Work Text:
Jopson —
Filing this from the road. Expect wifi to be spotty here on out — very mountainous terrain, poor infrastructure. Bleak as all hell. Stark, yes, but somehow incredibly beautiful at the same time?
Attached what I had on externals, a few scans & whatnot, but you’ll need to do a deep dive for most things from abt the mid80s onwards. Bridgens in Research can probably sort you out? Surprising how much never made the transfer to digital. Harry’s got loads of alternatives for the inside spread, take your pick of the lot, but he and I are both in love with the panorama of the property. You can almost feel the snow underfoot. Sil in her fur coat is a close second.
Glad to be out of the cold at last, I’m like an Amazonian bird in that respect.
Hope all’s well. Sending love to Edward and the twins.
— James x
Fitzjim —
Hate to be a stick in the mud, old thing, but there’s editorial latitude and then there’s — well, whatever it is you’ve sent me here? Three thousand and change over your limit? Cut something, for the love of God. I’m begging you. It’s meant to be a profile of the bloody restaurant, not a heart-eyed Francis Crozier biopic. Absolutely not a sentimental autobiography. What is this lachrymose shit? Please please please don’t make me regret giving you this assignment.
Harry’s pics are darling. Naturally I’m mad for the archival stuff. No way in hell we’re running that one of an absolutely plastered S.C. in the halter top with the water pistol, unless you’ve conveniently forgot whose name is on your pay stubs and the fucking masthead?
— Tom
ps Edward says come round for dinner next time you’re in London
The Fire Goes Out at Kissarsuut
by James Fitzjames
photographs by Harry D. S. Goodsir
L'avenir n'est point encore; le présent n'est bientôt plus,
le seul instant de la vie est l'instant de la jouissance.
The future is not yet; the present is soon no more,
the only instant of life is the instant of enjoyment.
- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
There's a problem with the equipment, I'm being told. Broken Harry laments in transit.
Why we’ll be picking bits of glass out of our pockets the whole journey, if we’re not careful. Which is how I’ve wound up driving round and round the suburbs of Trondheim, Norway’s third-largest city and home to majestic old cathedrals that we cannot spare a moment for, unless they happen to be conveniently viewable from the motorway as we search for a replacement. It is just past one o’clock on a sun-bright Saturday and we are — I am afraid to even think to myself, as if the thought might will it into being — going to be exceedingly late.
Our seating is not until seven yet we’re still a three hour drive away. Overhead, the sun has barely risen high enough in the sky to drive the chill out of the air. The mercury sits right at zero degrees, Harry informs me, prodding an app on his phone with the touchscreen gloves he’s kitted out himself with conductive metal thread. Snow is predicted. I have little experience driving in inclement weather of any sort, much less on the wrong side of the road.
If, by some small miracle, we make it with time enough to visit the in-house sauna before dinner, I will breathe easy. As it stands, I am quite likely to hyperventilate. Harry offers to take the wheel. I decline. Politely. Navigation is my forte.
We have paid in advance, in full, for one of the ten seats available on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. They seat parties of two, four, and six: no cosy chef's table in the kitchen, no communal dining with strangers. No — it almost should go without my saying — online reservations. You will be, in fact, forced to pick up the telephone on the first Monday of each month and hope that the books will be in your favour.
You may find yourself superstitious, thinking you should have made a pilgrimage, lit a candle and said a prayer, though you have not been to any church — Reformist, Papist, or otherwise — since you were a boy. Perhaps you might have trapped a small, fuzzy woodland creature in Hyde Park to sacrifice on a makeshift altar constructed in the front room of your flat. Anything to appease the reservation gods, and they are jealous ones.
Make no mistake about it. Anyone who manages to snag a table, after suffering that long-forgotten indignity, the busy signal, will easily end up paying the equivalent of a month’s rent on their Islington sublet. You will get through — finally — to the estate manager. She will inform you, in a voice gone raspy from years of smoking roll-ups, that they can offer a seating for two. Six months from now, yes, but at least it is on a Saturday. Pressing a little further for the details, she will pleasantly tell you that the single supplement costs about the same as the (optional) wine pairing. You frantically enter the numbers into the currency converter open on your laptop as the voice on the other end asks for your credit card details. Their website, such as it is, has been stunningly unhelpful.
Overall, it’s less of an expenditure to pay for a second seat straightaway, and hope that a suitable companion will materialise in time for you to make flight reservations. Depending on the season, the larder, and the yield from the rivers, streams, skies, and traps, dinner comprises anywhere from a dozen to twenty-odd courses. Sitting at an intimate table for two with a complete stranger for hours upon end might be someone’s idea of a grand night out; it is hardly my own, and I would rather not pay through the nose for the privilege.
Will you be staying the night?
Yes, you tell the estate manager, yes we — not yet knowing who will make up that ‘we,’ but that can be sorted later — will require a room. Two beds, if at all possible.
Breakfast the next morning?
Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Little do you know, as you read out a string of numbers, the expiry date, the security code from the back, that you are booking a spot at the last dinner seating that will ever occur at this incarnation of a two-Michelin-star restaurant unlike anything you’ve encountered in your — ahem — considerable years on the job.
There has been no great announcement, no fanfare in the press. Only the quiet certitude that something that began as an experimental partnership has succeeded: more top ten lists than you can shake a broom at, best chef, best female chef (whatever that means), most influential cookbook, plaudits, awards, stars, and the real metric for success in this era — user-generated Instagram hashtags galore.
However, all you care about in this instant is keeping the quaver from your voice as you transmit these details and are asked if you wish to confirm this non-refundable no changes no substitutions no accommodations for allergies or dietary restrictions reservation. You could spend a leisurely fortnight in Porto instead. Take a villa with four bedrooms and a walk-out veranda all for yourself and a friend. But you acquiesce and say yes, yes I will indeed take it.
After this ordeal you will be sweating around the hairline from the adrenaline rush. A moment to catch your breath and digest the certainty of what you have committed yourself and one, as-yet-unsuspecting other person to. You mutter aloud that it will be fine, all will be well, whereupon you will stand up from your desk and immediately become so dizzy you must lean against a chair to steady yourself.
Then on to websites to compare flights. Better to fly to Stockholm, Sweden (a grueling seven hour drive) or to Trondheim, Norway (a paltry three)? You consider the relative merits of trains as opposed to car hires, scribble down sums on bits of paper, with the currency converter still open, in order to purposefully offset the cost of this, destination dining: a holiday planned entirely in reverse.
But though you have been there, back when the concept was coalescing — it has grown in a direction you would have scarce been able to predict. Otherworldly is a word that seldom crops up even amongst the food-obsessed, certainly not in the context of a restaurant; a place where you sit usually at a table, usually in a chair, possibly with another person, and food prepared by someone else is brought to you. What else is certain apart from the bill at the end?
