You can’t help thinking they missed a trick with the naming of this restaurant. Located in the Great Scotland Yard Hotel, surely the chance to call it Eksedt of The Yard was too good to miss. Ok, the actual original Scotland Yard was on the other side of the road but why let facts get in the way of some idle wordplay?
To their immense credit, the team at Ekstedt seem to have focused on running an excellent restaurant rather than indulging in bad puns and you don’t need to be much of a detective to find the quality here. Chef Niklas Ekstedt’s original Stockholm restaurant has held a Michelin star for over a decade. For those who like to debate the vagaries of the Michelin system, there is plenty here to fuel a vigorous discussion as to why his London outpost hasn’t been similarly recognised. The theme is the use of traditional Scandinavian “fire cooking”, with the dishes being prepared either in or over open fire pits or wood-fired ovens and stoves.
This means the open kitchen at one end of the dining room gives off an industrial vibe, with flames visibly flickering in various pitch-black vessels. The rest of the room offsets this with a wide variety of plants giving the whole place the look of something that for no reason I can explain implanted the phrase “steampunk conservatory” in my mind. It’s a relaxed environment enhanced by friendly and attentive service that knows when to leave you to your own devices for a few minutes.
The restaurant offers a 3 course a la carte menu or the full Journey through Scandinavia tasting menu offering 8 courses, all of which are well worth the indulgence. The meal begins with a piece of theatre. Invited to the kitchen with our glasses of wine, we watched as an oyster was put in a flambadou and placed onto hot coals. Boiling beef dripping was then poured on the oyster before it was returned to its shell and doused in beurre blanc. The result was an oyster of exquisite texture, warmed rather than cooked through and the opulence of the experience was completed by adding some of the wine to the juices in the shell and slurping it down.
Stage suitably set, the final hors d’oeuvre was a delicious aged beef tartare with the “nordic caviar”, vendence roe. We then moved to the first course proper, another tartare – this time veal accompanied by a mustard ice cream that cut through the meat and lightened the dish and some wild garlic.
The robust methods of cooking don’t result in a lack of subtlety, however, as was illustrated by the couple of seafood dishes that followed. The smokiness that is added by wood fires was showcased with the ember-baked scallops, surrounded by a foam of roe emulsion, which had that perfect juicy firmness, followed by a delicate lobster claw tart with heritage tomatoes. There was a chance though for the inner caveman to have its appetite sated with the final savoury course, a juniper-smoked lamb saddle. Again the smokiness was present without overwhelming the beautiful depth of flavour of the tender meat. With black garlic, morels and nettles this was a dish that you could imagine being prepared under open Nordic skies.
Quite how you smoke ice cream remains beyond me but the first dessert, a hay-smoked ice cream, matched its description with a sharp pickled rhubarb to help clean the palate. The final dish was a cep souffle, a sweet dish despite the obvious mushroom flavour, with milk ice cream to cool it and wild blueberries again providing a tart injection of fruit for balance.
The menu can be matched with a wine pairing that offers a set of well-chosen wines made in volcanic areas where their terroir has imparted a minerality that complements the impact on the food of the fire cooking. This results in a varied and slightly off-the-beaten-track selection, offering wines from Santorini and the Canary Islands as well as from more common areas. An oily riesling by Wagner-Stempel from the Rheinhessen went perfectly with the opening oyster, while an Oregon pinot noir from Domaine Drouhin complemented the veal tartare with its mustard ice cream. Unusually, it’s also a pairing not afraid to switch from white to red and back again where the dishes require, the pinot being followed by a flinty Graci from Sicily to go with the scallops.
For all the novelty of the fire cooking and the theatricality of some of the dishes, there is nothing gimmicky here. This is fine dining, and properly good fine dining at that, with the method of cooking enhancing the experience rather than being the point of going. At £115 the Journey through Scandinavia offers reasonably good value as well, being at least equal in quality to a number of starred restaurants that would charge double. Perhaps that argument about Michelin recognition should be quietly shelved for the sake of all our wallets.
Ekstedt at The Yard, Great Scotland Yard Hotel, 3-5 Great Scotland Yard, London SW1A 2HN. www.ekstedyattheyard.com Tues-Sat 6pm-9pm. 3 courses £85pp, Journey through Scandinavia tasting menu £115pp, Volcanic wine pairing £115pp.
