The Swede taste of Scandinavia
March 4, 2004 | 12:00am
When we were invited last month to the Ericsson night of the Scandinavian festival of Makati Shangri-La Hotel, we expected to get a taste of what we experienced in Sweden some years ago: Scrumptious Swedish game dishes, and also an introduction to the cuisines of Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Finland.
Memories of lingonberry came back – that fruit that’s made into different foods like jam, pie, ice cream, wine, sauce, marmalade, pastry, juice and tea, among many others. And also memories of waking up in the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjarvi in the Swedish Lapland to the smell of piping lingonberry and actually sweating in the sleeping bag despite below-zero temperatures. Of walking in and out of H&M stores, Sweden’s biggest lifestyle export apart from Absolut vodka. Of taking a tour inside a networked building with homes you can control through your mobile phone, and thinking, how nice that people have found a better use for their cell phones than to forward jokes all day.
So, when Ericsson Philippines president Hans O. Karlsson tells us that the Philippines is indeed the texting leader in the world with 120 million messages a day, we wonder out loud how many of those come from his own Sony Ericsson phone.
He laughs and says, "On the average, about 20," and adds that some of those messages are of the "K, Tnx" variety. He prefers voice calls obviously, which is typical of an executive. After all, when you work for a company that helped develop mobile infrastructure in the country, you do want to do more than just text with your phone.
While the average consumer knows Ericsson only for its mobile phones Sony Ericsson, a larger part of its business in the Philippines is providing solutions to network operators such as Smart and Globe. For every action you do on your cell, whether you’re calling or texting or sending an MMS, chances are you’re going through network infrastructure that Ericsson either developed or expanded or improved.
Ericsson is a Swedish company, one of the companies that helped Stockholm gain its status as technological hub in the region. Karlsson says Europeans in general and Swedish companies in particular have a different way of doing business compared with their counterparts in North America. "We look more towards the long term. We’re not more concerned about next quarter’s profits than we are about where we’ll be 10 years form now."
At the Scandinavian festival of Makati Shangri-La, Ericsson hosted several nights for its dealers and clients. The Sveriges jazz band from Sweden, which played American jazz and bosa nova, provided the music.
The hotel’s guest chef Bjorn Ekstrand, who comes from Aland, Finland, was responsible for the lunch and dinner buffet at Island Café. He specializes in fish that he strips down to its natural flavor – no heavy sauces, no spices.
The 25-year-old chef started his career early at 14. Well, actually it wasn’t so much a career that he was after, but a woman he was infatuated with. She was a chef in a restaurant and he went to work there himself as a trainee. We don’t know what happened to the woman, but we do know what happened to Bjorn. He fell in love with cooking. By the time he was 18, he already had a degree from the Hotel and Restaurant Management School in Aland and worked in different Scandinavian countries such as Norway for three years, and Sweden where he worked at Bon Lloc, one of Stockholm’s top restaurants. He also worked in neighboring Finland as executive chef to different restaurants.
He may be young, but this chef has his own catering and consulting company.
At Shangri-La Hotel, he cooked up a sampling of dishes from the Scandinavian countries and also offered herring in different ways: Garlic herring, tomato Baltic herring, herring a la russe and preserved pickled herring. (Yes, the fish is his favorite, too.)
His seafood selections included smoked trout, fresh perch from the Baltic’s, fried fillet cod with remoulade sauce and chanterelle risotto, lobster soup, crayfish from Sweden and, of course, Norwegian salmon.
The Scandinavian festival lasted for 10 days. When Bjorn asked us what we thought of the food, we said, maybe he should do a longer one next time – like a year.
Memories of lingonberry came back – that fruit that’s made into different foods like jam, pie, ice cream, wine, sauce, marmalade, pastry, juice and tea, among many others. And also memories of waking up in the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjarvi in the Swedish Lapland to the smell of piping lingonberry and actually sweating in the sleeping bag despite below-zero temperatures. Of walking in and out of H&M stores, Sweden’s biggest lifestyle export apart from Absolut vodka. Of taking a tour inside a networked building with homes you can control through your mobile phone, and thinking, how nice that people have found a better use for their cell phones than to forward jokes all day.
So, when Ericsson Philippines president Hans O. Karlsson tells us that the Philippines is indeed the texting leader in the world with 120 million messages a day, we wonder out loud how many of those come from his own Sony Ericsson phone.
He laughs and says, "On the average, about 20," and adds that some of those messages are of the "K, Tnx" variety. He prefers voice calls obviously, which is typical of an executive. After all, when you work for a company that helped develop mobile infrastructure in the country, you do want to do more than just text with your phone.
While the average consumer knows Ericsson only for its mobile phones Sony Ericsson, a larger part of its business in the Philippines is providing solutions to network operators such as Smart and Globe. For every action you do on your cell, whether you’re calling or texting or sending an MMS, chances are you’re going through network infrastructure that Ericsson either developed or expanded or improved.
Ericsson is a Swedish company, one of the companies that helped Stockholm gain its status as technological hub in the region. Karlsson says Europeans in general and Swedish companies in particular have a different way of doing business compared with their counterparts in North America. "We look more towards the long term. We’re not more concerned about next quarter’s profits than we are about where we’ll be 10 years form now."
At the Scandinavian festival of Makati Shangri-La, Ericsson hosted several nights for its dealers and clients. The Sveriges jazz band from Sweden, which played American jazz and bosa nova, provided the music.
The hotel’s guest chef Bjorn Ekstrand, who comes from Aland, Finland, was responsible for the lunch and dinner buffet at Island Café. He specializes in fish that he strips down to its natural flavor – no heavy sauces, no spices.
The 25-year-old chef started his career early at 14. Well, actually it wasn’t so much a career that he was after, but a woman he was infatuated with. She was a chef in a restaurant and he went to work there himself as a trainee. We don’t know what happened to the woman, but we do know what happened to Bjorn. He fell in love with cooking. By the time he was 18, he already had a degree from the Hotel and Restaurant Management School in Aland and worked in different Scandinavian countries such as Norway for three years, and Sweden where he worked at Bon Lloc, one of Stockholm’s top restaurants. He also worked in neighboring Finland as executive chef to different restaurants.
He may be young, but this chef has his own catering and consulting company.
At Shangri-La Hotel, he cooked up a sampling of dishes from the Scandinavian countries and also offered herring in different ways: Garlic herring, tomato Baltic herring, herring a la russe and preserved pickled herring. (Yes, the fish is his favorite, too.)
His seafood selections included smoked trout, fresh perch from the Baltic’s, fried fillet cod with remoulade sauce and chanterelle risotto, lobster soup, crayfish from Sweden and, of course, Norwegian salmon.
The Scandinavian festival lasted for 10 days. When Bjorn asked us what we thought of the food, we said, maybe he should do a longer one next time – like a year.
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