I LOVE tasting menus.  I love the idea of multiple course dinners.  I love to try dishes that I wouldn’t normally order.  And I love when the restaurant pairs the menu with drinks!  Not surprisingly, Stockholm has a lot of restaurants offering tasting menus, some costing as much as $1,000 US a person (!).

I decided to find one more reasonable for my trip (and have Dan take me there for my birthday dinner! ). Doing some research, I came across the winner – Pubologi!  Pubologi is a hip gastropub right in Gamla Stan.  Pubologi offers 5 or 7 course tasting menus of “modern nordic food” (plus complementary amuse bouche and tasting treats post dinner) and it pairs the food with either beer or wine.  Sold!  We made reservations online before we left (recommended).  The cost of the 5 course tasting menu was 550 Swedish Crown and the beer pairing (beers from the Pang Pang Brewery) was an additional 355 Swedish Crown when we were there.

For our meals, we both went with the 5 course tasting menu.  That was a good choice.  The portions were LARGE for a tasting menu.  There is no way that I could have finished the 7.  For my drink pairing, I opted for the beer pairing!  Dan went with the wine.  Both were good and a substantial amount of alcohol.

Pubologi itself is a pretty hip restaurant.  There is a lot of communal seating, however, unlike some hipster restaurants I have visited, the waitstaff was helpful and not at all pretentious.

Here are some pictures of the restaurant, including the moving bar cart!  I love those!

    

For our dinner….

Amuse Bouche:  A pumpkin seed inspired soup!  This was really delicious!  We ate it with a spoon and dipped bread into it.

First Course: Sugar salted and burnt pike perch. Served with mixed zucchini and oysters, crispy vinegar shallots and warm oyster cream.  Oyster cream is surprisingly delicious!

Second Course: Coarsely cut slices of reindeer top round. Served with charcoal baked salsify, trout roe, butter-fired sage and grated frozen buttons of ox-marrow and almonds.  This was probably the third time I had reindeer on this trip.  It’s so popular.  For those wondering, its a lean red meat, pretty similar to venison.

Third Course: Lightly salted and baked skrei cod. Served with a cream of artichoke, baked onion, blackened brussel sprouts, sweet and sour sirop of smoked prawns and roaster poppy seeds.  This was the skrei (a really popular type of Norwegian cod that comes out only once a year).  It was delicious and I would absolutely order it again!  We were lucky that we were there to try it at the right time!

Fourth Course: Breast of blood duck. Served with charcoal grilled duck leg, roasted cauliflower, dried and crisp cauliflower, fried king oyster mushroom, grated black truffle and a butter duck jus.  The duck was fatty and delicious.  Dan is allergic to duck, so the restaurant subbed his for steak.  The duck was served with my favorite beer of the evening – Smoked Porky Port Porter!  Its just so fun to say!

 

Fifth Course: Molded chocolate mousse. Served with frozen mandarine and sweet and sour mandarine, mandarine marshmallow, semi dried rowan-berries, roasted pistachio and crisp buckwheat.  This was one delicious dessert.  It wasn’t too heavy, which was nice in light of the heavier courses before!

Final Course:  Treats prepared by the kitchen!  Always a nice way to end the evening!

STEAL OUR DINNER

Pubologi, Stora Nygatan 20, 111 27 Stockholm, info@pubologi.se
Reservations: 08 – 506 400 86.  Per their website, they answer the phone from 14.00 Monday-Saturday.  We made reservations online.

I highly recommend making reservations.  The restaurant is rather small, and it was packed in January!

The same restaurant group owns two fun bars right around the corner from Pubologi, Tweed and Burgundy.  Burgundy is a wine bar and Tweed is a hipster cocktail bar.  We stopped by after dinner and both were fun!  Worth checking out to round out your evening.