Culinary

DRINKING THE SUMMER LIGHT text and photography Sonya Devi TWO RECIPES INSPIRED BY STOCKHOLM MIDSUMMER After a recent trip to Stockholm and its archipelago, I witnessed midsummer for the first time — that magical, never-ending light which dips low before returning, spent in the company of friends at a beautiful lakeside home. I felt truly privileged to experience this phenomenon in such an authentic way. These simple recipes are designed to capture that feeling of drinking the summer light: seasonal, quick to prepare, and made for sharing with friends. Stove-Top Confit Tomatoes on a Bed of Harissa Yoghurt To Serve 500g Greek yoghurt Harissa paste For the Confit Tomatoes 100g olive oil (enough to cover at least half the tomatoes) 400g ripe tomatoes, cherry or vine 1 tsp sugar 5 garlic cloves 2 sprigs of oregano 5 sprigs fresh thyme, plus extra leaves picked, to garnish Method Place the olive oil, tomatoes, sugar, oregano and thyme in a small saucepan. Cover with a lid and cook over a low heat for about 10 minutes, then add the garlic cloves and continue cooking for a further 15 minutes, or until the tomatoes have softened but still hold their shape. Adjust the timing to suit the size of your tomatoes. Set aside to cool completely, then stir through the fresh oregano leaves. Spread the yoghurt over a plate and swirl through a teaspoon of harissa paste, making a well in the centre. Top with the confit tomatoes and serve with fresh thyme and the confit garlic cloves. Courgette Gazpacho​ A twist on the classic gazpacho, and a welcome way to use up a glut of courgettes. Smooth and elegant, it is the ideal way to cool off through these increasingly subtropical summers — and can be lifted with a touch of fennel liqueur for a more festive occasion. For the Soup 400g courgettes, roughly chopped 3 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for drizzling 1 large cucumber, roughly chopped 2 garlic cloves, roughly chopped 1 banana shallot, roughly chopped 20g fresh dill, plus extra chopped, to garnish 10g fresh mint, leaves picked Juice of 1 lemon 150g organic full-fat milk, or plant milk 200ml vegetable stock Sea salt and black pepper For the Croûtons (optional)​​ 1 tbsp olive oil 100g day-old bread, lightly toasted and torn into 2cm piecesSea salt Method Preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan/Gas 6. Tear the bread into large chunks, remove the crust, and add to the milk to soak. Halve the courgettes and cucumber and remove the seeds. Roughly chop the deseeded courgette into 2cm chunks. Place the courgettes in a roasting tin, drizzle with a tablespoon of the olive oil and season with salt. Roast for 20 minutes, then leave to cool. Place the cooled courgettes, cucumber, garlic, shallot, dill, mint, lemon juice and the remaining olive oil in a food processor or blender and blend until very smooth. Add the milk-soaked bread and continue to blend until well combined and smooth. Transfer to the fridge to chill for at least three hours. Fry the cubed bread in the olive oil and season to taste. Serve the soup in bowls, loosening with a little chilled vegetable stock if too thick, and top with the croûtons, if using. Garnish with chopped dill, fennel fronds and a drizzle of olive oil.

