BRIAN TRENCHsamples the culinary delights of a four-star boutique hotel in Grythyttan where guests are treated to the very best in Nordic cuisine
THE COBBLED main street of Grythyttan in central Sweden has red wooden buildings on both sides leading to a village square and a red wooden church. Only a simple wrought iron sign indicates that some of these buildings comprise a hotel.
The Gästgivaregården Inn has been there since 1640. Today, it is a four-star boutique hotel colloquially known as Gästis.
When Queen Kristina decreed in the 1640s that there should be inns on Sweden’s roads no more than 70km apart, Grythyttan had a strong claim to one of those inns.
It is on a narrow neck between two of the region’s 3,000 lakes and it was a centre for the historic iron industry of the region. Though now a quiet heritage village, it was chartered as a city in the 17th century.
The hotel’s buildings are spread over an acre of gardens containing some of the 50 guest rooms, each one with individual décor and with a particular story attached to its name. Most of the buildings are in the distinctive deep red of farm houses and barns across Sweden. The colour is Falun red, bearing the name of a mining town from where the copper came that gives the paint its special tint.
Gästis still has the stables required for every coaching inn, though now refloored and minimally refitted as a bar and function room.
Room 52, where we stayed, had a panel telling how Gästis’s owner in the 1970s, Carl Jan Granqvist, broke protocols when he packed the main street and forced a passing royal cavalcade to make an unscheduled stop. Granqvist stepped forward with glasses of champagne for the king and queen, thus securing front-page headlines for his new business.
In the mid-century, the inn had been in decline and there were plans to replace it with a supermarket.
Granqvist took on the challenge of restoring the inn and during 25 years in charge contributed significantly to the rise of Swedish and Nordic cuisine. He played a key role in establishing a school of culinary arts in Grythyttan. This has been housed since the early 1990s in a striking modern building on the edge of the town.
Maltidenshus (meal-time house) started life as the Swedish pavilion at the Seville World Fair in 1992, designed with an eclectic mix of styles and materials to display various characteristics of Sweden and its culture.
In 1999, Granqvist sold Gästis to the c/o group of six heritage hotels run by Swede Jenny Ljungberg from the Hamptons, in the US, where it has its only property outside Sweden. Granqvist still keeps a watchful eye through the several portraits and busts around Gästis and through occasional visits.
The college is now part of the university of nearby Orebro and its restaurant, gift shop, superb cookery demonstration facilities, library and cookbook museum make it another reason for foodies to come to Grythyttan. The museum has a collection from many countries and several centuries, making it a visitor attraction in itself.
The college students find part-time work at Gästis, developing their cooking and presentation skills. A sommelier student took us expertly through the summer dinner menu with matching wines for each of its four courses.
The menu is fixed for several months at a time, there are no more than four choices for any course and the core materials – cod, pork, salmon (actually, the more delicate char), beef – are very familiar.
But the commitment to slow food (two hours for the entrecote, longer for the pork loin), the accompaniments, the wine combinations, the ambiance of low-ceilinged rooms with rough wooden walls, the precision of the waiters’ presentations all make for an unforgettable dinner experience.
Potatoes are cooked with citrus fruits to go with the pan-fried char, egg yolk is baked for an hour as an accompaniment to cod, a single, small pickled red onion pops up with the pork, chanterelles picked in local forests are part of a vegetarian option based on creamed salsify.
The recommended wines for each are served by the glass and include unusual choices from Argentina, Alsace and Austria – and that’s just the As.
The sweet Sauternes (the alternative is a Hungarian Tokai) worked well with the plate of four Swedish cheeses. This includes a delicious sheep’s blue from Bredsjö, 15km from Grythyttan where there is a cafe and farm shop with the blue at various ages and visitors can see the sheep being milked.
A crafts and artisan foods fair at Järnboås, about 20km away, included goat’s cheese producers, a local butcher with a large range of smoked sausages, mustards and honeys with previously unimagined flavours, and vinegars and jams made from local fruits, notably cloudberry.
Back at Gästgivaregården, there are further offerings for the gourmet, a lunch menu served in the salon or dining rooms, that is also deceptively straightforward-looking, and wine tastings in the cellar that once served as a holding cell for prisoners facing trial in the courtroom that is now the main dining room.
The hotel has bikes and a boat or canoe to use on the lake that is less than 200m away. And, of course, a sauna.
Get there
- SAS (flysas.com) flies from Dublin to Stockholm Arlanda (three hours’ drive to Grythyttan) and Ryanair (ryanair.com) from Dublin to Skavsta (three hours). Swedish airline Nextjet (nextjet.se) flies to Örebro (one hour) from Copenhagen, which SAS serves from Dublin.
- Grythyttan’s Gästgivaregården has double rooms from €160 and gourmet packages for two (dinner, bed and breakfast) from €360. Dinner with four glasses of wine (two may do) comes to about €110. There is other accommodation in the industrial town of Hällefors (10km) and the pretty lakeside town of Nora (40km). See grythyttan.com