Here, though, the word is apt. The setting, apart from the grandeur of the landscape, is oddly pedestrian. A large red building that resembles a barn from the front, housing an old grain storage house which functions as the main dining room. A reindeer skin teepee enclosing a fire pit around which people may gather at any hour on chairs strewn with fleece cushions and woolen blankets. The food? As strange and unpredictable as the aurora borealis, which, if the sky is clear, free from particulate matter, and the magnetism strong, you may chance to see flare in the night sky.
The restaurant in question is Kissarsuut. That is what the TripAdvisor page, Google location map, and website domain name read. But everyone, everyone in the know at least, calls it Kissa. Reverently, of course, in an undertone, as if she — and the enterprise is definitively feminine — might herself speak aloud to correct you.
History and tradition brought forward with an eye on innovation. Experimentation. Trying new things and putting those into conversation with the oldest techniques in humanity’s culinary repertoire, when we first rocked up out of our caves and onto the savannah, stretched our pointed spears above our heads, and thought to ourselves what would happen if I carved that lion up for supper?
Scandinavia had its culinary moment in the early 2000s. Relics from that era still dot central London: Ekte, The Harcourt. We can mention Aquavit, that old reliable standby for upscale versions of the IKEA plate lunch. But to travel to an ersatz recreation of a Stockholm bistro via tube and taxi is one thing, to drive to the very edge of the Swedish woods through swirling snow flurries quite another.
One can expect Kissa’s menu to be devised on the day itself, with certain themes revisited time and again. Spring’s freshness, fragile and precarious, leads imperceptibly into summer bloom, and just as you are awash in the harvest, in fecundity and abundant game, winter descends. They are closed from November to March. Even head chef Silna Holgerssøn’s creativity demands respite.
This culinary outpost has been reshaped in the last decade, transforming from unremarkable hunting estate, moose fondue restaurant, and fishing lodge to double-Michelin starred destination. Kissa has thrived under the careful stewardship of its current trio of proprietors: Tamara Blanky, the estate manager; Francis Crozier, well-known for his time in the tabloids in the 80s and 90s, all the while spearheading the revival of nose-to-tail cookery in the UK; and Holgerssøn, whose focus underpins the whole enterprise. And to accomplish what they have, quietly, without press releases and a social media presence, only for the enterprise to flourish from sheer determination and an unwavering commitment to excellence?
But first, God willing, I have to make it there.
♨ ~ ♨ ~ ♨
My dear friend Harry Goodsir has agreed to accompany me on this endeavour, thereby sparing me the indignity of using stock photography or taking the one allotted photo per course with my own pedestrian point-and-shoot.
We arrive separately at Gatwick. Me by private car, him by National Express coach. He with a brandless rucksack, much worse for the wear, me with my Delsey 29” titanium hard-shell destined for the baggage hold. Harry has chosen to wear a heavy woollen peacoat and only sheds it once we are on the tiny plane that will bear us to Trondheim. He stuffs the coat beneath his seat in order to free up room for the bags carrying his equipment. Too large to fit in the overhead compartments. Harry makes a woeful face and asks if they might ride in the seat next to him, which is conveniently vacant. Our brisk flight attendant — a flaxen-haired blonde of a height with me — tells him in no uncertain terms that they may not. Reluctantly, and with the other passengers staring us down in a way that manages to be both British in overt hostility while Scandinavian in politeness, Harry permits her to check them.
Back in greater Trondheim, we stop in to a nondescript suburb by the name of Hell where we are saved by an electronics shop with the right replacement bulb. Having become engrossed in conversation with the shop assistant about long exposures and how to set his apertures to best to capture magnetic activity, Harry is wholly reluctant to leave. Only by threatening to throw his stuff into the Trondheim Fjord can I steer us back onto the motorway heading east, which is what we should have done hours ago.
Though my blood pressure is astronomically high, soon enough the industrial low-rise buildings give way to gentle hills and expansive pine forests. One cannot help but be calmed by their majestic presence. Harry rolls down the window, remarks on how crisp the air is. Like biting into a Winesap in autumn he says, and inhales through his nostrils.
That’s quite good I say, through gritted teeth, whereupon I proceed to roll the window back up and lock it. From the driver’s side.
Reception is atrocious, though it would not matter in the slightest if we were able to get a call through. Heedless, I do not slow down even as snow begins to fall. I clutch the wheel and vow, aloud, never to venture past the M25 for the remainder of what I hope will be a long, long life. From the passenger seat, Harry winces at my swearing.
To my utter relief, we arrive with ample time before the seating. Harry, happy as a mollusc, sets out to explore the grounds on foot in the swiftly fading light. Clad though I am in the most up-to-date gear that Arc'teryx can provide — a wicking synthetic base layer, fleece pullover, waterproof, down-insulated, Gore-Tex parka, heavy knit socks laced right up into sheepskin-lined boots — the cold manages to seep in. To my joints, down deep into my very bones. I manage but a quick walk round the building before conceding defeat and hurrying back inside to safe haven, alee from the biting wind.
We are the last guests to arrive. I count one Tesla, two Audis, and with our Volkswagen added into the mix, three of those parked around back. I hoist up my suitcase and make for the front entrance, where I am greeted by the same woman I spoke to on the phone all those many months ago.
Since everything has been prepaid — entirely unlike those exclusive sushi restaurants one finds in Tokyo where the bill, housed in a small, ornate box carved from fragrant hiba wood, is sent to one’s hotel the following day, all the better to avoid sullying the rarefied experience with anything so debauched, so base as commerce — I am shown straight into our lodgings. The room, singular, is a simple affair: one large bed with two twin-sized woollen bedspreads, a striped rug that covers the floor on the way to the no-frills en suite bathroom. There are no televisions, clocks, minifridges, cocktail nuts, ice buckets, tea kettles, or complimentary branded soaps. There is, at least, toilet paper, to my very great relief.
A fire has been laid, ready to be lit should we request it, but the room is deliciously warm thanks to the radiant under-floor heating. We had that installed that six years ago the estate manager tells me proudly, with the kind of wry, warm smile that says there’s a tale waiting to be told, if you have it in you to ask and, then, the grace to sit a spell in order to hear it.
Tamara Blanky, who is only in her mid-forties but has been known as ‘Old Tam’ for going on at least two decades, is a natural-born raconteur making one such overture right now. She is a good listener, as well, a quality which served her well as she traveled across Central and Eastern Europe in the waning years of glasnost’, excavating stories of exile, persecution, and destruction that had long been smothered beneath the official Soviet blanket.
My muscles ache from the long day of travel, my head from the bright winter sun, and the dry, cold air is playing havoc with my sinuses. But there is background to gather. I wonder if we might relocate our conversation into the lodge’s front sitting room, where a great fire is always blazing away in the cooler months and there is, in true Scandinavian fashion, a pot of coffee always at the ready.