Culinary Icons at Puente Romano: A Feast for the Senses Text by Natalia Muntean Puente Romano is not easy to summarise. Named after a first-century Roman bridge at its centre, the resort began as an apartment complex before opening as a hotel in 1979, and has since grown into something closer to a self-contained village. Comprised of whitewashed houses named after local Andalusian towns, subtropical botanical gardens, a long gold beach, its five pools, spread across the resort’s grounds, each offer a distinct atmosphere, true to its moniker of Mediterranean Playground, and enough ground that guests require a map to navigate it, Puente Romano is a kaleidoscope for the senses.  What sets the resort apart gastronomically is not the number of restaurants, more than twenty, but the relationships built that help them thrive. Nobu Marbella, GAIA, Leña, and the recently opened La Petite Maison are not simply tenants. They are the result of two decades of deliberate curation by Daniel Shamoon, who took over the resort from his father in 1995 and has since built something closer to a culinary ecosystem than a dining programme. Culinary Icons is where that ecosystem becomes visible. “It started as an idea to celebrate the chefs whose restaurants have made this resort what it is today,” Shamoon said. “It keeps getting better.” On June 2nd 2016, Puente Romano hosted the second edition of Culinary Icons, gathering five of the world’s best chefs. Two hundred and thirty-five guests had gathered in La Plaza, the resort’s open-air square that can function as something between a piazza and a stage set. SIPS Barcelona, named the World’s Best Bar in 2023 and Best Bar in Europe three years running, is now in summer residence at Bar La Plaza and welcomed guests with a Paloma Santoni Spritz created exclusively for the occasion. In its second year, the event’s format has sharpened considerably. Where the first edition brought together three chefs, this one expanded to five. Nobu Matsuhisa opened the afternoon, followed by Izu Ani with a dramatic Salt Crusted King Crab; Dani García brought his Nitro Tomato with green gazpacho and Motril shrimps, a dish first created at Puente Romano over twenty years ago that has since followed him to kitchens across the world; and Yiannis Kioroglou presented Rigatoni aux Truffes and Caviar Pissaladière, rooted in the French Riviera culinary tradition. Albert Adrià closed the afternoon with dessert. All the proceeds raised from the ticket sales were given to the Spanish Red Cross, the event’s charity partner, in support of their humanitarian work.  Chef Nobu Matsuhisa presented two dishes on stage: Tuna Tataki Tosazu and Seabass Kombujime Oshi Sushi, the latter a pressed rectangle of rice and fish so precisely calibrated it looked closer to architecture than lunch. When asked what he hopes guests notice when they watch him cook live, he said that foremost, he is enjoying himself. “I like to introduce my Nobu style, my sushi, with more passion,” he continued. For a chef with sixty restaurants across the world, the pleasure still appears to be genuine. That pleasure has its roots in a creative rupture that occurred more than forty years ago, when a young Japanese chef arrived in Peru and found an entirely different logic of cooking. “In Japan, fish is sashimi: fresh fish, wasabi and soy sauce. But in Peru, the same fish is cooked in a completely different way, with lemon juice, garlic, chilli, cilantro, onions. Ceviche is what changed my mind. It gave me more freedom to use fish in a different way.” The word he returned to was freedom – the permission, discovered in another culture’s kitchen, to treat Japanese cuisine not as a fixed set of rules but as a foundation. That foundation now supports sixty restaurants worldwide. When asked how he maintains consistency or intimacy across that scale, his answer reframed the question entirely. “The history is the team. A lot of people have been working since the beginning. They know everything. That’s why I’m a very lucky person.”  “My food is very simple,” he continued, “and maybe one misunderstanding people still have is that they think about sashimi in a traditional way. My way: no wasabi, instead jalapeño and different spices. Maybe some people say: This is not sashimi.” And that is the whole point of the Nobu cuisine – to disrupt and bring together different worlds.  If you were wondering what a chef of his calibre reaches for in need of comfort, the answer is simple. “Anything my wife cooks. She’s like my private chef at home.” Albert Adrià closed the afternoon with dessert, presenting two dishes: the Cork Stopper, disguised as a wine cork, and a Chocolate and Yuzu Waffle that balanced richness with the brightness of Japanese citrus. Adrià is sixty-one years old, forty of those years spent in professional kitchens. “Sometimes I believe I don’t know. You always need to learn more and more because I always think about the customers, not about me. People pay a lot of money to eat. So when the plate is empty, and the faces of people are happy, I don’t need to know more. The plate doesn’t lie.” His thoughts on dessert’s place in fine dining were direct. “The dessert is the end of the party,” he says. “It’s the last thing you remember when you go back home.” He has been making that finish for four decades, and his impatience with how little the category has evolved was evident. “I don’t see too many changes in dessert compared to twenty years ago. Of course, we talk about the reduction of fat, of sugar, better balance, but people still like sugar.” On legacy, Adrià said that it is the young chefs who worked with him. “The most famous chefs around the world worked at El Bulli. This is our school.” And the feeling he wants to leave with guests? “ La cocina es felicidad. Cooking is happiness,” he says.  Culinary Icons will return with a Third

