Skåne, Sweden travel guide: Chocolate makers, dining and artisan food trail through rising culinary region

Driving east from Malmo, Sweden, there isn’t a lot that calls your attention beyond the occasional red barn and long fields of rapeseed. So it came as a surprise to arrive at a former schoolhouse in the village of Skane-Tranas and find my imagination captured by the enticing aroma of chocolate. It was even more surprising to enter and discover not merely a chocolate maker, but a terroir-talking, bean-to-bean chocolate artisan.

That, according to Ulrika Bergenkrans, who founded Osterlenchoklad with her husband, Fredrik, is precisely the beauty of the Skane region. “It’s become a gastronomical destination, with a whole community,” she says. “All of us have that kind of craft nerdiness.”

Bordered on three sides by the Baltic Sea, Skane is a fertile agricultural area rimmed by sandy beach, a combination that has long made it a favourite summer destination for holiday makers from Stockholm and Gothenburg. But as we discovered on a recent driving tour, it’s also attracted former urbanites who have found in Skane’s lower rents and slower pace a welcoming environment for starting small businesses centred on artisanal food and drink.

“We knew nothing about making chocolate,” says Ulrika Bergenkrans of the moment 13 years ago when, while on holiday, she (a publicist) and her husband (who worked in telecom) discovered the village’s bonbon shop was for sale, and decided to change their lives. The couple began educating themselves in a more elevated kind of chocolate — crafted by artisans who buy beans directly from farmers and roast and grind them themselves.

Today, Osterlenchoklad specialises in single-origin bars and exquisite bonbons filled with local flavours like sea buckthorn and liquorice. Windows in the shop open onto the production area, so visitors can watch the chocolates being made before putting together a tasting of their own.

The Bergankrans have also helped build a community that supports its members personally and, by using and selling each other’s products, professionally.

When we checked into the Vyn hotel near the coastal town of Brantevik, the welcome gift — a box of Osterlen chocolates — proved this point. But the connection goes further. The chef and owner of Vyn is Daniel Berlin, whose previous restaurant (Skane’s first to earn two Michelin stars) was a pioneer in establishing the region’s culinary reputation. After closing that restaurant in 2020, Berlin says he remained in Skane because of the bonds he felt to the area.

With its own two stars and a spot on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, Vyn is the most refined of Skane’s restaurants. The cooking is elegant, without being fussy. Berlin and his team have a knack for paring dishes down to their flavourful essence. A now-signature scallop dish seared on top but raw on the bottom, arrives in a tart, verdant pool of apple, seaweed and dill framing the bivalve’s sweetness. A round of pheasant breast sandwiched between a sauce of aged pears and a crisp disk of salsify offers earthiness.

Berlin has worked with local hunters and farmers for years. “We don’t order from a big company that provides you with everything from far away,” he says. “It should be a collaboration.”

There’s more evidence of such collaboration down the road at Gamla Bageriet, which supplies Vyn’s hotel with the bread it serves at breakfast, and also operates a pretty cafe serving sandwiches and buttery pastries. The owner, Jimmy Johansson, was a photographer in Oslo for 20 years before moving to Skane in 2019. There, he converted everyone’s favourite pandemic hobby into a job by opening a sourdough microbakery in his home. By 2021, he’d moved the operation into what was once the town of Borrby’s general store.

We find another set of entrepreneurial transplants 11km inland. Soon after he retired from the military in 2014, Anders Persakre and his wife, Cherztin, bought Osterlenkryddor, an herb farm in Koppingebro, even though, he offers, “we knew nothing about herbs”.

Today, they grow an array of aromatic crops and keep a shop where they sell their own spice blends, as well as ice cream scented with saffron and lavender.

While we were too early for the July lavender bloom that turns Osterlenkryddor into a sea of purple, the scenery as we head east nearly makes up for it: rolling farmland dotted with stepped-gable churches and chubby windmills, all fringed with the cobalt sea. Farm shops and stands testify to a bounty of asparagus, potatoes, ramps and, as we near Kivik, cider from the region’s apple orchards. There’s even a drive-up bread stall.

