Aquavit – New York's Nordic original, four decades strong

Aquavit opened in 1987, when Swedish restaurateur Håkan Swahn introduced New York to gravlax, herring and bracing shots of the spirit that gives the restaurant its name, choosing the bold name Aquavit after his homeland's storied spirit rather than anything more cautious. The format he borrowed from Stockholm's Operakällaren, and from his original partner Tore Wretman, was itself a statement: one address holding two distinct dining rooms, a casual café beside a serious, cutting-edge kitchen. Marcus Samuelsson's arrival in 1995 pushed the cooking further into the city's consciousness, but it is under Chef Emma Bengtsson, in the kitchen since 2010, that Aquavit has kept its sharpest form, working seafood, pickling and cultured dairy into seasonal tasting menus of five or eight courses. It holds two MICHELIN Stars, awarded the same year, 2014, that Bengtsson was promoted to run the kitchen.

01The room and the setting

The restaurant has moved only once. For seventeen years Aquavit occupied a townhouse that had once held the offices of Nelson Rockefeller, before relocating a block away in 2005 to its current home in the Park Avenue Tower on East 55th Street.

The most recent redesign, by the architecture firm Spacesmith, opened a solid kitchen wall into a brass-framed glass window, so the dining room can watch Bengtsson's team plate each course in real time. Wide-planked Danish oak floors with butterfly joinery, walnut sofas and half-moon banquettes in dark blue Danish fabric now sit beneath the mother-of-pearl light fixtures that have hung there since the move.

02The chef

Emma Bengtsson grew up in a small town in western Sweden and trained through Sollentuna's Edsbacka Krog and Stockholm's own Operakällaren before crossing the Atlantic in 2010 to join Aquavit as pastry chef. She was promoted to executive chef in 2014, the same year the restaurant first earned two MICHELIN Stars, a mark she has kept for more than a decade. She was the first Swedish woman chef to reach two stars and only the second woman in the United States, after Dominique Crenn, to do so. Her pastry training still governs how the kitchen runs — rulers and micro-scales are standard equipment, even on the savoury side.

Insider tip

Smart casual dress; five- or eight-course tasting menus in the Dining Room, à la carte in the Bar Room; 76 seats total.

03The cooking

The food keeps close to Scandinavia's own vocabulary rather than reaching for invented fusion — light, bright plates built on fresh seafood and the old disciplines of pickling and preserving. The tasting menus change with the seasons: halibut arrives with salt-baked celeriac and a smoked-whey beurre blanc, kombu-brined yellowtail sits beside watermelon granita, and a savoury cheesecake with a sourdough crisp sometimes appears as a pre-dessert. Meat is cooked low and slow in the kitchen's sous-vide baths, sometimes for as long as 72 hours, a method Bengtsson applies even to kombu.

04What to order

Bengtsson's Arctic Bird's Nest, a dessert that took her three years to perfect, rarely leaves the menu and is the dish regulars return for. In the more relaxed Bar Room, the kitchen's casual register produces a fried cod sandwich that became one of her own favourites and a shrimp roll that remains one of the restaurant's most-ordered dishes, alongside classics like herring, Swedish meatballs and gravlax.

05Wine and drinks

The wine list runs long, and the bar keeps its own programme of aquavit infusions and cocktails built around the clear spirit, traditionally cut with caraway or dill, that gave the restaurant its name back in 1987.

06The neighbourhood

Aquavit sits in the Park Avenue Tower at 65 East 55th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, deep in Midtown Manhattan's grid of office towers and townhouses, a world away from the kitchen's quiet Nordic discipline inside.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.