She suggests we do one better, and invites me to accompany her to the sauna before we’re due back for the dinner service; her to offer hospitality, and me, to sit at a wooden table and take it. Not the indoor one for the paying guests, built of pristine Canadian red cedar and heated with an electric stove, on which my thoughts longingly linger as we make our way back outside into the cold, traversing the main path down past the communal building which houses the staff. All but a scant few live in this set-up, while the proprietors share a moderately sized farmhouse all to themselves, which you will find nestled into the gentle slope of a hill. These workers, mostly young, hail from North America and mainland Europe. A few have come by way of Greenland inspired by Holgerssøn’s success, along with a lone Sami woman, seemingly much older than the rest. They are going about their business, largely unmolested, on their way to and from the greenhouses, the smokehouse, the frost-bitten garden in which only the hardiest of crucifers await their final harvest.
A few steps from the front door of the chefs’ house sits a second sauna. Constructed in the traditional style of Old Tam’s native Estonia, she has been stoking the fire this morning to heat a pile of hot stones. Though it lacks a chimney, it resembles nothing so much as a hut you’d expect to find standing on spindly chicken legs hidden deep in a haunted forest, a nightmare out of a fairytale.
It was the first thing she built, she tells me, as we undress and scour ourselves clean in the outdoor shower, all my synthetic armour stripped away, when she and Holgerssøn arrived a decade ago. Yet the weather-beaten logs of Norwegian spruce and Scots pine seem almost to be one with the surrounding landscape. Honestly if you weren’t looking for it, you might think the small building chinked with moss had simply sprouted there, like a mushroom after a drenching summer rainfall.
My job consists of asking questions. Usually the denizens of high-end restaurants have their origin stories firmly in place by the time I show up, but I have been fortunate in my ability to tease out the truths that lurk beneath the fictions. My questions for today are simple: how did they get here, what have they done, what will ensue?
Why did they bring another chef on board?
Regular readers of this little column may recall that Francis Crozier and I crossed paths many years ago, in Bath, where he was serving as Bill Parry’s second-in-command at the beloved, much-missed Prince Regent, during a decade known mainly for excesses in styling mousse and cocaine. He, to his eternal credit, has apologised for the circumstances of that meeting — the details of which are easily locatable on your internet search engine of choice.
After some stints on the continent, restless, moving from Nonay to Bocuse, thence to Duperré, squandering an entire year in Marseille (fishing, he claims), before washing up at Joël Robuchon’s in Bordeaux. London called, and he answered. Under the ever-growing aegis of the Barrow Hospitality Group, he, Jim Ross, and bright young thing Graham Gore had their own dust-ups while their fame skyrocketed.
♨ ~ ♨ ~ ♨
What can I tell you about that era, for those who missed it? We were rounding the bend, culinarily speaking, and pushing the gas pedal all the way down to the floorboard, our engines filled with the novelty of Britain being cool. We tossed out the avocados and sundried tomatoes, pale imitations of Californian seasonality, ditched the French beurre blancs and ersatz Italian pestos.
For decades we, as a nation, had gone in search of taste, crossing the Channel for unpasteurized cheeses, rump steaks still bleeding out onto the plate, a loaf that audibly crackled when you pulled off the crusty end bit, a treat for whoever made the stopoff at the boulangerie and who might, if the bread was particularly warm and the day overcast and cool, end up eating the loaf, bit by pilfered bit, until you’d have to turn on your heel and march right back into that same bakery and request une autre baguette s'il vous plaît, and wedge this second loaf, which you would resolutely vow not to eat one single bite of, into the string bag you’d carried so proudly round the marche, buying a half kilo of cherries here, a few canelés there, a little bundle of the tiniest turnips to cook in the drippings given off by a roasting duck.
Once back on English soil we met in gardens for intimate dinner parties, compared wine merchants, and discussed the best ways to smuggle cheeses home on the Eurostar. But then, all of a sudden, we didn’t have to go to the Continent anymore to find good food.
A few things happened simultaneously to make this culinary convergence possible. We Brits, Londoners in particular, realized our own green and sceptered isle was, in fact, global. Cosmopolitan, even, beyond a narrow stretch of multistarred restaurants housed in hotels. Air travel got much, much cheaper thanks to the proliferation of budget airlines. All of a sudden one could spend a weekend on the Mediterranean coast for about the cost of a train ticket to Leeds, and eat anything and everything. Barcelona. Bologna. Budapest. We were expanding our worldview, even as those carbon-belching jetliners ensured that those once-remote places would soon enough house Little Englands of their very own — but we will save that lament for another, post-colonial day.
The point being, average people caught on to the notion of the minibreak, and a few brave souls went as far as to try the food in the places they visited. Media types wrote think pieces, television programmes were commissioned. We rediscovered the timeless recipes of Jane Grigson, the stern admonitions of Elizabeth David, and were thrilled to discover that, like Moliere’s bourgeois gentilhomme — who spoke prose without intending to do so — we had been possessed of a cuisine all along.
What this meant was a renewed interest, the New Wave, if you will, in dining. We’d head to a gastropub any old afternoon, queue up for a bar seat at the River Café. Chefs were ascendant. Newspaper columns, magazines, radio. Telly. The new rock stars. And if you were in possession of a direct line, which in those days would have entailed sending a fax complete with covering letter, then you might have found yourself with a table, near the busy swinging door that led into the kitchen but a table nonetheless, at Marco Pierre White’s eponymous spot in the Hyde Park Hotel, Tom Abernathy’s Somerset House, John Diggle’s storeROOM, way ahead of the Hoxton craze, or, the pinnacle of it all, Jim Ross’s great, gilded Covent Garden 60-seater, Cove.
♨ ~ ♨ ~ ♨
Back in the sauna, my head is swimming. We have trekked in and out enough times for me to lose count, each time thinking to protest enough enough already when Old Tam tips yet another bucket of ice-cold water above my head. In deepest winter, she explains with a wicked grin, they’ll dive into a snowbank instead. Has to be fresh, she says, soft like. Otherwise it’ll cut your skin to ribbons. An ice-hole cut into a frozen lake is the best of all, but I wanted this close to the house so as to use in the dark.
Sting though it might, I cannot deny that I have become warmed right through from the tips of my toes all the way up to my scalp. I am also, strangely, terribly sooty. My poor hair has frizzed out something ghastly which will definitely need to be addressed if Harry insists on photos with me in the frame.
Outside, the light is indeed fading fast but enough lingers to show up the mottled pink and red patches on my skin. Tam assures me these are a good sign, brought to the surface by the bundle of birch leaves with which my body has been swatted and brushed. Supposedly good for the circulation of lymphatic fluid, which is neither a substance nor a sentence I had ever, before now, contemplated.
