The story’s the same for this week: it’s been raining and I’ve been staying in. Until today! Because today is our anniversary! I can’t believe it’s been four years. Happy anniversary, Matt!
The thing to do in Oslo is to go to a fancy restaurant and have a several course tasting menu. So I hunted down a not *too* fancy restaurant that also had a vegetarian tasting menu and that’s where we went. It was called von Porat, located at the fairly new Mathallen Oslo. (Coincidentally, the photo at the top of Mathallen’s website seems to have been taken from the table where we sat.) All the food was so pretty, I took pictures of what I had just for you.
To go with our meal we had some great sourdough bread served with local butter and pork fat with pork crumbles. I stuck with the butter.
First course: parsley root, charred pickled onion, and julienned apple with some kind of nice herb sauce that I didn’t catch the name of.
Second course: poached egg with cheese sauce and fresh herbs. Unfortunately, I don’t like soft poached eggs. If I had told them they probably would have made it differently for me. Oh well.
Main course: charred cabbage, charred pickled carrots, and grilled king oyster mushroom with potato sauce. I was so excited about this course that I almost started eating it before I took a picture!
Matt’s main course: veal, pickled carrots, pickled radishes, peas, broccoli, and mystery bubbly sauce. I got to eat all of Matt’s pickles.
Dessert: nyr (a cream cheese ice cream, strange, but good) infused with coffee, rosemary sweetbread, and rosemary blueberry sauce.
It was definitely a fun place to go for our anniversary dinner. And now we’ll try to stick to cheaper restaurants for the rest of the trip!
In other news, we’ve decided to go to Sweden for the weekend. It’s so nearby, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity! It’s a four hour bus ride to Göteborg, Sweden’s second largest city. We already bought some city passes that will give us admission to tons of museums, public transit, etc., and even included our hotel. Online reviews say that the hotel has a great free breakfast, which I’m pretty excited about. Scandinavian breakfast is something we’ve sort of missed out on since we eat at our apartment every morning. Someone even said they have Swedish pancakes…
Our bus leaves at 5:00pm tomorrow and we’ll get back Sunday night. It should be fun!