Last Minute Plans: Swedish Sister City Dinner

By Melissa Wiley in Food on Sep 10, 2012 7:00PM

For a city of famously brawny shoulders, Chicago sure has a lot of sisters—28 sister cities in total, and most of them love to cook. Or so Chicago Sister Cities International tells us by way of bringing us round the global dinner table through its Taste of Chicago Sister Cities series. Tonight the organization is toasting Gothenburg, Sweden, a female sibling city of 25 years standing, by presenting a five-course epicurean extravaganza from Chef Håkan Thörnström of Thörnströms Kök, a Michelin-starred restaurant and 2011 Restaurant of the Year award winner.

Thörnström is one of many enterprising Swedes bent on proving to the rest of the world that the blonde, lissome children of Mother Svea have more going for them than their good looks. And Swedes are more than willing to share what extra bounty nature has given them, it seems. Thörnström will open his kitchen and co-create the meal with Kendall College instructors and students, showing them how 21st-century Gothenburger chefs are deftly reconfiguring their native slow-growing hillside fruit, coastal seafood, and forest berries and game into modern farm-to-table crowd pleasers.

Special out-of-town guests will include Mayor of Gothenburg Anneli Hulthén as well as Bengt Linde, co-owner of Michelin-starred Fond and chairman of the Gothenburg Restaurant Association. The dinner takes place at Kendall College from 6 to 9 pm, and tickets are still available at ChicagoSisterCities.com for $100, so saddle up your Dala horse for a night of Nordic cuisine and culture to remember. Consider it one tasty family reunion.

Kendall College is located at 900 N. North Branch Street.