Flame Meets Fjords: Chef Niklas Ekstedt ignites Nusfjord 2026

At the far edge of the Lofoten Archipelago, where the mountains plunge straight into the sea, a new kind of heat is stirring. In May 2026, the remote fishing village of Nusfjord, a sustainable eco retreat of heritage fishermen’s cottages decked in comfort and style, becomes the stage for Flame Meets Fjords: the next chapter in the North’s most coveted culinary series. Following last year’s RE-NAA Arctic residency, the spotlight now turns to Niklas Ekstedt (Ekstedt, Stockholm), Scandinavia’s master of elemental cuisine and the chef who turned the glow of embers into Michelin artistry.

From 28 to 31 May, the Lofoten Islands will host an extraordinary pop-up where wilderness meets craft. Ekstedt’s Stockholm kitchen is famed for its controlled blaze; a study in patience and precision. In the Arctic, that control loosens. The wind replaces the hum of the extractor; the rhythm is set by the crackle of burning wood and the slow pulse of coals. Cooking becomes theatre: tactile, fleeting and steeped in the scent of smoke and pine.

The Man Behind the Flame

Michelin-starred chef Niklas Ekstedt brings his mastery north to Norway’s Lofoten Archipelago for a culinary pop-up that fuses wilderness, craft and the slow theatre of flame.

Niklas Ekstedt, born in Järpen, Sweden in 1978, grew up in the rural heart of Jämtland where proximity to nature and old ways of cooking shaped his sensibility early on. After training at culinary school in Åre, he travelled abroad; staging under Charlie Trotter in Chicago and later at El Bulli in Spain. By twenty-one, he had opened his first restaurant in Helsingborg before moving to Stockholm to establish his Michelin-starred flagship, Ekstedt, now one of Scandinavia’s most celebrated dining rooms.

His philosophy is rooted in elemental honesty. Flame, in his world, is not simply a tool but a mindset: a return to the tactile, the instinctive, the sensory. “I was researching the old ways of cooking in Sweden, the way we cooked without electricity,” he once said. Today, nearly every dish at Ekstedt (Stockholm) is prepared using wood, ash, smoke and cast iron. The result is food that feels primal yet precise; deeply Nordic, deeply human.

A Theatre of Heat and Heritage

Guests to Flame Meets Fjords arrive by sea or air, greeted by rows of red timber cabins reflected in the still water. The days follow the rhythm of nature: morning foraging walks with Niki Sjölund, seaweed harvests with Lofoten Seaweed, fishing trips aboard Elltor. Lunches are simple, born from the morning’s finds. By late afternoon, the first coals are stoked, the scent of birch drifts across the fjord and the theatre begins.

Ekstedt’s dining rituals invite participation. Guests gather close to the heat, cooking beside his team, plating Arctic fish, wild herbs and foraged greens. It is food as connection, as ceremony, as transformation, a dialogue between ingredient, flame and hand.

Saturday night brings the grand finale: a multi-course feast celebrating Lofoten’s natural larder of shellfish, reindeer, roots, seaweed and smoke. Each dish honours the balance between restraint and intensity, echoing the elemental purity that defines Ekstedt (Stockholm) and its Michelin-starred philosophy.

This is not a restaurant transplant but a living performance. The kitchen becomes a landscape, and the coals a medium of expression. It is gastronomy at its most primal and poetic, a pilgrimage for the gourmet, the gourmand, the epicurean, and the flavour hunters.

For those drawn to the heat of the extraordinary, this is the invitation: four days of elemental dining in a village caught between sea and sky where the architecture of flame meets the spirit of the North.

Footnote: The RE-NAA Arctic Pop-Up set the precedent for this annual culinary pilgrimage. Ekstedt now carries the torch forward and lets it glow brighter still.