Freya Nordic Kitchen tops Tulsa World’s Best New Restaurants list

It takes about three days for a serving of the gravlax at Freya Nordic Kitchen to get to a buyer’s desk.

That’s how lengthy it takes for the salmon to be cleaned, skinned and deboned, then cured in an answer of beetroot juice and aquavit, an herb-infused spirit distinctive to Scandinavia.

After about 36 hours of curing, the now-bright purple salmon is thinly sliced and served with fried capers, a dill-mustard bitter cream, radishes and rye crisps as an appetizer or as one of many parts that make up the Smorgasbord sampler that features numerous pickled greens, Nordic cheeses and different Scandinavian treats.

“It’s one of those dishes like Swedish meatballs that many people associate with Scandinavian cuisine,” stated Justin Thompson, chef and proprietor of Freya Nordic Kitchen. “I know, because those two dishes were about all I really knew about this cuisine before we started working on this concept. It was a very steep learning curve for all of us.”

Freya Nordic Kitchen, at 3410 S. Peoria Ave., has been chosen because the Tulsa World’s Best New Restaurant of 2022. It opened July 19 within the house that previously was house to Mondo’s Ristorante Italian, with a menu that pulls inspiration from the cuisines of Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

Named for the Norse goddess related to love, magnificence and fertility, Freya was the one new restaurant reviewed this 12 months to earn five-star scores for its meals, its service and its environment.

For Thompson, whose eating places embrace Juniper, Prhyme Steakhouse and Ferrell’s Bread & Bakery, in addition to a thriving catering enterprise, incomes reward for his employees’s service and hospitality are simply as vital to him because the meals served.

“With every individual service — say, a table of four people — there are maybe 100 touch points where we can succeed or fail,” he stated. “It could be how they were greeted, how long they had to wait for a table, is the music too loud, was the drinks order correct. And all that is before the food is served.

“The thing about service is that it should not be noticed,” Thompson stated. “That’s the goal, anyway. And that is very different from hospitality, which is all about the atmosphere you want to create. Service you can teach; hospitality is something more innate. That’s why we work to be hospitable to our staff members. From the start we wanted Freya to be a warm, welcoming place not just for our guests but for our staff.”

The concept for Freya was born a few years in the past, when Thompson and Derek Hillman, director of restaurant operations for Justin Thompson Restaurant Group, have been discussing attainable ideas for brand new eating places.

“It was the end of 2020, and we thought if we ever got out of COVID (restrictions on public gatherings), that we should do something we were passionate and excited about,” Thompson stated. “We tossed around a number of concepts, but the idea of a Scandinavian restaurant was the one that really stuck. It would be something new and different for Tulsa.”

Thompson and his employees spent a great deal of time in analysis — not solely into the meals of Scandinavia but in addition into the historical past and tradition of the international locations that might be represented on the menu.

The restaurant’s design incorporates influences from the area to create, because the Tulsa World’s assessment put it, “a setting full of blond woods and soft green upholstery, arranged with the sort of tasteful austerity of which IKEA can only dream.”

It was additionally, Thompson stated, a method of alerting Tulsa diners that Freya was certainly one thing new and totally different.

“If we hadn’t completely transformed the space from how it was when Mondo’s was here, I don’t think people would take what we were doing as seriously,” Thompson stated. “It needed to be totally different from what was here before.”

The menu was developed in collaboration with former chef de delicacies Tiffany Taylor and sous chef Kelsey Ihm. (Taylor has left Freya to take a place with The Hemingway steak home, and Ihm is now Freya’s chef de delicacies.)

The aim was to create dishes that have been as genuine as attainable however which might nonetheless enchantment to Oklahoma palates.

“We don’t serve fermented fish,” Thompson stated. “It’s a big part of the cuisine, but I’m not at all sure how that would go over here.”

For the dishes the restaurant does serve, Thompson stated, the creators attempt to be as genuine as attainable with the parts used to create it — for instance, importing from Sweden a jam created from cloudberries, a fruit that grows solely in northern climates, to make the demi-glacé for what has turn into one in all Freya’s best-selling dishes, the elk chops.

“After that,” he stated, “we just try to make food that tastes as good as we can make it. Tiffany and Kelsey spent months redoing dishes over and over to get them the way we wanted. Freya wouldn’t be what it is without Tiffany and Kelsey.”

While Freya has a full-service bar with a line of signature cocktails such because the Odin Sour and the Vixen’s Tail, it additionally presents numerous nonalcoholic choices, embrace wines and beers, in addition to mocktails such because the Royal Garden, made with Lyre’s Apertif Rosso, hibiscus, grapefruit and rosemary tonic, and Mjolnir (The Hammer), a mixture of Harmony alpine Digestif, chamomile and lime.

The effort and time that has gone into the menu has been appreciated by diners who’re acquainted with Scandinavian delicacies.

“I was talking with a guest recently who told me that his father had spent a great deal of time in Norway and Finland and that he would often make Swedish meatballs,” Thompson stated. “He said the ones we serve were better than his father’s. I thanked him, but I said he probably had better not tell his father that.”