Adventure: The New Nordic

Michelin-star chefs converge on Swedish Lapland, home to a new kind of rugged luxury, for the epic Stars du Nord event

- By Jared Paul Stern

In a remote clearing in Swedish Lapland near the Arctic Circle, nine Michelin-starred chefs are racing around to various fire pits and makeshift prep stations, plating rustic-looking delicacies for diners perched on stools carved from tree trunks. What's remarkable is not only the isolated majesty of the location, but the way the men and women-gastronomic celebrities in their own right-work together on each course, an all-hands-on deck approach necessitated by the lack of electricity and kitchen equipment.

The cooking utensils and methods run the gamut from rough hewn to downright medieval, as the chefs from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland successfully execute a nine-course tasting menu that's been almost a year in the making. For the two-night-only, $700 per person pop-up, dubbed Stars du Nord, everything was sourced and foraged within a 120-mile radius from the surrounding woods, mountains, and sea, and prepared using only traditional methods, including fermentation, fresh spring water, and open fire.

Torsten Vildgaard, formerly of world-famous Noma in Copenhagen, prepared tartare of reindeer heart dressed with porcini marinade and topped with fried ants. Tommi Tuominen, of Finnjävel in Helsinki, roasted lamb under hot coals for six hours in a deep pit using a Finnish technique the name of which translates to "bandit roast." And Nicolai Tram of Knystaforsen, a Michelin-starred openfire restaurant housed in an old sawmill in southern Sweden, prepared reindeer meet using a flambadou, a cone-shaped cast iron tool from the Middle Ages that he made red hot in order to ignite and melt fat, searing the meat in the process..