since its opening, Fäviken has become a pillar of the ‘new Nordic’ trend in food culture.

Magnus Nilsson, head chef at Fäviken, Sweden’s premier fine-dining restaurant, is not fond of repeating himself, but there is a motto he uses with frequency: ‘Do it once, perfectly.’ He says it when observing that a chef has failed to place the cream in the same place on every dish, or when explaining why he paid so much for his elaborate composting facility, which has reduced the restaurant’s waste to practically nothing. When it was suggested that one be omitted from the collection because it was impractical, Nilsson offered to withdraw from the project, rather than publish it incomplete. The central thesis is that a country’s dinner table reveals a great deal about its culture’s values, economy, natural environment, and even family structure.

Nilsson’s day job, however, is running Fäviken. Set 375 miles north of Stockholm, deep in the forested province of Jämtland, the restaurant is an hour’s flight from Stockholm to Östersund, then a 75-minute drive north-west. Its setting is otherworldly. Mountain vistas unfold with little human interruption. At the height of summer, the sun shines for 24 hours a day. In the winter, the temperature drops to –40 C.

Intended to bring diners into an encounter with the origin of the food they eat, the movement has spread across this part of Europe. Like Danish chef René Redzepi in Copenhagen, Nilsson spends hours searching woods and riverbanks for ingredients. One dish is a single scallop poached in its own juices, which arrives at your table in its gigantic shell atop a bed of moss – the ocean meeting the forest. Food as an exercise in high aesthetics has been part of popular culture since the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià brought his restaurant, El Bulli, and its pioneering molecular gastronomy ‘lab’ to international fame in the late 1990s. But Fäviken is a restaurant whose food is also talked about as an expression of moral values.

During the long winter months, when the sun only breaks the horizon line for an hour or two each day and the land is sheathed in snow, such activity is not possible. Then the kitchen serves mostly foods they harvested in the warm months and then preserved. But the food isn’t just appealingly local; it’s a seemingly ‘authentic’ expression of a place.

Perhaps this is why a season’s worth of reservations in Fäviken’s 24-seat dining room sell out in minutes to international diners. One recent guest told me that he was not there just for the food. ‘I think of Nilsson more as a philosopher or poet than a chef,’ he said. If our dinner plates reveal who we are, what does Nilsson’s rise to fame say about our fantasies and obsessions?

It was mycelium growing on straw, the caption explained, ‘waiting to be turned into broth.’ That nearly no one knows what mycelium is (it’s a fungus) doesn’t bother his admirers – the thrill seems to be that somewhere a hunter-chef is cooking it perfectly. This is our contemporary fairytale: a Swede making magic out of mould.

Magnus Nilsson, head chef at Fäviken, Sweden’s premier fine-dining restaurant, is not fond of repeating himself, but there is a motto he uses with frequency: ‘Do it once, perfectly.’ He says it when observing that a chef has failed to place the cream in the same place on every dish, or when explaining why he paid so much for his elaborate composting facility, which has reduced the restaurant’s waste to practically nothing. When it was suggested that one be omitted from the collection because it was impractical, Nilsson offered to withdraw from the project, rather than publish it incomplete. The central thesis is that a country’s dinner table reveals a great deal about its culture’s values, economy, natural environment, and even family structure. ___ Nilsson’s day job, however, is running Fäviken. Set 375 miles north of Stockholm, deep in the forested province of Jämtland, the restaurant is an hour’s flight from Stockholm to Östersund, then a 75-minute drive north-west. Its setting is otherworldly. Mountain vistas unfold with little human interruption. At the height of summer, the sun shines for 24 hours a day. In the winter, the temperature drops to –40 C. ___ Intended to bring diners into an encounter with the origin of the food they eat, the movement has spread across this part of Europe. Like Danish chef René Redzepi in Copenhagen, Nilsson spends hours searching woods and riverbanks for ingredients. One dish is a single scallop poached in its own juices, which arrives at your table in its gigantic shell atop a bed of moss – the ocean meeting the forest. Food as an exercise in high aesthetics has been part of popular culture since the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià brought his restaurant, El Bulli, and its pioneering molecular gastronomy ‘lab’ to international fame in the late 1990s. But Fäviken is a restaurant whose food is also talked about as an expression of moral values. ___ During the long winter months, when the sun only breaks the horizon line for an hour or two each day and the land is sheathed in snow, such activity is not possible. Then the kitchen serves mostly foods they harvested in the warm months and then preserved. But the food isn’t just appealingly local; it’s a seemingly ‘authentic’ expression of a place. ___ Perhaps this is why a season’s worth of reservations in Fäviken’s 24-seat dining room sell out in minutes to international diners. One recent guest told me that he was not there just for the food. ‘I think of Nilsson more as a philosopher or poet than a chef,’ he said. If our dinner plates reveal who we are, what does Nilsson’s rise to fame say about our fantasies and obsessions? ___ It was mycelium growing on straw, the caption explained, ‘waiting to be turned into broth.’ That nearly no one knows what mycelium is (it’s a fungus) doesn’t bother his admirers – the thrill seems to be that somewhere a hunter-chef is cooking it perfectly. This is our contemporary fairytale: a Swede making magic out of mould. ___

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