The Sound Sets the Table

At most restaurants, the menu is created in the kitchen. At Strandvillan in Ljunghusen, it begins somewhere entirely different – among pine trees, sandy soil and salt‑sprayed air, where ingredients are gathered, tasted and sometimes discarded long before they reach the guests’ plates.

In Sweden, there are an estimated 800 to 1,200 documented edible plant species, including those that grow both above and below the water’s surface. In practice, this means that roughly every sixth plant you encounter in nature is potentially edible.

“It’s fascinating to discover just how much can actually be eaten, if you explore with knowledge and care,” says Mattias Gustafsson, head chef at Strandvillan — a small but quietly outstanding hotel that opened in the summer of 2025, just a stone’s throw from the mouth of the Falsterbo Canal.

“The challenge is finding ingredients that can be refined into something truly delicious, and creating harmony between flavours. I don’t start only from what I personally like, but from how others will experience it. Is there too much acidity? Too much salinity? I’m constantly playing with flavours, adjusting and tasting again,” he says.

Ingredients Within Walking Distance

Just beside the hotel pool, only a few steps from reception, Mattias pauses by a small stand of pines on the property. Sunlight filters through the needles as he carefully twists a small cone from a branch. It is here — among pine trees, sandy soil and coastal vegetation — that many of the restaurant’s flavours first take shape.

“Pine cones are picked early in spring, while they’re still soft and green, and slowly simmered for seven hours into a syrup with a clear citrus note. As it’s stored, the flavours continue to develop and change,” he says.

Together with his colleagues in the dining room — sous chef William Walton, sommelier Jeanette Lindback and breakfast host Pernilla Sveinbjörnsson — he systematically explores what the surrounding area has to offer in terms of wild‑growing ingredients.

“All around us, there’s an incredible amount that can be used. Beach rose hips grow along the entire coast, from Falsterbo up to Höllviken. We make use of both the hips, which work in everything from desserts to starters, and the roses themselves, which we pickle and serve with meat. It becomes a bit like our own version of rose water, which is often used as a flavouring in Middle Eastern cuisine,” Mattias explains.

In the fields around the hotel, ground elder is harvested while still young, before the bitterness sets in. Lamb’s quarters — dismissed by many as a weed — is used fresh in salads or lightly sautéed. Wild asparagus grows straight out of the lawn and often ends up paired with fish. In the wetlands nearby, cattails appear in spring, resembling asparagus in both texture and flavour.

Letting the Kitchen Take Its Time

When Mattias arrived at Strandvillan — a hotel with 20 individually designed rooms, a spa, a pool and a restaurant — his ambition was not to build a three‑star destination or set a new benchmark for Nordic gastronomy. The hotel was new, the location untested, and the assignment unusually open. What did exist was a clear mandate: to work at his own pace, listen to the surroundings, and allow the kitchen to grow out of the place itself.

“I was basically asked to show my vision. No one said it had to be one thing or another. It was more like: do what you believe in, and we’ll see where it lands,” he says.

We sit down around a table in the muted green dining room, furnished with light wood, large windows facing the landscape, and softly upholstered seating. In short: a room that works just as well on a windswept winter day as on a calm summer evening.

From Foraging to Movement

The gastronomic direction Mattias works from is not new. Much of his thinking around food had taken shape long before there was a name for it — through encounters with people who worked close to nature, before foraging became a concept. One of them was Roland Rittman, a pioneer of wild harvesting and local ingredients in Skåne, whom Mattias met during the years he ran a restaurant at a folk high school.

“I thought he was a bit crazy at first, if I’m honest. He’d turn up with things from the forest and talk about ground elder, mushrooms and other ingredients no one else cared about back then. But really, he was a genius — just far ahead of his time.”

Roland is a man of action. For him, it was about going out, picking, tasting and failing until he understood what worked. That knowledge later spread in small circles, often outside the established restaurant world. When chefs like René Redzepi at Noma began articulating what came to be known as the New Nordic Cuisine, it was precisely this kind of experience that proved decisive. Roland was one of those who early on influenced how the movement related to nature — not through theories or ideas, but by quite literally showing up with a car full of wild‑foraged ingredients.

“I still call Roland today if there’s something I’m unsure about with an ingredient.”

Where Ingredients Belong

Alongside his work at Strandvillan, travel has left clear traces in Mattias’s thinking — above all through memories of how ingredients taste where they truly belong.

“I’ve spent time in tropical environments, Bermuda for example. I know what a coconut tastes like there, what a mango tastes like when it’s fresh and ripe. You eat what’s available at that moment. When it’s gone, it’s gone. There’s no expectation that everything should be accessible all the time. And the strange thing is that we, who live so close to nature here, have lost that knowledge.”

The question comes up repeatedly in the conversation: why don’t we do the same in Sweden?

“We’ve become used to constant availability. You walk into a shop and everything is supposed to be there, year‑round. Oranges in summer. Tomatoes in February.”

He describes a vast greenhouse near his home, glowing against the night sky.

“That’s where cucumbers and tomatoes are grown all year long. They look perfect, but they taste of nothing. It’s completely backwards, really.”

For Mattias, this isn’t a moral issue, but a practical one. Taste, experience and context are inseparable. And if the kitchen at Strandvillan is to be relevant, it has to start there.

Terroir on the Plate

The conversation pauses as sous chef William appears at the table with a few wine glasses filled with an opaque juice made from gooseberries and bay leaves — lightly tart, with a lingering herbal note. It’s served to guests who don’t drink wine but still want a thoughtfully paired beverage with dinner.

Mattias nods towards William.

“This is the man with the green fingers.”

It’s often William who notices something new on his bike ride to work. A plant along the cycle path. Something pushing up from a ditch. A leaf, a root — something that sparks curiosity.

“All ingredients are shaped by their surroundings. Terroir — a term we usually associate with wine, but which really just describes how geography influences flavour, things like soil, air and climate — exists in everything. Here in Ljunghusen, you can really taste the salt in the plants. The flavour comes first, and when you lift your gaze and see the landscape outside the window, everything falls into place,” William says.

The words linger at the table. Flavour first, place second. Or both at once. Through the windows, the landscape that has been there all along comes into view — the sand, the wind, the pines and the sea just beyond.

This is often where something shifts for the guest. Not necessarily understanding, but perspective. Many arrive with a fairly clear idea of what a dinner at a hotel restaurant should be. Something safe. Something familiar. Something they already know they like.

“Some people expect a steak with béarnaise,” Mattias says. “But that’s easy enough to cook at home. We want to surprise people a little — even though we do, of course, also have crowd‑pleasers on the menu.”

What’s served here is rarely dramatic or provocative in form. But often just different enough to linger in the memory. An ingredient you thought you disliked, prepared in another way. A flavour that first feels hard to place, but then becomes entirely obvious. Like a syrup aged for seven months, made from pine cones picked just outside the door.

Mattias returns to the same thought more than once during the conversation.

“Above all, it’s about curiosity. You have to have it. Dare to try, dare to taste, dare to look at what’s around you in a different way.”