NORDIC VALUES, LOCAL INGREDIENTS
Eldr head chef Jenny Warner explains how our new five-course journey through Nordic cooking was created by combining local ingredients, Nordic values and traditional techniques – as well as a heavy dose of collaboration.
What defines Nordic cooking? For me, fresh produce is at the core of everything we do. We’re guided by the principles of seasonality, sustainability and the use of age-old techniques like cooking over fire, smoking and pickling.
And so, when it came to creating our new five-course Nordic experience for Eldr, we started with produce and the commitment to source only the best ingredients from exceptional farmers and expert foragers. That’s why the menu will be an ever evolving one, depending on what’s fresh and in season.
“We’ll be honouring the guiding principles of Nordic cooking, but constantly playing with ideas.”
We’ll be honouring the guiding principles of Nordic cooking, but constantly playing with ideas. After all, in Nordic cooking there aren’t really set rules like you might find in classical French and Italian cooking. Instead, our kitchens are places of collaboration, filled with chefs from across the globe who contribute their own ideas – while respecting tradition.
And that’s how we’ve gone about creating our menu. You’ll find plenty in the menu from my childhood in Finland – including the rye bread that we’ve developed from my mother’s recipe – but an equal amount of input from my talented team of chefs. They’re all highly trained in Nordic cooking, but each have been given the space to express themselves and share their own experiences.
Take the mackerel fish course on our launch menu. Created by my sous-chef Nicolas, it takes inspiration from his home country of Chile for a delicate spin on the Nordic tradition of pickling fish. Rather than being fully preserved, the fish is prepared like a ceviche that uses Nordic ingredients and flavours – while the skin is cooked with fire.
“The dish is also just one way we will be working to minimise waste in the kitchen.”
The dish is also just one way we will be working to minimise waste in the kitchen – perhaps the most important guiding principle of Nordic cooking. The ceviche mix is made using the bones and head of the mackerel, which is already a highly sustainable fish. Then the cod skin it’s served with comes from fillets we have on the Roof Garden menu.
Another example comes from the Herdwick Lamb which headlines our launch: the belly is used to make a ragu that’s served as part of the dish, while a seaweed jam – which the meat is marinated in to give a nice caramelisation on the grill – is made from the off cuts of Japanese nori from the sushi counter in Sachi, our Japanese restaurant.
Further courses include a celebration of spring veg with Wye valley asparagus, morel mushrooms and Västerbotten cheese, as well as a pallet cleansing play on a cheese course with goat’s curd and local honey that we smoke in house.
One of my favourite dishes is our dessert, which uses the humble sea buckthorn, a berry that I spent the late summers picking and preserving in Finland. An invasive species in the UK, it’s not only highly sustainable, but packed with vitamin C and extremely flavourful. For our launch, my pastry chef Ivan led the development of a sea buckthorn tart that’s served with meringue charred directly with hot coals.
Finally, we also have a drinks pairing that we’ve carefully developed with the drinks team at Pantechnicon. Rather than being a straight wine paring, you’ll find beer, wine and birch sap sav – which will also change with the menu.
There’s also a non-alcoholic pairing that includes innovative products from some exciting producers, as well as in-house ferments and cocktails created by our bar and kitchen teams. I’m really proud of what we’ve created together, and I’d love to welcome you in to give it a try – we’re open every week from Thursday to Saturday.