–By Craig Stoltz
My wife and I were browsing Euro-chic goods at a cosmopolitan furniture shop when a stylish waiter brought out candles and place settings to a teak dining table on the sales floor. Four diners were then seated, and a server delivered an appetizer board of cured fish and caviar. We soon headed to the bar at the rear of the store for an aquavit cocktail.
It was just another evening in Copenhagen…no, wait, we were in downtown Roanoke. More specifically, we were at Stock, a Nordic café ingeniously integrated with Txtur, a retailer of locally made modern furniture with a Scandinavian flair and a boutique hotel. The restaurant has become an improbable Blue Ridge hit, drawing in locals and visitors whose closest previous brush with Scandinavian cuisine might have been the cafeteria at Ikea.
Of all the possible styles of food to serve in this rising former railroad town, how did the fare of the fjords wind up here?
“I wanted something completely different” from other offerings nearby, Chef Jeff Farmer says; most of his cooking, in New Orleans, Mississippi, and two restaurants in Roanoke, has been Southern style. He also wanted a cuisine likely to be novel elsewhere, since the owners are bringing the same concept to additional regional markets (a second location opened in Richmond in May).
Indeed, the menu is unlike any you’ll see anywhere near the Appalachian foothills. Selections include pork schnitzel with a sauce of lemon, anchovy, and horseradish, smoked sturgeon on Danish-style smørrebrød, and a whole trout with rosti—a potato cake that’s the Swiss national dish.
Perhaps Farmer’s most beloved item—the one that would “cause a riot” if taken off the menu—is the Dutch fast-food staple kapsalon. It’s a layering of hand-cut fries, chicken shawarma, melted Gouda, shredded lettuce, garlic sauce, and the Indonesian chili paste sambal. It arrives as a colorful mound laced with white and red stripes. It’s a gastronomic treat, each forkful delivering a mix of unexpected flavors, textures, and temperatures.
But wait: Chicken shawarma and sambal? Haven’t we drifted pretty far down the canal from Stockholm?
Farmer explains that the Dutch, once the center of the spice trade and the colonizer of Indonesia, brought all kinds of global tastes to Scandinavian and other Northern European tables. Immigrants continue to refresh Nordic cuisine today. “I like to play up those sharper
flavors,” Farmer says.
Take, for example, the lamb dish, a handsome kebab of ground lamb curry served on a bed of golden beets. Or his crowd-favorite starter: 18-month-aged Gouda tucked into an egg roll wrapper, deep-fried, and served with a dipping sauce that’s sweet and full of punch. That dish is cribbed from a Danish “TV dinner”–style version, Farmer says.
Stock’s appetizer board is an introduction to the Nordic palate. In addition to a variety of cheeses from goats and sheep, there is pickled, smoked, and cured fish and a deeply pungent cod liver spread. Thin discs of homemade, Danish-style sourdough rye crackers stand upright. Crisped trout skin, dried for two days then deep-fried, brings another texture. A dollop of sturgeon caviar adds a high-gloss touch.
Nordic cuisine is very seafood-focused, and “it’s tough to source good fish when you’re land-locked,” Farmer says.
He’s found ways. He imports salmon from Denmark; he finds it excellent for curing. The trout is from a source closer to home: Smoke in Chimneys, a best-in-class hatchery in New Castle whose customers include the three-Michelin-star Inn at Little Washington.
The concept is going over well enough that it can be hard to score a table on weekends. “We get people who come to look at the furniture, see the restaurant, and stay for a meal,” Farmer says. Guests of the hotel upstairs come down for a drink and wind up getting dinner. And locals are discovering it, some becoming regulars and ordering small plates at the eight-seat bar.
The cocktail program is a knockout, helmed by a veteran New Orleans barkeep, who does magical things with aquavit, the Scandinavian spirit that carries a whiff of caraway and dill. The wine list integrates some northern Europe varieties rarely seen in the Blue Ridge, including five Grüner Veltliners, from a grape similar to sauvignon blanc that’s native to Austria.
There wasn’t a misstep in our two meals. In addition to the kapsalon and fried gouda openers, we had a richly savory smoked trout and ramp pâté, served on a dense slice of toasting bread and topped by a gorgeously composed salad of watercress and local English peas, the latter so fresh you could hear them pop in your mouth.
The Juanito Amor cocktail with Lunazul blanco tequila, Ancho Reyes, lime, pineapple, green bell pepper, chamoy, Tajin seasoning, and latchkey painkiller bitters; and Life on Mars, with gin, pineapple, orgeat, rhubarb, grapefruit liqueur, and lemon juice.
We also tried the smørrebrød, a core menu item at Stock. It’s an open-faced rye sandwich served with a variety of toppings, many sourced regionally and reflecting Farmer’s playful global touches: gravlax cured on-site and served with everything-spiced crème fraîche, and Carolina blue crab with Za’atar and miso red pepper butter. We had a delightful French horn mushroom version with leeks, goat cheese, and a scattering of fried shallot crisps.
Our knopfle, the Swedish name for spaetzle, featured three kinds of local mushrooms, lingonberries, and sheep’s milk Gouda; the small noodly dumplings were flavored with ramps. It was a masterpiece of local forage. And speaking of masterpieces, our dessert, a kind of cheesecake ice cream sandwich with gingersnap crusts, uses Ski Queen, the Americanized version of the caramel-touched Norwegian brown cheese Gjetost. It was a spectacularly creamy and delightful finish.
Significantly, the menu at Stock also includes Bavarian Rock Hen, despite Nordic menus rarely offering poultry. And there’s hanger steak, whose only Scandinavian mark is the bacon gouda fondue draping the frites. This is all by design. Farmer knows not everybody who comes into Stock is pre-sold on this whole Nordic thing, and he wants to be sure they have great meals too.
In fact, to add some variety and pull in a local crowd the restaurant may not reach otherwise, Stock does a weekly pop-up featuring a wide range of cuisines. The week before Farmer and I spoke it was a crawfish boil, done in straight-on Southern style.
Although he adds, his globalist food mind whirring away, “Swedes really love crawfish…”
Check out Chef Farmer’s recipes here.
This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue.