Just outside are some rough-hewn benches covered with blankets on which we sit, wrapped in towels with funny roughspun sauna hats on our heads. She puffs away at those horrid, acrid cigarettes, pours out shots of that summer’s batch of aquavit, aromatic with dill, aniseed, and caraway. We discuss, in a vague, drowsy sort of way, what these three will do once Kissa’s fire has been extinguished once and for all.
She shrugs. We’ve got a loose itinerary. We’ll see my family, then we’re off to Istanbul. The old trade routes, caravanserai. Silk Road. I want to see the Bukharan cemeteries in Tashkent.
As for Crozier?
Oh, we reckon he’ll be along for a leg of it.
And after that?
Dunno. Hear he’s put an offer in on a boat.
Footsteps approach; the snap of a frozen twig underneath a heavy boot. It is the man in question, come to fetch us, though not to join in our libation. Tam goes on ahead to dress for the evening service.
He takes her place on the bench. I contemplate putting my clothes back on but would prefer to keep them clean. I am surprisingly dirty, all told. The dreadful hat, though, I set aside.
How did he end up here? On the fringes of what a sane person would venture to call civilization? When he’d had New York, London, Hong Kong, Paris?
He sticks an unlit cigarette in his mouth, then takes it back out, considering my question.
It got to be way too much. John Barrow wanted China. Fuck America, he’d say, the real frontier? Had to be Asia. The whole Pacific Rim. New world with all those millionaires. Right when the handover happened they were sinking money left and right. Wine cellars visible from the main dining room that could only be accessed by someone attached to rappelling gear. Indoor fountains. Ice sculptures. One-to-one ratio of waiting staff to guests. Personal fucking butlers. But as fast as we were making money — and, to be clear, we were making shitloads of money — it was going right back out the door.
There’s a lot of flabby arses you have to kiss on your way up. By the time you get to where you want to be, or failing that, as close as you reckon you’re going to get, then it feels like you’re getting what you’re due. And when you’ve put in twelve, fifteen, twenty years on the grind, you think to yourself, finally. Why wouldn’t you want to strut around in that feeling for a little while?
I venture that sobriety suits him, though his restive nature has only become more apparent in its wake.
It starts out fun he says. And each time you quit there’s a little voice. And what you hope, deep down, is that in quitting, you can make it as good as the first time when you inevitably start back up again.
Is it?
He puts away the cigarette.
There have been memoirs, tell-alls, blind items, and, almost inevitable in this era of disinfecting with sunlight, accusations. Certainly nothing of a piece with certain things that have been levelled at his peers. But rumours do fly and a few do land.
Jim and I had fun. It was a heady time. You probably remember. Crozier presses his fingertips against his tear ducts as if trying to stave off an incoming headache. Look, we all have things we regret.
And Francis Crozier has regrets aplenty. Though they predate the early 2000s we can say that is when they caught up with him at last. First there was the very public split with hard-partying It Girl Sophia Cracroft, the stylish but troubled heir to the Franklin shipping fortune. Then the overdose that cut Graham Gore’s life short and drove a wedge between Crozier and Ross, his business partner and closest friend.
The tabloid vultures were circling. He was caught on camera abusing the doorman at John Morfin’s Hippodrome, made his disastrous Top Chef appearance during the infamous Hoar and Gibson season, and, according to rumours, attempted to strangle the erstwhile owner of a fleet of Hawaiian plate lunch food trucks during an ayahuasca ceremony gone horribly, horribly wrong.
[Ms. Cracroft, through her publicist, declined to comment.]
Does he regret anything in particular? Perhaps the loud, public denunciation he’d issued after some hapless food critic, newly promoted, called Cove’s signature dish (pigeon studded with truffles, stuffed with foie gras, wrapped in Savoy cabbage and braised in a Marsala reduction) a cack-handed attempt to heap prestige ingredients atop one another in the fantastical hope that the final result will prove transcendent enough to justify its exorbitant cost rather than inducing misplaced nostalgia for the overcooked liver from the school canteen?
He roars out a laugh. My limbs are warmed through by now. Though clad in nought but a towel, I am happy to stay out in the cold for a little while longer. All my weatherproof paraphernalia seems, somehow, pointless in the presence of that laughter.
Christ, we couldn’t take the damned thing off the menu. Jim used to threaten to do it, you know, each new location we’d open. He’d send me over there first to get the kitchen set up, the staff trained, then he’d fly in for the soft launch. And fuck me, didn’t matter if it was Melbourne or Singapore, whatever.
You think today's trends are overdone? Worse back then. A hundred times worse. Because people weren’t chasing novelty like they do now. No, they’d heard all about it, read about it in one of your glossy lifestyle magazines, or from a friend, and they didn’t want anything that deviated in the slightest from what we had at Cove back in England. The local press’d be at the opening, asking where the damned pigeon was, and straightaway we’d have to get our supply chain guy Irving on the line and say, bring me all you can get your hands on.
He left, yes. But he came back. Why?
I was finished with that world, sure. Cooking, though. He shakes his head pensively. Wasn’t quite finished with that.
What about now?
Leaving Barrow — hell, leaving Jim? Hardest thing I’d ever done. But I’d ended up in a bad, bad spot. I wasn’t going to change that culture. Not on my own. Certainly not in the state I was in. It took time, ages, for me to think about what my place in cuisine was going to be. Once you take away the lifestyle, chasing a high and then a crash, what’s the goddamned point? A standing table at the Groucho?
While my own membership was four years in the making, even that long wait had to be expedited by several existing members. Best not to mention it, I decide. Might spoil the atmosphere.
Instead I remind him of what he accomplished in fine dining, his lasting legacy from training legions of chefs de partie, especially once he’d dried out somewhere sunny. The way he revolutionised the way we thought about eating animals, from his staunch refusal to use factory-farmed meat to downright showcasing "the nasty bits" at his own establishment.
He got people to eat marrow from split veal bones with charred toast and garlicky parsley salad; for humble stewed pig trotters to be transformed into the height of sophistication; and yes, for us to consider, again, the pigeon. This time without the pomp and circumstance and simply roasted whole with its head intact and a wing tucked under its breast as if caught in a conflagration while roosting there on the plate.
Need I remind him, too, that The Bainbridge, now under the ownership of brothers John and Tom Hartnell, old hands from the Hong Kong branch of Cove, has continued to refuse a Michelin rating since Crozier handed back his own two hard-won stars?
He smiles benevolently. They’re good lads he says. I trusted them to steer the ship in the right direction.
But if those stars ceased to matter to him, why has Holgerssøn spent years chasing them? Why come work by her side in their pursuit?
She wanted them he tells me after a lengthy pause that makes me wonder if I might be growing rather chilly after all. Because of what happened back in Aarhus.
♨ ~ ♨ ~ ♨
I have yet to see the proverbial her, and speculate as to whether or not she’ll be any more talkative now that Kissa is shutting its doors for good. Historically, this has not been the case. Historically, that is also a major understatement. She gives the impression, when she speaks, that her words have been tumbled around the hopper of her mind until they come out as smooth as polished glass.
