In a few months, Swedish chef Marcus Jernmark plans to open his first restaurant in Los Angeles, celebrating Nordic food with fine-dining touches that could mark a splashy comeback for the kitchen in Los Angeles. He will follow that up with a second restaurant, located above the first.
Jernmark was raised in Sweden but spent much of his two-decade career in New York City, cooking at Per Se and contemporary Swedish restaurant Aquavit. He returned to Sweden and headed the kitchen at Stockholm’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant Frántzen, currently ranked No. 6 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, and then opened Zén in Singapore before moving to Los Angeles in 2022.
In his culinary career, he’s already cooked dumplings and herring and reindeer tasting boards, but in 2025, when he takes over the Pico-Robertson spaces that most recently housed Bicyclette and Manzke, he hopes to open a restaurant that uses California ingredients but maintains a “Nordic backbone and DNA.” It’s Nordic cuisine with a personal touch, as if he were cooking a fine-dining tasting menu for Angelenos in their own home, he says.
“I really feel like in 2024, introducing a lot of the flavor components and some of our culinary approaches is the right time for Los Angeles,” Jernmark said.
New Nordic cuisine draws on the culinary foundations of Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Finnish techniques and ingredients, sometimes reimagining smoked and pickled fish, wild berries and fire-cooked game in inventive presentations of powders, sauces, splashes and smoke. It has gained global prominence over the past two decades and has been the hallmark of some of the world’s most famous restaurants, including Noma in Denmark and Fäviken in Sweden.
Today, Nordic restaurants are few and far between in Los Angeles, and the influence here tends to be more casual, with smørrebrød at Piknik, Danish pastries and kringles at Copenhagen Pastry, smoked fish on Icelandic rye at Destroyer, cardamom buns at Clark Street, and Danish hot dogs at Open Face Food Shop.
But Los Angeles was once a seedbed for the more refined corners of the kitchen. Scandia, one of the city's most glamorous restaurants in the 1950s and '60s, saw some of the world's most famous celebrities dine on Swedish meatballs, herring fillets, steaks and “Viking platters” on silver platters. Jernmark's two new restaurants could be a modern path to Scandinavian cuisine's prominence in fine dining.
There will be home-fermented and small-batch products from Swedish makers highlighting the country’s latest culinary innovations — perhaps a cold-smoked soy sauce made from a traditional vegetable called the grey pea, or roe flown in from Sweden — with dishes served on custom ceramic plates by a Swedish artist and drinks poured into vessels by a glassblower in Denmark.
The night he moved to Los Angeles in 2022, Jernmark dined at Bicyclette, and Joe Garcia, formerly of the Manzkes’ French bistro, had briefly performed at Frántzen in Stockholm. The memory of the Pico-Robertson bistro remains special to Jernmark, and its former home felt like a resonant place to plant his Los Angeles flag.
Marcus Jernmark’s dry-aged guinea fowl with habanero “hot sauce,” toasted almond salsa, tomatoes and onions might offer a hint of what Los Angeles can expect when the chef opens his first restaurants here in 2025.
(John Troxell / Lielle)
The first concept to be launched will be the underground LielleThe restaurant, named after the chef's daughter, is set to open in early 2025 as the more personal of the two concepts. A tandem restaurant will open on the second floor in the former Manzke space a few months later.
Although he helped secure three Michelin stars at Frántzen, Jernmark doesn’t want to “overcomplicate things.” He says he’s found his tastes lean toward simple flavors, which not only allows ingredients to shine, but also drink pairings — an important factor for his robust, non-alcoholic wine programs.
“While I’m still a curious person, I’m also 42 years old,” he said. “I’m going to eliminate a lot of the nonsense, a lot of things that I don’t think necessarily contribute to the overall experience — things that don’t make any sense when you’re cooking for people in your home, the way you cook at home. We’re going to incorporate some of those components into the restaurant experience, because it’s really about nutrition and how to take care of people.”
Los Angeles is packed with thoughtful fine-dining restaurants that do away with some of the hallmarks of fine dining, so Jernmark is now wondering how his forays into the scene will fit in: Menus are still in development, but he’s considering family-style dishes shared around the table.
Though his restaurants will focus on Nordic cuisine from a California perspective, he’s also turning to his favorite foodie city for inspiration: His favorite Paris restaurants, he said, are “very confident, very deep, very direct.” Bertrand Grébaut’s modern bistro Septime and its sister seafood restaurant Clamato currently serve as a blueprint for Jernmark’s tandem restaurants, both in atmosphere and structure.
He’s been working on planning these concepts since May 2023, but he first hinted at his Los Angeles debut in 2021 with an Instagram post naming his private dining club here, Habitué. That business saw the launch of a limited pantry line and his own caviar. Though more or less on hiatus, Jernmark hopes that once his restaurants are up and running, he can relaunch Habitué again as an importer of his favorite pantry items, perhaps even along Pico Boulevard.
Lielle is expected to open in early 2025 at 9575 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles. Jernmark’s upstairs restaurant is slated to open later that year.
