DINING REVIEW : N.Y. Gets a Taste of Gustaf Anders Menu

Rain did not dampen the spirit of a “Midsummer Night’s Dinner” at New York City’s James Beard House on Monday.

Chef Ulf (Anders) Strandberg of Santa Ana’s Gustaf Anders restaurant became the first Orange County chef to prepare a dinner for the house. The audience for the sold-out event was composed mainly of die-hard food enthusiasts, and Strandberg wowed them. The menu, a variety of Swedish specialties, couldn’t have been a bigger hit.

The James Beard House is home to a charitable foundation dedicated to culinary excellence, where chefs from all over the country and from abroad hold cooking demonstrations and fund-raiser dinners.

Seminal food figure James Beard lived there for many years, a small, cozy five-story brownstone in Greenwich Village. The house features a sheltered, ground-level greenhouse and a second-floor dining area big enough to hold around 70 guests. Monday night it was elbow-to-elbow.

The normally shy Strandberg appeared honored by all the attention.

He brought almost everything, including a crew of four chefs, from California, and started work on the dinner nearly a week in advance: homemade Swedish crispbread, two types of pickled herring, his own cured salmon.

Longtime associate Solveig Davis came from La Jolla to assist. Lynn Walker, manager of Kosta Boda in Costa Mesa’s Crystal Court, furnished the dinner with more than 1,000 pieces of Swedish crystal stemware, later donating them to the Beard House.

A good deal of the eating took place in the greenhouse, where guests scarfed up such dishes as smoked reindeer salad, matjesherring , Jansson’s frestesle (temptation)--a crisped potato and anchovy casserole-- gravad lax and Vasterbotten cheese from a traditional Swedish buffet table, washing everything down with aquavit, Scandinavian fire water served ice cold in tiny shot glasses.

Everyone was then summoned upstairs for a sit-down dinner featuring many of Ulf’s specialties from the Gustaf Anders menu.

The first course, a puffy wild-rice pancake, came topped with smoked salmon, fish roe and creme fraiche . That was followed by an exquisitely perfect sorrel soup, as green as Kermit, offset by a delightful, quiche-like tart of spring morels.

Baby red beets with beet greens, butter and lemon, more cold country food, accompanied slices of roast lamb blanketed with a Swedish grandmother’s sweet-and-sour sauce flavored with fresh dill. New potatoes rounded out the plate, de rigueur at any Swedish summer dinner.

After a marzipan whipped-cream dessert called Swedish princess cake, Strandberg came upstairs to greet the guests, something he almost never does at his Santa Ana restaurant. He received a wild ovation.

It is wonderful that Orange County chefs are receiving national recognition, and I’m informed that Pascal Olhats of Pascal in Newport Beach has received a similar invitation from the Beard House. If he accepts, New York should be in for another treat.