Like Francis Crozier, who began working full-time at his parents’ Northern Irish pub after leaving school at sixteen, Silna Holgerssøn’s lineage is culinary. Her father spent many seasons as a chef on Royal Norwegian Cruise Lines, sending remittances home to his extended family, but ultimately chose to settle in Europe. Aarhus, specifically, Denmark’s second-largest city and home to a small but fiercely tight-knit community of Greenlanders who relocated there in the late 1960s.
He parlayed his personal savings into opening his own establishment, hjørne, and while the younger Holgerssøn proved adept in the kitchen, he was adamant that she go on to post-secondary study rather than follow him into trade. As he had hoped, she was accepted to Aarhus University with a planned focus on environmental sciences, but rarely attended her lectures. By the following spring she had withdrawn, much to his chagrin, and embraced wanderlust.
Being untethered to a single place she could cover a lot of ground. She would work for a spell somewhere, helping out with harvests, the grape pressing, butchery, curing, whatever she could get, and then move on. Kitchen work was always available in the high season for touristed areas if she fancied slightly more stability.
By this point, technology had made global communications much easier. She was traveling around the Yucatan Peninsula when she learned over Skype that her father had suffered a stroke, the first of several. With Tam now in tow she returned to Europe to take control of the restaurant which had been floundering for a while, owing to her father’s deteriorating health. Thanks to a government-sponsored grant for female entrepreneurs Holgerssøn was able to keep the lights on.
After he passed, she threw herself into work. Large loans were secured against her childhood home to finance an ambitious expansion. The press got wind of her. She was profiled, filmed for documentaries. There was buzz. One Michelin star was awarded. A second was felt to be on its way. Owed. By time and the fates. And then came the global financial meltdown.
Reservations dried up almost overnight. People stopped dining out. She sold anything that wasn’t nailed down, including her car. Despite some stop-gap measures, including a few small-business loans for ethnic minorities and a well-received pop-up in Copenhagen, she was hemorrhaging cash. The lenders came to collect. She considered giving up the gig entirely. The itinerant lifestyle appealed less now she had a partner in tow. Maybe she’d emigrate, learn transcription for Tam’s oral histories, go to law school.
On that subject, she doesn’t offer to converse. However, we can dig deeper without being too terribly invasive. Trawling the Wayback Machine for Chowhound and Blogger threads, a story can be pieced together, supplemented by clippings from local news outlets that reprinted, verbatim, a surprisingly personal press statement.
Holgerssøn dropped off the map again only to resurface as the newly-hired chef de cuisine at the old hunting lodge and lacklustre eatery Skogens Värdshus that would, after a few months under her command, be rebranded as Kissarsuut.
I’ll have my chance to ask her about that transformation tomorrow, Crozier assures me, as we walk back to the main lodge. He deposits me at the door to my room and heads for his chef’s whites and thence the kitchen. Inside, Harry is still wearing his outerwear and taking up most of the bed and the tables alongside. Laptop, lenses, cameras, external batteries, and the flashbulb which we risked life and limb to acquire are strewn about haphazardly.
My body is clean from the sauna, though my skin’s a bit prickly and my hair looks a fright. Once that has been quelled with a liberal helping of pomade and a prayer to the heavens, I am ready for our meal, and intend to approach it in the manner of a supplicant, a pilgrim on the Camino de Santiago. Harry, though, must be harried to change his clothes.
But Lord, he will talk. Would I like to walk out with him and some of the other guests, whom he has somehow managed to befriend in my absence, after our meal? He is hoping to catch the aurora with some long exposures. I haven’t the heart to tell him that though the weather forecast may call for clear skies, Tam expects the fog to roll in this evening. A shame, but what’s a little magnetic disturbance in the atmosphere, really, compared with dinner?
Over the years, I have seen trends come and go with alarming regularity. Nihil sub sōle novum: wake me when it’s finished, chaps. Spectacle yields to austerity, simplicity loops back around to extravagance. Pageantry is what you will find, today, because food has taken a backseat to its own appearance. Why, who cares how it tastes as long as it pops on the ‘gram?
We begin in the great room with drinks and nibbles. A bottle of estate-drawn still water, at room temperature, is brought to the table. I am plied with a more refined version of that aquavit Tam poured us earlier. I suspect I can taste juniper berry, mirabelle plum, maybe even pine needles. Harry is perfectly content with a rhubarb and elderflower cordial. Looking at the price for the alcoholic pairing, I suspect his prudence will serve him well. Still, needs must.
To start: long-fermented baby carrots, their greens still attached, stood upright in a glass jar alongside cured reindeer sausage. Harry proclaims both of these interesting.
I am brought honey mead fermented in the bottle. Harry’s empty glass is whisked away. Flaxseed tuiles draped over a wooden spoon, to be broken into fragile shards and dipped into an astonishing emulsion of mussels and vinegar. A teacup in which a tiny square of just-made cheese floats in whey, sprinkled with dried, powdered white goosefoot. That this plant would be considered a weed by most is evident in its rather charming common designation: fat-hen.
Trout roe, a little cacophony of orange spheres the size of tapioca pearls, a generous spoonful nearly overflowing the crust made of dried pigs’ blood that they rest in. I consume mine in one voluptuous, messy bite. Harry nibbles at his, proclaims it interesting as well. That single bite has me wishing there were more, a whole edible plate: animal, iron, salt.
The cured slices of goose which follow are perfectly adequate, saved from being pedestrian by the birch syrup they have been glazed in. A dish of three crispy lichens served with powdered egg is lovely to look at, texturally bizarre to consume, as if a calves’ brain has been transformed, by some magical alchemy, into a pressed-potato crisp.
On to the main dining room. We are escorted up the stairs and past the massive wolfskin coat on which shines a spotlight. I find it subtly ostentatious, but cannot deny that it is evocative. Cured meats and smoked whole fish hang from hooks in the ceiling, bundles of dried herbs are fanned out like brooms against the wooden walls. And Holgerssøn behind the stove, her face placid, her whites immaculate, hair tied back, her concentration unflappable.
Tonight our dishes come out in a quiet procession and while the presentation is stunning, one would be hard-pressed to call it flashy. Natural materials are abundantly evident in the plating. Pottery from nearby artisans, hand-hewn wooden boxes, daunting slabs of granite.
A scallop practically quivering with freshness, smoked over woodsy juniper branches. We are encouraged to eat it with our hands and drink the liquor straight from the shell. Paired, thank the fucking heavens, with a premier cru Chablis from 2013. A man can only endure a certain quantity of torture in the name of sustainable gastronomy; he must have wine.
