In New York, Scandinavian Chic

This winter Manhattan foodies have had a hard time keeping up with the avalanche of Italian trattorias and French bistros dictating New York tastes. So when I asked my serious food friends if they’d tried Aquavit--a recently opened Scandinavian restaurant--I got a lot of quizzical expressions and plenty of raised eyebrows. “Not the hottest idea I’ve heard,” one informed source remarked. He noted that Manhattan’s sole white tablecloth Scandinavian restaurant, Copenhagen, closed quietly in 1983. Would opening another now make any sense? Was it possible that the Swedish hotel chain willing to sink about $2.5 million into this restaurant knew something we didn’t?

A few days after the restaurant had opened--with very little fanfare--I walked into Aquavit’s upstairs cafe for lunch. While I ate the smoked Arctic venison and horseradish cream, delivered to my table with thick, rough-hewn slices of rye and sweet creamy butter, I had a look at the dinner menu for the more formal dining room downstairs. It was clear from the ingredients that no Scandinavian grandmother was running this kitchen.

“Most American-Scandinavian cooks haven’t been in touch with the changes in the food over there,” notes chef Christer Larsson, “especially in the more serious restaurants.” Larsson imports fine native ingredients from Sweden and supplements them with local ingredients. He keeps the preparation simple in a style that would make Alice Waters cheer.

You enter the restaurant through the cafe-bar where a custom-designed four foot-tall crystal Aquavit dispenser is the center of attention; it looks like a tubular rainbow. Each segment contains Aquavit infused with a different flavoring. Traditionally these are chased with a tumbler of beer; this bar pours lesser-known Scandinavian labels, including Nordic Wolf and Aass. The combination goes well with the cafe’s traditional comfort foods-- smorrebrod sandwiches at lunch, house-cured herrings and homemade gravlax , Icelandic shrimp and meatballs in cream sauce. Although familiar, these dishes are wrought with the same classy hand as the more formal meals of the dining room.

Aquavit is housed in John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s 1913 townhouse. It has been completely renovated, so when you step out of the wintery New York day you enter warmer climes. There is an eight-story-high solarium planted with birch trees; at one end is a sheet of stone with water quietly gliding down its surface. Colorful paper mobiles, borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art, hang high above the diners, who include a sizeable number of the local Scandinavian business community.

A small square of classic Scandinavian liver pate and a basket of assorted breads arrives the minute you are seated. Then you must choose from the prix fixe menu ($27 at lunch, $45 for dinner).

Uncultivated foods, in the best sense of the word, are the hallmark here, full of foresty techniques and dash of post-nouvelle lightness. The pate, for example, held a fat medallion of rare gamey venison centered in a frame of earthy ground meat and pistachios, all edged with a glittering ribbon of aspic. This venison was nothing like the watery domesticated deer so popular in many restaurants now. A wild mushroom salad, a tangle of infant lettuces piled with sand-colored, warm pleurotes and a large dark forest mushroom was scattered with still-warm roasted walnut halves.

The entrees were equally impressive. If you’d imagined the juniper-smoked salmon entree as being the familiar thin-sliced style, this thick chunk of lightly smoked fish would have surprised you--a generous filet full of juniper flavor was poached to velvety firmness. Creamy trout roe studded with fresh salmon eggs was spooned alongside the fish--a sublime combination. The grouse, a fan of ultra lean slices over an intense stock and cream-enriched sauce, was sprinkled with little bits of smoky morel mushroom; it was the sort of dish to thrill the heart of any hard-core game lover.

Desserts here have a sort of upscale homey quality. Lingonberry-poached pear with homemade vanilla ice cream, a clafoutis made with Swedish blueberries, and a “cheesecake” that’s barely sweet, faintly cake-like, with a mound of warm cloudberries (these golden raspberries grow only above the Arctic Circle).

For now the ever-changing parade of trends seems to be out. So don’t expect a rash of Nouvelle Nordic clones. But Aquavit takes the best foods of a region, serves it with a fresh slant, and is doing so with obvious promise.

Aquavit, 13 W . 54th St . , New York , (212) 307-7311.