This bounty is on display at Talldungen — an inn and restaurant run by Emma Hook and David Levung. The two moved to Skane from Uppsala in search of a quieter life.

They found the perfect balance in Brosarp, where they bought a bed-and-breakfast and added a restaurant with a serious wine cellar. The region’s relative affordability was an attraction. “In big cities like Stockholm or Copenhagen, it’s quite difficult to open a place,” says Levung. “Skane is a place where you can try something out.”

Fifteen years later, that experiment has become a regional culinary hub.

Talldungen’s rustic cooking — our dinner included a punchy pork rillette, and ricotta-filled gnudi with ramps and white asparagus — depends, Hook says, “on very, very, very good produce”. They’ve built relationships with small, conscientious farmers.

“We’re part of an ecosystem that believes in what the community around us can be,” says Hook.

The next morning we head for Bastad, a seaside resort town that’s home to the recently opened Pensionat Furuhem. Housed in a former boarding school, Furuhem is many things — a hotel whose every element, from the handwoven rugs to the locally made linen towels, has been chosen with care; a bakery that sells pastries made with geometric precision; a cafe that at lunchtime serves a single, homey dish.

But Furuhem is also a restaurant. Because it was founded by chef Magnus Nilsson, whose exclusive, acclaimed Faviken closed in 2019, he’s at pains to emphasise that this one is “perfectly ordinary”. That means a place that offers “really good produce, and really good craftsmanship, but is open all day, and that locals feel is meant for them”. To that end, Furuhem boasts that most unchefly of things — an a la carte menu.

His business partner and fellow head chef, Frida Nilsson (no relation), have designed a menu that showcases their own set of local producers. Dinner starts with delightfully tart pickled tomatoes, followed by the sweetest langoustines I’ve ever eaten, served cold with a puckery plum mayonnaise, and then by caramelised roast pork slices bathed in a savoury pool of soldier beans and spinach.

The meal ends with a spectacular rendition of a classic Skane cake, a meringue-based tower whose name — spettekaka, or spit-cake — refers to the rotisserie on which it is slowly baked over an open flame, and which must be carved with Jenga-like dexterity.

After a walk the next morning along Bastad’s villa-lined seafront, we drive to Lindegrens, the organic farm that supplied the delicious pork at Furuhem, and discover a butcher shop filled with charcuterie.

By now, we were accustomed to Skane’s unlikely stories of inexperienced but passionate would-be artisans and farmers. Yet on the outskirts of the town of Hoganas, we find what might be the region’s least likely place of all — a Texas-style barbecue joint called Holy Smoke.

Self-educated through a series of what he calls “meat crusades” through the American South, Johan Fritzell, opened a restaurant in a field that now serves up to 1500 people a day in summer.

Picnic-style seating and buckets of marshmallows for toasting at the fire pit give Holy Smoke festival vibes — but know this barbecue is serious, from the Flintstone-size St Louis beef rib, to the perfect charred edges of tender brisket, to the sticky, smoky, sweet slab of pork belly.

Later Fritzell takes us down the road to Kullaberg’s Vineyard, where we follow the shock of Swedish barbecue with nearly as surprising Swedish wine. The winery’s CEO, Victor Dahl, speaks about Terra Skane, a new initiative to put the region on the winemaking map, now that climate change is making northern wines a thing.

“We may not have the history of France or Italy,” says Dahl, “But we have the passion.”

I think about that passion as I drive home to Copenhagen. Still peckish, I pull out the box I picked up at Osterlenchokolad and begin sampling. As a lavender bonbon gives way to one flavoured with apple liquor and another with spettekaka, I realise I’m eating my way through a map, both of the territory I’ve just explored, and of the committed chefs, artisans and growers who’ve turned it into a community.