Swedish chef Marcus Jernmark is planning new Nordic restaurants in LA

In a few months, Swedish chef Marcus Jernmark plans to open his first restaurant in Los Angeles, celebrating Nordic cuisine with elevated culinary touches in what could mark a glorious return for LA cuisine. He will then open a second restaurant on top of the first

Jernmark grew up in Sweden but spent much of his two-decade career in New York City, where he cooked at Per Se and the modern Swedish restaurant Aquavit. He returned to Sweden and headed the kitchen at Stockholm restaurant Frántzen, which has three Michelin stars and is currently No. 6 on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list, and subsequently opened Zén in Singapore before moving on in 2022 headed to LA.

He has previously made meatballs, herring and reindeer boards in his culinary career, but when he takes over the Pico Robertson space, most recently home to Bicyclette and Manzke, in 2025, he hopes to open a restaurant using ingredients from California, but that remains a “Nordic backbone and Nordic DNA”. It's Nordic cuisine with a personal touch — like he's preparing a gourmet tasting menu for Angelenos in his own home, he says.

“I really feel like 2024 is the right time for LA with the introduction of a lot of the flavor components and some of our cooking approaches,” Jernmark said.

New Nordic cuisine builds on the culinary foundations of Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Finnish techniques and ingredients, sometimes reinterpreting smoked and pickled fish, foraged berries and fire-cooked game in artful presentations of powders, sauces, splashes and smoke. It has gained global prominence in the last two decades and has been the trademark of some of the world's most famous restaurants such as Noma in Denmark and Fäviken in Sweden.

There are few Nordic restaurants in LA these days, and here the influence is often more casual with smørrebrød at Piknik, Danish pastries 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 LA it was once a breeding ground for the finer corners of the kitchen. At Scandia, one of the city's most glamorous restaurants in the 1950s and 1960s, some of the world's most famous celebrities dined on Swedish meatballs, herring fillets, steaks and “Viking platters” on silver trays. Jernmark's two new restaurants could be a modern way to give Scandinavian cuisine a higher status in gastronomy.

There will be in-house fermentation and small-batch products from Swedish producers highlighting the country's latest culinary innovations – perhaps a cold-smoked soy sauce made from a traditional vegetable called gray pea or roe flown in from Sweden – with dishes served on custom-made ceramic plates by a Swedish artist and drinks that were cast into vessels by a glassblower in Denmark.

On the evening he moved to Los Angeles in 2022, Jernmark dined at Bicyclette, and Joe Garcia, formerly of the French bistro Manzkes, had briefly dined at Frántzen in Stockholm. The memory of Pico Robertson Bistro remains special to Jernmark, and his former home felt like a resonant place where he could plant his LA flag.

The first concept to hit the market will be the basement Liellenamed after the chef's daughter, will open in early 2025 as the more personal of the two concepts. A tandem restaurant will follow a few months later on the second floor, in the former Manzke premises.

While he has contributed to three Michelin stars at Frántzen, Jernmark doesn’t want to “overcomplicate” things. He says he's found his tastes are driven by simple flavors that showcase not just the ingredients but also the drink combinations – an important factor in the bold wine and non-alcoholic programs he envisions.

“As much as I’m still a curious person, I’m also 42,” he said. “I'm going to cut out a lot of nonsense, a lot of things that I don't think necessarily add to the overall experience: things that don't make sense when you're cooking for the people in your house the way you do it in your house . Let’s incorporate some of those components into the restaurant experience because it’s really about nutrition and how you take care of people.”

Los Angeles is home to many thoughtful, high-end restaurants that strip away some of the stiffer trappings of fine dining, so Jernmark now wonders how his forays fit into the scene: The menus are still in development, but he's rethinking Family dishes are shared at the table.

Although his restaurants will focus on Nordic cuisine from a Californian perspective, he also draws inspiration from his favorite food city: His favorite restaurants in Paris, he said, are “very confident, very deep, very to the point.” Bertrand Grébaut's modern bistro Septime and its sister seafood spot Clamato currently serve as a guide to Jernmark's tandem restaurants, both in terms of atmosphere and structure.

He's been working on planning these concepts since May 2023, but first hinted at his LA debut in 2021 with an Instagram post in which he called his private dining club here “Habitué.” This company introduced a limited supply line and its own caviar. Although he's more or less on hiatus, Jernmark hopes that once his restaurants are back up and running, he can restart Habitué as an importer of his favorite supplies, 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 scheduled to open later this year.