Stockholm

Berzelii Park · Näckströmsgatan 8

Sweden’s first Chinese restaurant was opened in 1944 with help from Chinese jugglers who had become stranded in Stockholm during the Second World War and ended up working in the kitchen. That strange inheritance is still visible in Berns itself. Dim sum, sushi and a menu now roaming much more widely across Asia arrive beneath chandeliers in one of Stockholm’s most spectacular nineteenth-century salons, a room built for concerts, society and public grandeur rather than chopsticks. Diana Ross has performed in the building. So has Charles Aznavour. Today somebody beneath the same ceiling is ordering sashimi. The layers of cosmopolitan Stockholm coexist without needing to be resolved. Once the jugglers became chefs, purity had already lost.

Östermalm · Nybrogatan 12

Italiano’s philosophy is that dinner takes several rounds, the food goes in the middle and nobody should be in a hurry because eating together is the main event of the day. The Ottobre family’s original restaurant brings a warm Italian rhythm into Östermalm: pasta, meat, wine, people sharing things, staff who behave as though hospitality involves liking the presence of other human beings. Chef Marco Baudone has the serious résumé, Gualtiero Marchesi, Guy Savoy, Pierre Gagnaire, but the food does not arrive burdened by it. Italiano calls the proposition simply cibo italiano. Come for the kind of four-course dinner that attempts to solve all the problems in the world and has made no progress by midnight.

Östermalm · Nybrogatan 15

Astoria is a power brasserie and deserves the slightly obnoxious phrase. Two floors. Two hundred seats. Open kitchen. Fire. Bar. DJs. Seafood. Duck. Pasta. Steak. Caesar salad finished beside the table because apparently lettuce can still support live theatre. Serving carts move through the room while everybody watches everybody else pretend not to watch everybody else. After his three-star restaurant, Björn Frantzén built somewhere people actually want to misbehave on a Thursday. The former Astoria cinema gives the production exactly the right scale, and the room has recovered its original purpose: spectacle, escapism, social observation, beautiful people sitting in expensive chairs while something happens in front of them. Dinner is meant to be seen here.

Stadsgårdshamnen 22, 116 45 Stockholm

Fotografiska stays open until eleven, allowing photography to exist outside the responsible cultural hours between breakfast and coffee. The temporary shows keep changing, so there is no permanent master collection demanding reverence on every visit. On the top floor, water, Djurgården and Gamla Stan spread out through the windows. The restaurant has earned sustainability awards, exhibitions are included with a reservation and the bar is good enough to use independently. Stockholm gave a photography museum the hours and social equipment of a night out.

Djurgården · Galärvarvsvägen 14, Stockholm

The king wanted an enormous warship. The engineers discovered it was top-heavy. A stability test involving thirty men running back and forth across the deck made the ship roll so alarmingly that the admiral stopped the test, but it was launched anyway. Vasa sailed for about twenty minutes. It sank in Stockholm harbour in 1628, remained underwater for 333 years, was raised in 1961 and is now sitting indoors with approximately 98% of the seventeenth-century ship still original. Walk into the dark museum and encounter the actual catastrophic object: sixty-nine metres of carved royal ambition preserved because its failure happened so quickly. A deeply expensive mistake became a magnificent object.

Space Stockholm · Sergelgatan 2, 111 57 Stockholm

Avicii Experience is much stranger and sadder than a straightforward celebration of EDM celebrity. You begin with Tim Bergling: the bedroom, the computer, gaming, instruments, the ordinary young Stockholm obsessive who became extraordinarily good at arranging sounds. Then the scale expands through studios, collaborators, unreleased music, festival crowds and world tours, the Avicii identity growing until the person inside it becomes increasingly difficult to see. You can stand behind a virtual DJ booth and experience tens of thousands of screaming people, remix tracks and do VR karaoke. Then the route takes you back past the boyhood room. The museum refuses to reduce the story to a Stockholm kid conquering the planet. The music became enormous, and so did the machinery around it. Listen loudly, but leave thinking about Tim.

Hornstull · Hornsbruksgatan 24, 117 34 Stockholm

Tjoget contains five places: dining room, wine bodega, beer café, cocktail bar and private room. DJs play, the food circles the Mediterranean, and the drinks pull flavors from southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The bar has spent more than a decade appearing on serious international lists while continuing to call itself a neighborhood place. That claim survives because Hornstull supplies the crowd and each room offers a different use. Order a cocktail, chistorra or wine according to where you landed.