Under: A Culinary Meditation Beneath the Atlantic Text Jawhanna Berglunds  Reaching Lindesnes, at the southernmost edge of Norway, feels like traveling not just across distance, but toward a new state of awareness. The road unfurls through pale landscapes and sea mist until it meets the calm, glassy waters of the Skagerrak. After five hours of travel and a restless night, I arrived at Lindesnes Havhotell, a coastal sanctuary that whispers comfort rather than declares it. The hotel’s devotion to hygge that distinct Scandinavian warmth wraps around you from the moment you enter. Soft lighting, clean lines, and rooms overlooking the sea create a cocoon against the wildness outside. It is both base and balm, a place to prepare the senses for what comes next: Under.   Just 200 meters away, on the rocky shoreline, Snøhetta’s architectural masterpiece breaches the boundary between sea and sky. The building seems to have slipped deliberately from land into the depths, a concrete monolith half-swallowed by the Atlantic. This is Under, Europe’s first underwater restaurant, where the natural world becomes both setting and soul. Inside, the oak-clad interior glows with a subdued warmth. Dining five and a half meters below the surface should feel confining, but the opposite is true it’s almost meditative. The space breathes, and so do you. Opened in 2019 after five years of design and construction, Under is the vision of brothers Stig and Gaute Ubostad, modern pioneers of Norwegian gastronomy. Their concept is less about indulgence and more about communion with sea, with season and with craft. The service is hushed yet intuitively present. The staff move with confidence and restraint, anticipating needs rather than responding to them. It’s seamless, almost telepathic – yet never impersonal. As the final course fades, a quiet melancholy takes hold. Joan Didion once wrote of “the ordinary instant of an ending,” and here beneath the Atlantic, I understood exactly what she meant. I found myself lingering reluctant to surface, to leave the stillness behind. Its achievement lies not in classification but in emotion in its ability to connect architecture, cuisine, and nature into a single, resonant experience. Dinner begins not with a dish but with a gesture: a palate cleanser of blueberry and spruce needle. The blueberries, fermented for two years, taste of both forest and time, an invitation to slow down. It’s the sort of detail that signals what’s to come: food as reflection, not performance. Before you stretch an eleven-meter panoramic window, an underwater horizon that shifts with every ripple and school of fish. The ocean becomes part of the conversation. Each course, each sip, feels synced to its rhythm.   A 2023 Smaragd Riesling from Austria grown on steep, sun-struck slopes opens the experience with bright minerality. It’s followed by a biodynamic Catalan white, paired with Norwegian bluefin tuna caught just hours away, the cleanest expression of “local” imaginable. A 2016 White Rioja, aged in three oak barrels, follows alongside langoustine, its freshness amplified by the wine’s soft oxidation. Then arrives monkfish, tenderized for ten days to achieve an almost otherworldly texture, complemented by an elegant Red Rioja whose lineage reaches back to the 1700s. Even the non-alcoholic pairing, Meadow, a series of handcrafted local juices feels deeply considered, a pastoral echo beneath the waves.   Would I return? Inevitably. Under is one of those rare places that doesn’t simply feed you, it transforms you. Like a film whose final scene haunts you long after the credits, it leaves you suspended between memory and awe, surfacing slowly, carrying the ocean with you. www.under.no/en/ www.havhotellet.no/  Image courtesy of Odalisque Magazine, shot on Leica.

Villa Valentina opens in the heart of Stockholm A Spanish farmhouse opened its doors on 28 May in the centre of Stockholm. Villa Valentina opened in Slussen, occupying a building with panoramic windows on all sides and a west-facing terrace overlooking Stockholm’s waterway and Gamla Stan. The restaurant seats close to 400 guests, 150 of them on the terrace, and represents the new flagship for Urban Italian Group, which operates 17 restaurants across Sweden and Spain including Basta, Florentine, and Lola Maria. The concept draws on Andalusian and Mediterranean food culture, with an interior of mosaic floors, hand-painted walls, Murano chandeliers, and an open kitchen and bar that runs in a 360-degree arc through the space. The menu is built around sharing plates from land and sea: gambas with sobrasada, squid with chorizo and salsa verde, pluma ibérico, alongside a Basque cheesecake with brown butter and a dulce de leche with rum among the desserts. The wine list spans accessible to more exclusive selections; cocktails follow a Mediterranean thread from aperitivo to closing drink. “There is something in Spanish cooking I have always been drawn to – the simplicity, the respect for ingredients, the ability to create a great deal of flavour without complication,” says Kristjan Longar, Co-owner of Urban Italian Group.  For founder and CEO Brazer Bozlak, the location at Slussen, one of Stockholm’s busiest transit points, was central to the vision, which developed during the group’s years of expansion in Marbella and Madrid. Villa Valentina opens 28 May at Mälarterrassen, Slussen.

NENI and Rex Bar Open in Stockholm this June NENI Stockholm and Rex Bar open on 15 June at the top of the new Miss Q development at Fridhemsplan on the isalnd of Kungsholmen. The two concepts share a continuous rooftop space, restaurant, bar, and terrace flowing into one another. The bar and restaurant are designed around the idea that an evening here should shift naturally rather than be divided into distinct parts. NENI is a premium-casual restaurant inspired by the culinary world of Haya Molcho, led here by head chef Ergent Durici, who previously ran the kitchen at TAK. The menu draws on Eastern Mediterranean flavours and is structured around sharing – dishes placed at the centre of the table rather than ordered individually. The kitchen is open, the terrace stretches across the rooftop, and the 230 seats are arranged to encourage movement throughout the evening. Adjacent to the restaurant, Rex Bar is the social anchor of the space. The cocktail programme is curated by Vasilis Kyritsis and Nikos Bakoulis, the bartenders behind Line in Athens – currently ranked 8th on the World’s 50 Best Bars list. The bar is conceived less as a destination in itself and more as a place that extends the evening: from golden hour on the terrace to something that runs later into the night. Both open for dinner from 15 June, with lunch and brunch service to follow later in the year.