Maaelstrom Brunch feat Lindstrøm
We’ll level with you: Crack has rarely eaten in Michelin star rated establishments, so our knowledge of the finest gastronomical delicacies may be a little limited.
But when we receive the offer of a six-course meal with a twist prepared by the chefs from one of Oslo’s most highly regarded restaurants, Maaemo, we were naturally attracted to the prospect – if slightly reticent about our ability to convey the inevitable grandeur of the food we were set to consume.
This wasn’t your typical food experience. Food of this quality is rarely prepared onsite at a festival, never mind soundtracked by a Norwegian musical jewel such as Lindstrøm. But the effort level present at Norway’s Øya festival had hardly been lacking over the weekend, so we shouldn’t have been surprised. It all stemmed from a concept devised by Øya’s Environmental Manager Julie Forchhammer, who explained the ideas behind what she called the Maaelstrom Brunch (Maaemo / Lindstrøm)
“For a few years now we wanted to do something more with organic food, because 90 percent of the food we serve at the festival is organic. We really wanted to do a project with the restaurant Maaemo. It’s a new restaurant specialising in new Nordic cuisine and has two Michelin stars. We wanted to involve them, but you can’t have Michelin chefs selling hamburgers, and Maaemo only uses organic, local produce food, so we needed a good idea. I was drinking in my favourite bar and I was reading a review of Lindstrøm’s new album – Smalhans – and I noticed its six song titles are each a Norwegian traditional dish. I knew the Maaemo guys are really into music and I know Lindstrøm is really into making food, and organic food as well. So the concept was ‘I would like to taste that album’. So we asked Lindstrøm and Maaemo, and they were keen on the idea. Esben the head chef and owner of Maaemo and Lindstrøm clicked immediately. It’s a unique one-off experience. Six-courses for 30 people and Lindstrøm has done some edits, so every time you get a dish, Lindstrøm will be playing his new version of the songs.”
So for the first time, we were about to find out what an album actually tastes like. The chefs at Maaemo interpreted each of Lindstrøm’s songs and created a dish accordingly. If the concept on paper was a little wild for some to get their heads around, it was brought into sharp focus by Pontus Dahlstrøm the Finnish front-of-house and co-owner of Maaemo, who gave some context to the quality of food we were about to consume. “We are young guys in our early 30s and if we wanted to eat in Maaemo ourselves we’d have to save up for a long time” (the cost of a meal is roughly £400 per person). “Today we serve about 40-50% foreign guests who fly in just to eat at the restaurant. We run a filthy expensive restaurant. We thought we shouldn’t distance ourselves from who we really are, so at least once a year we do something like this where we don’t charge for anything apart from the drinks and the trade prices it costs us to buy the ingredients.”
The drinks reception allowed us to mingle with gathered Norwegians, ecstatic to have acquired tickets to the event and basking in this preamble to a Michelin two-star feast from such a revered source. It was all smiles. Maaemo’s success is reflective of the cosmopolitan development on the waterfront in Oslo; a fresh-faced vision of Norway full of young entrepreneurialism and modern development. Maaemo’s design is wooden and open, with the glass-fronted kitchen reflective of this transparency and an open-minded culture which remains attached to its traditional values.
We walked down to the site and positioned ourselves on two tables of fourteen in a tent being used for the festival, a temporary kitchen having previously been erected by the Maaemo staff. Lindstrøm was milling around with laptop in place next to the chefs, and Crack was seated either side of a Norwegian photographer and a French food journalist. She knew exactly what she was doing.
Before we began the food, Cecile Dawes, whose anticpation is evident having spent six months realising Julie Forchammer idea, explained a bit more about the heritage of organic food in Norway and the Food Studio and how they have been involved in the project through their ethical food projects. It was all very enlightening stuff. Then the courses came thick and fast, and immediately thoughts are drawn towards the unusual setting for such culinary delights. We are indeed at a music festival, and despite Øya significantly bucking the trend in terms of the quality of food you usually expect from such events, the sheer quality of food on display here is absolutely staggering.
