A few years ago I had dinner at a trendy, much-hyped Helsinki restaurant and was served a solitary carrot. It was a steamed carrot, cooked to perfection, but with nothing on the side and no sauce. “This is peak New Nordic,” I thought, referring to the food movement that belaboured hyperlocal ingredients and elevated long-forgotten and highly esoteric Nordic staples, from wild herbs and foraged berries to obscure mushrooms. At its best, it was brilliant. But it was often a little pretentious.

In hindsight that carrot probably was peak New Nordic. So influential was the movement that restaurants from Singapore to New York, which had little to do with the cuisine’s roots, described themselves as New Nordic-influenced. Usually, that meant obscure regional ingredients cooked in an ambitious fine-dining style, where plates were presented like abstract art and chefs had an obsession with tweezers and microherbs. Luckily, it seems that the Nordics are beginning to move on. 

The Nordic restaurant scene has undergone a profound transformation in recent years. Most of the popular places that have opened in my native Helsinki, such as Maukku, Jason and Mat Distrikt, are casual bistros with chalkboard menus that serve hearty, down-to-earth food, often inspired by either French, Japanese or Italian cuisines. Gone are the days when top restaurants in Stockholm opted for tasteless Swedish truffles instead of their clearly superior counterparts from Piemonte. 

The decline of New Nordic cuisine is related to the waning popularity of fine dining. It’s a trend across the Western world that is related to both the downturn in our economies and the move towards a more relaxed working culture. But diners have also started to reject New Nordic’s dogmatic and fussy approach to food. With naming names, I have eaten in Michelin-starred New Nordic restaurants where presenting the menu felt more like a lecture than a treat. 

When a cuisine becomes a movement, it can sometimes lose sight of the basics. Dining out should be a fun and social experience. People like food for its taste, not for its intellectual or philosophical underpinnings. 

My favourite restaurant in Helsinki, Nolla, is case in point. It’s a relaxed bistro with fun and interesting owners who are full of stories and laughter, and the menu is a wonderful mix of Serbian, Finnish, Portuguese and Catalan flavours. It also happens to be a world pioneer in zero-waste cooking, which isn’t even trumpeted on its menus. Why? Because that’s not why people eat in restaurants. 

Another Helsinki example is French bistro BasBas. It has been voted the city’s most popular restaurant so many times that you now need to book your table weeks in advance. The restaurant floor contains so much energy that your spirits are lifted as soon as you walk through the doors. The menu isn’t conceptual or stuffed with the names of wild herbs that no one knows. Not all of the food comes from within a radius of five kilometres either – and that’s okay because people still eat here.

The New Nordic movement had its place and will have its legacy. It put Scandinavia on the culinary map. Copenhagen’s Noma, the epicentre of the movement, was doubtlessly one of the world’s best restaurants for many years. Yet, for all of Noma’s influence, Nordic diners now crave something different – and their appetites are taking them elsewhere. As for me? I’ll skip the carrots for now, thank you.