King crab seasoned with ättika vinegar and served with ‘almost-burnt cream.’ A tiny morsel of edible duck, battered in sourdough and fried until its coating has barely set. It sounds simple but borders on grotesquery by having the whole feathered wing still attached to the bit you’re meant to eat. Neither Harry nor I know how to approach the matter with anything resembling grace and resort to using our hands once more. Worth the slippery fingers, as it turns out.
Pigs’ head compressed into golden spheres and skewered on birch twigs, plated over a scattering of smooth grey stones gathered, one imagines, from the rocky coastline. I think but do not say that they look startlingly like cake pops, despite their covering of shaved, pickled gooseberries and pine needle salt.
Bread made with moose blood instead of water, then braised in moose broth until it has the texture of a clootie dumpling, served with chopped back fat and onion cream. Foraged mushrooms scattered with fireweed stems and freeze-dried wood sorrel. An egg coated in ash made, the waiter tells us with great gusto, from dried sheep’s dung, with a sauce of pickled summer marigold. The whole eggs, black as carbon, are presented in a nest of dried stems and grasses which, I am assured, we are not meant to eat.
More wine — always, always, always more wine.
I feel Crozier’s hand in the suite of dishes which follow, not to mention the theatrical way in which they are presented. A long-cooked marrow bone, sawed open right there in the dining room by two staff with impish grins upon their faces, topped with diced raw cow’s heart and grated swede. Dry-fried cod, bold, almost cocky, in its unadorned simplicity, with only a touch of spruce powder sprinkled over the top. A “slice of a retired dairy cow” along pickled onions with honeyed undertones that remind me, despite being chicly stained with beetroot, of the kind of thing you’d get in a ploughman’s from a family pub in Northern Ireland in the seventies.
Holgerssøn’s influence shines through in a porridge “filtered through the forest floor.” Harry, who has not spent the last few decades becoming increasingly bored with tableside gimmicks, is nearly beside himself at the presentation. To my mind it borders upon twee but he is utterly transfixed.
Grains grown within the region: barley, rye, wheat berries, are cooked into a porridge and finished with butter the colour of old parchment. Dried chives saved from the summer harvest and puffed grains are scattered over the top. It is mounded in a shallow dish and brought to our table alongside a translucent glass teapot with two spouts. In this sits beef broth infused through rehydrated moss as well as oak leaves from the previous autumn which have completed most of their decomposition journey and, at our table, manage to finish the job. This liquid is upended over the surface with unusual delicacy by our large-boned waiter, then finished tableside with a smattering of greenhouse-grown chicory and oak leaf lettuces.
It’s beautiful Harry says, and while he is only supposed to take a single photo, he gives the sad-eyed man stood at attention beside our table such a keen smile that he conveniently looks the other way, allowing Harry to snap a few more.
Quite a thing to behold. But the flavour?
Interesting I say.
Earthy Harry agrees. We chew quietly on puffed barley and more small bits of fermented carrot, which appear to be a recurrent motif this season.
The small glass teapot is removed. I get more wine. At this point in the evening my notes become mostly illegible, moreso once I drink the salted duck egg schnapps that serves as a transition to afters. Harry looks sceptical on principle. It reminds me of Advocaat, and I wonder if it would be bad form to ask about getting another. Luckily I am saved from this faux pas by the arrival of dessert.
Sugar, along with salt, vinegar, and the imported wines, are the only ingredients at Kissa not cultivated or hunted on the premises. I joke to our waiter about turning the land to sugar beet production after the closure. That lands like a lead balloon. Luckily the sweets are sticky and force me to keep myself occupied with chewing. Salted liquorice, tar pastilles, sunflower seed nougat, birch resin tarts, meadowsweet caramels wrapped in wax paper, dried rowan berries, green and crystalline candied angelica.
Deprived of the usual dose of coffee — a long black, an espresso, or even a Turkish — with which I usually conclude a meal, I find myself shattered. The flight, the drive, the sauna, and the food have all conspired to exhaust me. I thank the waiting staff (six, by my last count, but there could be more lurking about), pay my respects to the kitchen, and leave Harry to it, chatting with his newfound friends. I barely stir when he comes to collect his photographic gear for his midnight adventure.
Sorry he says and turns the overhead light off at last.
♨ ~ ♨ ~ ♨
Only a few flashes, Crozier tells me as I accompany him on his morning constitutional the next day. However early we are up, and it is quite bloody early, Harry has managed to beat me to it. You really didn’t miss much. It’s strongest in the winter months.
The snow is light and fresh, and I am assured that he will be fine, better than, snapping his photographs and marveling, open-mouthed, at every tree and twig. We may see Holgerssøn with her sledge, checking the traps a final time and carting them back to dismantle, oil, set aside.
We locate her in an open clearing between the woods and a gentle hill that rises to the north, blocking the outbuildings from view, a fur-clad speck of grey and white. Crozier waves to her. She waves back and we wait for her to catch us up. On the way back we encounter Harry who, as predicted, can be found lying on his side, attempting to arrest the silhouette of a bird casting a shadow on a striated piece of rock. Together we walk in to breakfast.
For those who opt to stay overnight, the next morning’s meal will send them on their way with a lightness in their mood but not, surprisingly, in their wallets. But if the price is reasonable, the expedition entire is not. Forget the London lines for Sunday brunch at Le Vesconte’s Hank & Hyacinth or Fairholme’s Two Spoons and a Fork: factor in the cost of an international flight, a car hire, lodging, and dinner the night before; it is hardly a matter of popping round on your way to the cinema for an afternoon matinee.
Light pours in from the windows in the great room and makes the space altogether more airy.
Beautiful Harry says, and reaches for his camera in an attempt to capture the dust motes floating in a watery yellow sunbeam. I myself am more captivated by the handsome table that has been laid with very little and yet exudes abundance. A wedge of yellow cheese, shavings of cured pig jowl, more white than pink, more fat than meat. Ramekins lined up like little soldiers: a gamey pâté of wild bird liver, caramelised dairy butter, whipped trout, cheese that has barely set to a liquid quiver. A rye bread that is buried in a slow-banked fire to cook overnight before being cut into the thinnest possible slices with the sharpest possible knife. Cloudberry and lingonberry preserves. To drink, raw milk or apple juice, and coffee, thank the saints for coffee.
Harry happily goes for another yet wander around the property, I transcribe my notes from the previous evening to the best of my ability, then place a video call to Alexander McDonald, Professor of Social Anthropology, who speaks with me from his book-lined study at the University of Edinburgh, about the ethos embodied here.
Sustainability is a word that we hear bandied about a lot, but all it means is to live without relying on extraction. And not just stopping short of exhausting the whole, but to think about balance, equilibrium, even.
That isn’t to say that the flow of goods and populations, movement of things and persons, doesn’t predate the systems which brought mercantile capitalism into being, and if you want my take on the matter, people would do well to remember that capitalism, like the the divine right of kings, is neither permanent nor natural.