The first course Rà-àkõ-st is an appetiser firmly based on firming up the taste buds for something altogether more succulent. The granulated cauliflower rubs up against a cauliflower purée and you guessed it – a cauliflower sauce. Despite being more than a little top heavy on the cauliflower, it tastes surprisingly diverse and wholesome. It’s also our first chance to experience the Maaelstrom concept in full-effect. With Lindstrøm performing on a headphone channel we are invited to sample his album performed live. It’s initially something of a sensory overload (especially considering you’re sat opposite others having a similar experience) mixed with initial apprehension, as trying something new tends to be. As the second course is brought out you become aware of how much time you took contemplating the first. Eating in this way naturally slows you down as to take full advantage of the concept being presented. The idea was to finish when Lindstrøm finished, and even though the size of the portions, certainly for the fourth course which consisted of two potent chicken liver parfait cones, meant this wasn’t always possible, it meant Crack consumed the food at a fraction of our normal yamming speed. It’s a good idea to rein it in when the things you’re consuming carries so much flavour you have to question what you’ve been eating all these years. It’s as if we’d been in food hibernation.
Each course offers merits that are richly contrasting but utterly rewarding. Lāmm-ęl-āār’s pickled onions are rich, succulent and a beautiful companion to the lamb or fenalår cubes that accompany the sweet onion purée. With a remarkable lightness of touch and a delicate and precise arrangement of flavours, the robust textures are totally satisfying. Meanwhile the soundtrack is beginning to bed itself into some kind of complementary normality among the guests.
Ęg-gęd-ōsis is so satisfying it’s difficult for this inexperienced food critic to gather the superlatives. Crunchy grilled potatoes are accentuated by grated egg yolk (something new for the majority) and a quail egg buried beneath that pops after some light tampering. It’s a combination of seemingly everyday food of such pored-over quality and assembled in such an incredibly innovative way, Crack takes bloody ages over it.
The final two courses are a relatively typical main course / dessert affair, except the main comes adorned with yellow chanterelle mushrooms and the dessert appears expelling spectacular plumes of dry ice The lamb fillet is an assault of mouth-watering odour long before it’s been tasted, and the liquid waffle ball in the dessert distributes its unctuous contents under pressure, spreading across the honey combs. Unadulterated crowd-pleasers, both courses ooze class and showcase the Maaemo chefs as experts at not simply displaying world-class process and technique, but also at making food you really want to eat.
So what of Lindstrøm? Despite not eating the food, his music provided the catalyst for the whole experience. He explained his role.
“Since I’m really interested in food, I didn’t need any time to decide. I love the festival too, so it was a no-brainer since I’ve been to Maaemo once and it was so good. In between the courses I was playing some ambient melody lines, I’m not sure if people were listening in-between though. It was like they were eating in 120bpm!! I know this festival has had some criticism from some sceptical journalists that they invite the same people over and over again, but I really love this festival. I live 10 minutes from here and the people do interesting this like this, so this year I thought I’d have a year off and do this instead.”
This was a concept of lofty proportions brought right back down to earth by offering two of the most basic requirements in life: food and music. Both were deployed by veritable experts in their field which made for an incredible lunch of sensory magic. Crack wandered back into modern Oslo with an unshakeable feeling of warmth and goodwill to those who had made the last three hours so pleasurable. It was a successful experiment in food culture that was inherently Norwegian, but in many ways a language to which we could all relate.
Maaelstrøm tracklisting / menu:
Dish 1 Rà-àkõ-st: Granulated cauliflower, cauliflower purée, cauliflower sauce, wild herbs
Dish 2 Lāmm-ęl-āār: Grilled pickled onions, onion purée, tapioca and fenalår
Dish 3 Ęg-gęd-ōsis: Grilled potatoes, wild garlic purée, poached quail egg, grated egg yolk
Dish 4 Vōs-sākō-rv: Chicken liver parfait in a pastry cone with blackcurrant leaf gel
Dish 5 Fāār-i-kāā: Lamb fillet, pickled chanterelles, chanterelle purée, grilled cabbage, wild herbs
Dish 6 Vā-flę-r: “Liquid waffle” ball, waffle crumbs fried in honey, butterscotch, frozen cream
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Words: Thomas Frost
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