Nordic flavors at Restaurant SÖL
This restaurant opened in February 2018 and the reviews were
good. We decided to check it out on a Friday night in May to see what Restaurant
SÖL is all about. It is located a short walk away from the city center. It
is in quiet surroundings and maybe that is why the previous restaurants in this
location has gone out of business very fast. Let us hope that this does not happen to Restaurant
Restaurant SÖL is a small place with room for maybe 20-30
guest. The guests have a view into the open kitchen and I was surprised to see
that the three young chefs that runs the place, carries out all the work
themselves. According to their web site they will focus on good
vegetables with an add on of meat/fish if this fits in. Keywords are Nordic
flavors, sustainability and vegetables. To match this, they also focus on
serving natural wines.
We got there just after 8 and got a table right by the
kitchen. In some places this can be an issue as there is a lot of noise from
the kitchen. But in this place, I could hardly hear that food was prepared just
feet away from us. We got the menu and it is simple: they have a set menu! We
decided to go all in and have the menu with matching wines. It did not take long
before we got some white wine in the glass and some lovely fresh (still warm) bread
with a fluffy butter on the side. I was starving so this was very appreciated.
The first dish was a bowl of bacondashi, cabbage, ramson
(ramsløk in Norwegian) and egg. The first question we had was “What is dashi?”
and apparently it is a Japanese stock with quite a lot of umami flavor. And it
had a lot of flavor indeed! It was a lovely starter and first of all because of
the richness in the dashi. In addition, it was great to find a perfectly
poached egg at the bottom.
We got a new glass of white wine (I did not note down the
names as most of them are not available at Vinmonopolet) and prepared for the
second dish. Again we got a dish that was beautiful presented: half a
cauliflower served with buttermilk, nuts and roe from a fish called rognkjeks (lumpsucker
in English). I’m not that crazy about cauliflower so this dish was not my
favorite. But it was interesting to taste the grilled cauliflower together with
the slightly sour taste of the buttermilk.
We switched to red wine and got ready for the main dish. The main dish of the evening was a sort of risotto served
with chicken (or actually organic hen) and topped with lovage (løpstikke) and
salad. Instead of using risotto rice they had replaced this with grains that
can be grown in Norway I assume. The “risotto” was not bad at all – but as I
love my risotto made from risotto rice, I always feel that it is false
advertising to name a dish like this “risotto”. But the chicken/hen was juicy,
and the grains had a good firmness. I would have preferred more grains and less
of the green salad on top.
The dessert was lovely: grilled apple with an ice cream that
had a slight malt taste to it (or toast ice cream according to the menu). And
to round it of we got a fresh warm dish called “epleskiver”. It is some sort of
Danish pancake balls and it was delicious. Not sure why it is called epleskiver
as it does not seem to contain any apples ;-)
Conclusion: I’m impressed to see three chefs venture into
something like this and I hope that the place will make it in the Stavanger
restaurant scene. We enjoyed the dinner at Restaurant SÖL even if we were not
totally blown away. They change the menu based on what they have so I would not
mind going there to try them out again. Thanks to chefs Nayana, Claes and Magnus for having us! You can find more information on their
homepage https://www.restaurantsoel.com/
and the facebook page https://www.facebook.com/restsoel/
Regards
Gard
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