ONE SUMMER IN SWEDEN

“OUR GOAL IS to create Sweden’s best living room,” Erik Nilsson said as he poured our glasses of dry cider. Dressed in a collarless button-up with his red hair tied in a bun, the sommelier was telling me and my girlfriend, Sherry, about Villa Strandvägen while we ate dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. Tucked into the woods just off the beach on the outskirts of Ystad—an 800-year-old town on the coast of Skåne (pronounced scone-eh), the country’s southernmost province—the villa was built in 1899 and renovated into a seven-room hotel and restaurant that opened in 2016.

Dining at Villa Strandvägen feel a little like being in a friend’s living room—a friend who has a better house and better food than any of your real friends, and who never wants to tell you long stories about his kids. At most, this friend will want to explain to you in apologetic tones, as Erik was doing, why he had gone all the way to Trondheim, Norway, for the salmon you were about to eat. As we would soon learn, environmentally conscious Sweden has such a passion for local sourcing (known as or ‘near grown’) that getting fish from