When I mention my gratitude for the coffee with breakfast he chuckles. He has, I decide, the kindly manner of a tutor that any undergraduate worth their salt would be desperate to impress.
Naturally. One does not have to adhere to world systems theory in order to see how we’ve benefited immensely from a global supply chain that stretches from Sumatra to Cape Town and brings us Israeli aubergines, Spanish capsicums, Turkish figs, Andean quinoa, Taiwanese oolong.
Abundance, I suggest, in other words.
Precisely. He smiles, revealing deep dimples which are visible even over the shoddy wifi connection. Idly I wonder if it is too late for me to take up postgraduate study, then dismiss the idea out of hand. I would hate the weather in Scotland.
But nowadays we expect it. Perhaps it was the way rationing dragged on well into the 1950s that had the opposite effect on us: now, we are gluttons. First for sugar, then tea, coffee, chocolate — all the stimulants of industry and empire — and now for these same, and cheap meat, overfished Atlantic cod, probably three-quarters the world’s supply of potatoes, slash-and-burn palm oil.
What then does it mean to look for something genuine, authentic, in this day and age, when what seems to matter most are the surfaces? Appearances above all else.
Certainly positivism has fallen out of favour as a paradigm. But for those of us who work with material culture there is still something to it, the recognition of something, well, essential. Tradition comes with its own entanglements, of course.
Like the legacy left by an absent parent? Or, I venture, what might come to be known as the signature dish of a restaurant?
Each person brings their own expectations to that experience. Maybe they’ve had it a hundred times before, but yes, the interpretation lies with them. That’s what makes food and cuisine such a fascinating object of study. It contains the whole gamut, you see, of what makes us human.
I am digesting this information when Crozier comes to fetch me for lunch at the chefs’ house. In contrast to the almost stark simplicity of last night’s meal and today’s austere breakfast, it is the very picture of abundance. The unsightly end bits from those elegant reindeer sausages have been sliced up and cooked in rendered duck fat with the insides of overwintered leeks, some frozen red pimentos, and new potatoes that, I am told, have come from a tin. There is juice, packaged, from a carton, and marmalade airmailed from the UK. The morning buns courtesy of Tam’s deft hand at pastry contain less sugar than you’ll find in the version at your local café or service station, but do not skimp on the requisite freshly-ground black cardamom seeds.
Harry proclaims the marmalade wonderful, the packaged juice wonderful. The buns? Wonderful. Tam clears a few dishes, really a pretext to go for a smoke outside, leaving the four of us at the table. Though I am meant to be the professional, Harry’s earnestness is impossible to resist, and he has many, many questions ready to hand.
He begins by asking Holgerssøn about her time in Patagonia with Steve Stanley, a place that he’s always wanted to visit, and she tells him, and us, about cooking with open fire on the other side of the world. That leads into a conversation about another one of Stanley’s crew from about the same period, Charlie Des Voeux, whose wildly popular Fujianese chain CdV has undergone another round of expansions, now with locations in Houston, Atlanta, and Minneapolis.
He’s made out quite well Holgerssøn notes, diplomatically I think.
Amazing what a marginally photogenic white guy can lay claim to Crozier replies with a disdainful snort. Fearing a tirade may be forthcoming, I mention my conversation with Professor McDonald from earlier in the day. My dining companions nod at one another. On this they are in complete synchronicity.
What does it mean to turn your back on imported and foreign things? To what end?
Narrow down your palette she says. See what that does.
Look, anyone can be good at making food in California Crozier says to the sound of Holgerssøn’s anticipatory chuckle. We’re all aware that seasonality is kind of bullshit when you aren’t in a temperate climate. When you can’t just reach out for the thing you want that you’ve come to expect to be there whenever you desire it.
Early on, I think I said, let’s stop getting lemons Holgerssøn interjects. Remember? Not because we didn’t want acidity—
— right, right, but because it was too easy in one sense —
— exactly. She indicates me with her chin. Same as having this kind of abundance just handed to you. Scarcity makes value. It’s anticapitalist, if you get right down to it.
I get the distinct impression that they have had this exact same conversation before but are repeating it for my benefit. Spelling it out in full rather than the easy shorthand that comes to be the property of those who inhabit small spaces together. Shiphands, flatmates, lovers, cooks.
We discuss the particulars in reference to the previous night’s menu. Harry makes a rather astute observation about the porridge. How it seemed to emanate from the forest itself. That it tasted, well, of the forest. How did it occur to her to make it like that?
Holgerssøn has an answer at the ready. Why do we consider some organic things edible and scorn others? What is it about a decomposed leaf that strikes us as disgusting, to think that moss and humus can’t be part of our food, when that’s what’s at the heart of cooking, this process of transformation?
More than fire? I interrupt. She turns the full force of her attention upon me. I can feel my spine straightening from its habitual hunch, the soles of my feet flattening against the floor.
Yeah, in a way. That transformation from raw to cooked is only one part of the equation.
She returns to the subject of the porridge.
That dish is the most immediate thing on the menu. To me it tastes exactly the way the forest feels right now. Like the land is taking its last big deep breaths before burrowing down for winter.
Harry is hanging rapt upon her every word.
Are you familiar with the concept of Japanese microseasons in the traditional sense? They're given expression through kaiseki meals, imperial cuisine. The calendar doesn’t precisely sync up with the one here, but to me we’re inhabiting an analogous time as Shōsetsu, the lesser snow season. Specifically 'Kitakaze konoha o harau' — when the north wind blows leaves from the trees.
He hasn’t. I, however, have, and so take the opportunity to dash off a quick email under the table. By the time I’m finished, Tam has rejoined us at the table and they have moved on to the topic of food trends. Harry, having missed yesterday’s tirade, patiently listens to Crozier rant. He would; it's altogether new to him.
Before all your Instagram, your social media and whatnot, people had read the write-ups. They’d heard about it from people who’d been there. Whole problem with a model like that is that you want to think about local tastes, because if you’re a cook you’re inspired by what people are eating on the streets and in the markets. There's all this new stuff to mess around with. But really your clientele is rich expatriates and tourists, maybe local businesspeople if you’re lucky. All you’re doing is plonking down the same fucking model all over again, replicating it in a different latitude. Central office in London, local staff trained in the ways of the home kitchen, everything fucking identical. He turns to Holgerssøn. The same shit wherever you end up, right?
She is thoughtful. She is perpetually thoughtful. It seems fundamentally dishonest — maybe that’s not entirely the right word, but you know what I mean — to act like place doesn’t matter. Same thing as standardising technique, right, when you apply it to whatever the raw materials are?
Crozier nods fervently. Absolutely. Technique can only really take you so far. France isn’t the only place with haute cuisine despite what culinary schools would have you think.
Holgerssøn chuckles. True, true. Otherwise you’re just stuffing pigeons with fucking foie gras for socialites in Singapore to coo over.
