I thought it was a joke, placed in front of me a plate of warm raw mince-meat with a raw egg yolk on top. I wanted to experience a good restaurant meal to end my week in Stockholm and went to Broms in the wealthy Östermalm district.
Never wanting to be squeamish I tucked in. The menu had said Steak Tartare and I had imagined a regular grilled steak with tartare sauce. The waiter asked about my meal and I said, ‘Well, actually, I had sort of expected something different’. He immediately offered to replace it with an alternative at no extra cost, I accepted, and was given the classic Swedish dish of meatballs, mash, cucumber and lignonberries – delicious. The waiter was wanting to chat and I said I had observed the whole restaurant was full of middle-aged women, some wearing leopard print tops. He said that’s because they’re all cougars. The staff, apparently, refer to them, the Swedish equivalent of ‘latte-momas’. They come in the morning and stay most of the day – Broms was a well known hangout. The places you end up sometimes – crazy.
Earlier in the day I returned my hire-bike, did my last shopping, shipped a box back to NZ and took the Metro Walking Tour. All the underground stations have amazing commissioned artwork – they have been blasted out of solid rock and are enormous caverness spaces. There’s an even deeper new network of tunnels for the faster commuter links to distant suburbs – those Swedes, talk about investing in infrastructure – it must have cost them billions.
