The splashiest new Nordic since Scandia? A former chef of some of the world's best restaurants has big L.A. plans
In a few months, Swedish chef Marcus Jernmark plans to open his first restaurant in Los Angeles, celebrating Nordic food with fine dining flourishes that could mark a splashy return for the cuisine in L.A. Then he’ll follow it with a second restaurant, located above the first one.
Jernmark was raised in Sweden but spent much of his two-decade career in New York City, cooking at Per Se and in contemporary-Swedish destination Aquavit. He returned to Sweden and led the kitchen at Stockholm restaurant Frántzen, which received three Michelin stars and currently sits at the No. 6 position on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, and went on to open Zén in Singapore before making his way to L.A. in 2022.
He has cooked meatballs and herring sampler boards and reindeer in his culinary career prior, but in 2025, when he takes over the Pico-Robertson spaces that most recently housed Bicyclette and Manzke, he’s hoping to open a restaurant with ingredients from California but that maintains a "Nordic backbone and DNA.” It's Nordic cuisine with a personal bent — as though he were cooking Angelenos a fine-dining tasting menu in his own home, he says.
“I really feel like in 2024, introducing a lot of the flavor components, some of our approaches to cooking, is the right time for L.A.,” Jernmark said.
New Nordic cuisine builds on the culinary foundations of Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Finnish techniques and ingredients, sometimes reimagining smoked and pickled fish, foraged berries and fire-cooked wild game into artful presentations of powders, sauces, splatters and smoke. It has risen to global prominence the last two decades and been the hallmark of some of the world's most famous restaurants such as Noma in Denmark and Fäviken in Sweden.
Scant Nordic restaurants exist in L.A. today and here, its influence often leans more casual with smørrebrød at Piknik, danishes and kringles at Copenhagen Pastry, smoked fish with Icelandic rye at Destroyer, cardamom buns at Clark Street or Danish hot dogs at Open Face Food Shop.
But L.A. was once a hotbed for the finer corners of the cuisine. Scandia, one of the city’s most glamorous restaurants in the 1950s and '60s, saw some of the world’s most famous celebrities dining on silver-trayed Swedish meatballs and herring filets and steaks and “viking platters.” Jernmark’s two new restaurants could prove a modern path to Scandi-cuisine’s fine-dining prominence.
Read more: Scandia Trying to Regain Its Past Glory
There will be in-house fermentation and small-batch products from Swedish makers that spotlight the country’s latest culinary innovations — perhaps a cold-smoked soy sauce made from a heritage vegetable called gray pea, or roe flown in from Sweden — with dishes served on custom ceramic plates by a Swedish artist and drinks poured into vessels by a glassblower in Denmark.
The night that he moved to Los Angeles in 2022 Jernmark dined at Bicyclette, and Joe Garcia, formerly of the Manzkes’ French bistro, had briefly staged at Frántzen in Stockholm. The memory of the Pico-Robertson bistro remains special to Jernmark, and its former home felt like a resonant place to plant his L.A. flag.
The first concept to launch will be the subterranean Lielle, named for the chef’s daughter, and will open in early 2025 as the more personal of the two concepts. On the second floor, in the former Manzke space, a tandem restaurant will follow a few months later.
While he helped garner three Michelin stars at Frántzen, Jernmark doesn’t want to “overcomplicate things.” He says he has found his tastes drawn toward simple flavors, not only allowing the ingredients to shine but also beverage pairings — an important factor for his intended robust wine and nonalcoholic programs.
Read more: Restaurant News: Scandinavian cafe Piknik opens on Echo Park Lake
“As much as I am still a curious person, I'm also 42,” he said. “I'm gonna cut out a lot of nonsense, a lot of things that I don't necessarily think contribute to the overall experience: things that don't make any sense when you cook for people in your house, the way you do it in your house. Let's bring some of those components into the restaurant experience, because it's really about nourishment and how to take care of people.”
Los Angeles is rife with thoughtful high-end restaurants that remove some of the stuffier signatures of fine dining, so Jernmark now asks himself how his forays will fit into the scene: The menus are still in development, but he is considering family-style courses shared around the table.
Read more: It's No Mystery Why Gustaf Anders Sees Swede Success
Though his restaurants will focus on Nordic cuisine through a California lens, he’s also turning to his favorite food city for inspiration: His favorite Paris restaurants, he said, are “very confident, very profound, very to the point.” Bertrand Grébaut’s modern bistro Septime and its sibling seafood spot, Clamato, currently serve as the guide for Jernmark’s tandem restaurants, both in vibe and structure.
He’s been working on these concepts planning since May 2023, but first hinted at his L.A. debut in 2021 with an Instagram post that named his private-dining club here, Habitué. That business saw the launch of a limited pantry line and its own caviar. Though more or less on pause, Jernmark hopes that once his restaurants are running, he might relaunch Habitué as an importer of his favorite pantry goods again, perhaps even along Pico Boulevard.
Lielle is expected to debut in early 2025 at 9575 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles. Jernmark’s upstairs restaurant is planned to open later that year.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
