2_1_ScanMag_80_Sep-Oct_2015_Q9_Scan Magazine 1 15/09/2015 19:40 Page 118
Scan Magazine | Feature | Scandinavian Everyday Heroes
Scandinavian everyday heroes – bringing Scandinavian food to Londoners, one pun at a time If there is one thing that is immediately evident about Brontë Aurell, it is that she is determined and really, really hardworking. In addition to running the UK’s by far most popular Scandinavian café together with her husband Jonas, she is churning out great ideas, campaigns and creative projects like some sort of superwoman. Not that she would ever describe herself in those terms. “Most businesses fail within a year of starting out. We simply couldn’t afford to be one of them,” she says about the early days of ScandiKitchen. By Linnea Dunne | Photos: Pete Cassidy
The Aurells pulled it off, and in the most spectacular of ways. Whether to tempt fate or out of pure madness is unclear, but they decided to match the opening day of their new café with the due date of their firstborn, also Brontë’s birthday. “I guess being nine months pregnant and it being my due date meant we did consider the possibility of the two events coinciding, but we didn’t think it would be the same 24 hours. In the end, it was the café’s birthday, my birthday and the baby’s birthday all in one,” says Brontë. “At least we never forget that date.”
118 | Issue 80 | September 2015
Baby Astrid arrived close to midnight after a busy first day at the café, and Jonas slept in a chair at the hospital only to head back to open the shop at 7am the following morning – feeling doomed, one might think. But Brontë shakes her head. “We felt blessed – and tired. Very, very tired.”
The ScandiKitchen cookbook Lesson learned: having a great team is key. Eight years later, that team is as much of a cornerstone to ScandiKitchen as the open sandwiches it is known for and the daily puns on the A-board outside.
So much so it seems, that Brontë, despite both the café and its webshop doing extremely well, decided to go and write a cookbook.
The ScandiKitchen invites the reader into a Scandinavian pantry, outlining what the key Nordic ingredients are and listing the must-haves for your kitchen all the while holding your hand through your first attempt at making sautéed reindeer, baking rye bread and preparing a smörgåsbord. Moreover, it irons out those all-important Scandinavian concepts: from Midsummer to Lucia, from fika to hygge. Friendly and welcoming The book is founded on a strong conviction that there is more to Nordic food than pickled herring and meatballs (though you will find recipes for these here too, of course) and that it really does not have to be complicated. The tone throughout is familiar to anyone who has ever set foot in