![](/resource/61250-faviken-780-1.jpg)
Faviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End is the gift to reheat their love of great cuisine
Magnus Nilsson’s white-hot cookbook-cum-memoir is one of our better books for a better year ahead. Give someone you love a copy!
Everyone knows that restaurants have been hurting, but perhaps it's time to spare a thought for restaurant lovers. Plenty of us are sorely missing those once-regular trips to the local bistro, or that special, monthly excursion to somewhere a little more fancy. Dining at home has its advantages, but just like dressing up when no one's around, preparing a complicated series of courses isn’t the sort of thing we can keep up for too long, when there are simpler, more comforting dishes to be made.
![007-restaurant](/resource/007-restaurant.jpg)
Of course, 2021 looks as if it's going to be a little tastier that 2020, whether you’re booking in somewhere fancy to eat, or inviting friends over to try your own adventurous culinary skills. The only problem for post-pandemic foodies is how to get back in the right frame of mine for fine dining. And that’s where Magnus Nilsson’s new book, Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End, comes in.
![Plating Porridge of grains and seeds from Jämtland finished with a lump of salty butter. Photograph by Erik Olsson](/resource/119-mn-plating.jpg)
Nilsson was the chef behind Fäviken, the acclaimed remote restaurant in Jämtland, Sweden. He took over the place in 2008– when it was little more than a fancy hunting lodge – and quit in late 2019, having won two Michelin stars and a place on the World 50 Best Restaurants list. In the process the chef pioneered both Nordic cuisine and the dedicated use of local ingredients; he also took the opportunity to meet many other successful chefs, travel to other great restaurants, and author a series of acclaimed cookbooks.
![Linseed and vinegar crisps, mussel dip. Photograph by Erik Olsson](/resource/faviken-gallery-4.jpg)
This most recent work, written both during his time at Faviken and immediately after it closed, sums up his experiences as both a hugely talented chef, and as a creative professional and manager, working at the very pinnacle of his chosen industry.
Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End, is a cookbook; across 324 beautifully designed and illustrated pages, Nilsson lists every dish ever served at Fäviken, including step-by-step recipes for a great many of them. Pick up this book and you could recreate great services from the restaurant’s past.
![Breakfast at Fäviken. Photograph by Erik Olsson](/resource/285-breakfast-f-1.jpg)
Yet the book offers so much more than this too. In a series of essays, recollections and asides, Nilsson lets readers know what it’s truly like to run a great restaurant, and visit other great restaurants, as both a friend of the chef and a simply an avid food lover.
With references to everything from caviar to Karl Lagerfeld, social media to ecological virtue signalling, Nilsson describes how he thinks creativity truly works in a high-end kitchen setting; the true meaning of high-quality ingredients; why some great restaurants aren’t exactly overflowing with great talent (and why that’s OK); and the precise reasons he chose to close his restaurant.
![Front-of-house manager Hatim and Magnus in the combined office space and staff dining room, one storey above the guest dining room. Photograph by Erik Olsson](/resource/195-hatim-mn-1.jpg)
Covid-19 played no part in this final decision; Fäviken closed prior to the pandemic. Now, as we look forward to a time when we look forward to a little more than take-outs, Nilsson’s book is a perfect way to recall just what we loved about dining out in the first place.
It’s for these reasons that Food & Wine described the book as “a must-read’, while the Vancouver Sun characterised it as “a trip into the mind of an ingenious chef."
Give this book to that culinary-minded loved-one, and you’ll be helping them reacquaint themselves with a much-missed part of their life, via the words, pictures and dishes of a contemporary master, opening up fully for the very first time. To find out more and order your copy of Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End here, and let’s all look forward to dining at top tables in 2021.