Pensionat Furuhem—Sweden

Field Office made its way to the Skåne region of Sweden, recently written up in The New York Times by Lisa Abend as a paradise for food lovers in the Swedish countryside, and landed on the west coast for lunch at Magnus Nilsson’s new inn and restaurant. The first thing that struck us wasn’t the food—it was the craftsmanship. The furniture, the light fixtures, every surface felt considered, like nothing had been chosen simply because it was available.

The meal closed with a spectacular version of spettekaka, Skåne’s classic meringue tower—a “spit-cake,” named for the rotisserie it’s slowly built and baked on over an open flame. Marcus mentioned that Skåne’s version of the meringue leans on egg yolk, not only the whites as you’d expect, which gives the whole tower a different color and character than the meringues most of us grew up with.

Before we left, we bought two enormous bottlees of apple cider from Brännland Cider, made in collaboration with Magnus using apples harvested straight from his own organic orchard in Axelstorp. We packed them into the car alongside a hönökaka—a flatbread we picked up in Gothenburg that was, no exaggeration, the size of a boogie board, and set off on the long drive through Sweden and into Norway.

A Perfectly Ordinary Restaurant

Pensionat Furuhem is, in its own words, an exceptional inn with a perfectly ordinary restaurant and a bakery. For more than a hundred years, people from Båstad and the surrounding area have come here to eat, drink, stay the night, and have a good time. Nothing more, nothing less. The doors open early, when the first cinnamon buns come out of the oven and their smell pulls people in for breakfast. They close in the small hours, once the last dinner guests have wandered home or up to one of the rooms.

Daniella, Frida, and Magnus Nilsson run it that way on purpose. Their explanation for the restaurant borrows from an unlikely hero: dill. The best variety, they’ll tell you, is simply called “Vanlig”—Swedish for “ordinary.” It’s not greener or more fragrant than other dill, and its leaves have no special shape to speak of. It just delivers, year after year, exactly what the place and the people who live there need, without fuss and without needing to adapt itself to anything. That’s the model for the restaurant too—ordinary in the best possible sense, and fully woven into its local community. Much of what lands on the table comes from producers nearby, people the family knows, alongside what grows in their own orchard and gardens in Axelstorp outside Båstad.

Why It Matters

It would be easy for a restaurant with this level of craft—in the woodwork, in the lighting, in a dessert as technically demanding as spettekaka—to reach for spectacle, run by one of the most highly decorated chefs in the world. Furuhem does the opposite. The ambition here is expressed through restraint: grow the good, ordinary dill; use the apples from your own trees; let the inn run on the same rhythm it has for a century. It’s a quieter argument for what Skåne’s food culture actually is, beyond the version that makes headlines.

Support This Work

→ Pensionat Furuhem—Östermalmsvägen 1, 269 36 Båstad

→ Lisa Abend’s full story in The New York Times: A Paradise for Food Lovers in the Swedish Countryside