After a pregnant pause, Tam grimaces into a crinkled, sunburnt laugh. Crozier answers with a smile to rival her own. It is like watching the sun emerge from behind a wall of rain-grey clouds.
My phone pings with a message. To his eternal credit, Professor McDonald has responded to my query straightaway, and with better humour than one might expect given the circumstances.
No trouble at all, Mr. Fitzjames. As to your question, my short answer is: yes. My longer answer might read as follows: decomposition is absolutely elemental; foundational, if you will, on our path to becoming human. Look at what happens when we began to ferment grain, for example, or turn grapes into wine, milk into cheese, and so forth. It’s not fire per se that matters, it’s about the processes of transformation, and cooking is only one side of that equation. As these substances are changed from one form to another so too do we see the passage of nature into culture — though I surround both terms with invisible air-quotes.
If you’re looking for an academic take you might want to consult Levi-Strauss’s early writings on the culinary triangle, which, though lacking the depth you’ll find in his later works, at least has the advantage of being slightly more accessible to the lay reader. But I suspect you might be better off speaking to someone like Sandor Katz or, closer to home, Dickie Wall?
By the time I have finished reading this missive, I find the conversation has once again moved on, now to agriculture. What’s working in sustainability? Who’s doing it right? Look at what George Hodgson has been up to in the Piedmont foothills, they say, practicing intensive livestock cultivation by means of field rotation.
Land ownership by charter of the queen Crozier says. Goes way back. For America at least.
Plus a family fortune Holgerssøn remarks under her breath, loud enough for us to all hear. Easy enough to call yourself a gentleman farmer when you’re making a cushy living off the backs of the dead.
Harry asks where the money originated. The poor dear. He looks wholly aghast at the answer. I don’t know why we English are so shocked at the skeletons in our collective closet. Hardly a secret as to how and where the prosperity originated, is it?
For all her antipathy towards him, Holgerssøn admires what Hodgson has been able to accomplish on his six hundred acres, though she rolls her eyes when I ask her if they really think they are “emotionally, economically and environmentally enhancing agriculture.”
He really does sound like a wanker sometimes Holgerssøn concedes.
Crozier mutters something in response I will not reproduce here, which, suffice it to say, is less than complimentary.
But she continues, likewise ignoring Crozier’s one-man sidebar, that isn’t to say he doesn’t have the right idea about things.
In what respect?
In that he’s thinking about his patch as its own ecosystem and building resilience into it from the outset. He’s not trying to impose a European, or worse, an American model of extraction upon it. And while he’s brought in species from elsewhere, he’s still paying attention to the whole.
Like importing mongoose for pest control on Hawaiian sugar plantations, does she mean?
Yeah, exactly. I’m reluctant to call it indigeneity but — local knowledge, you know? Not a thing we prioritize in Europe. Here it’s all about resource extraction. We have to change that. Should have changed it a long time ago. Shit’s unsustainable. Although calling it stewardship is incredibly reductive. Conservation, too, isn’t quite what we need.
What would she call it, if she had to give it a name?
It’s easy to think of the relationships between humans, land, animals, plants as binary. A thing is of nature or culture. Never both. And yet that misses the entire point. Humans are in a social relationship with their surroundings. And that relationship? Is reciprocal.
Harry finds this fascinating and asks if she can recommend any books on the subject. She can, she says, but right now thinks we should clear the dishes, take a little walk, and then have a sit-down in the reindeer teepee out front. Harry is escorted away for his own traditional Estonian smoke sauna experience. Tam assures me he is in the safest of hands. I wonder if she will manage to get him drunk.
Following our postprandial stroll about the grounds, Holgerssøn leads me into the teepee and lights the kindling already laid beneath the logs in the fire pit. I pull my notebook out, hopefully unobtrusively. She feeds it more birch twigs until it catches into a decent blaze. I am bundled back into my gear and huddled underneath a massive fur blanket, yet the heat cannot come soon enough for my liking.
It feels out of place to talk. Together, in companionable silence, we watch the flames lick at the air. Sparks and smoke drift up to the hole left for ventilation above our heads. Though it becomes reasonably cosy in a relatively short time, I am loath to cast aside my wolfskin covering. She seems comfortable enough in her massive white fur coat with the collar pulled up.
Finally I pose the question that has niggled at me since I made that reservation many months prior only to find out that I would be there for the final service. She’s spent her life in pursuit of this goal. Why stop? Why stop now?
Holgerssøn wipes her nose discreetly with her sleeve before shoving her bare hands deep into her coat pockets.
Because there will still be time she says. Better to leave while you’re still curious rather than depleted entirely. There’s gas in the tank still and I intend to use it. I don’t want to burn myself out here. I’ve seen what that does to people.
Another long pause.
I wait.
She speaks.
Years ago, when Francis and I were both in the running for some dumb award, he asked me what I was trying to prove. Pretty sure he was wasted at the time, but I never forgot it. Because he said out loud what they were all thinking, the establishment. Those men. The people who wanted nothing more than to watch me crash and burn.
What was her response?
At the time I probably said something sarcastic about being a woman in a male-dominated field. Playing the game, paying dues to arrogant white guys with big hats and even bigger fucking egos. But you do it. You grit your teeth and you do what you have to do to be seen. Otherwise you’re invisible.
To do what we’ve done here takes resources like you wouldn’t believe. And people complained about the price tag when it was only me behind the stove. But when Francis came aboard? Well, they changed their tune mighty damn quick.
Doesn’t that make her angry?
More that it makes me a pragmatist she says with a shrug. But what Francis and I have, it goes both ways. We each demand that the other one excel. Yet despite that, we’re both striving for balance.
Have they found it?
I ask myself that a lot. This place. It strips you down to your essence. There’s no room to be precious, no space for vanity. But it gives so much in return. It takes a long time to get to the heart of what makes it special. And I think — no, I know — that we’ve done that. We’ve made a kind of echo of this landscape in our cuisine. And all echoes fade into nothing eventually.
Harry and I are booked out on an early flight tomorrow from Trondheim. We could have left today and given ourselves a morning lie-in at the airport-adjacent Radisson. Comfortable, maybe; convenient, certainly, but with a noticeable deficit of magic in the sterile, climate-controlled air. I venture this observation.
Holgerssøn looks through the sliver of open tent flap. For a moment, she is elsewhere.
Whatever it is, it comes back around. Time is a flat circle, James.
Meaning what, exactly?
She shakes her head at me and smiles. Exasperated, benevolent, fond. Come on she says, and stands up. I look at her outstretched hand and, after a pause, take it in my own. She pulls me up to stand and in the direction of the exit.
I pause. Shouldn’t we extinguish the fire before we leave?
The fire will be fine she says, tugging on my arm. It’ll burn itself out.
♨ ~ ♨ ~ ♨
