Råkultur – quality sushi in Stockholm

It was Daniel’s mother’s birthday on Friday and we went over to Sweden to help her celebrate. After my first couple of trips to Stockholm I found it somewhat surprising that there were now (at least) a couple of quite serious restaurants to visit. First up was Rakultur, which delivered quality Japanese food that certainly impressed.

Sadly we had failed to deal with one of the better aspects of the restaurant: it has no alcohol license. If we’d have known we would have brought along some refreshing beverage. Every table has a little transparent teapot filled with green tea, but green tea is a pointless and largely nasty drink so we didn’t bother.

The menu was brief but had a reasonably interesting selection of Japanese goodies. We ordered a starter and main course each.

The starters were quite lovely. Leena ordered turbot sashimi with yuzo butter. The turbot was very extremely tasty with a great texture. Delicious. Not as lovely as my starter, though, which was hilariously rare beef in fish sauce with a little sprinkling of dried chilli on top. The beef was extremely high-quality and tender and it worked a treat with the nam pla and chilli. This was quite like the [link2post id=”1452″]hot and sour beef salad we often prepare[/link2post]. I enjoyed this so much that thought this would easily be the best starter, then I tried Daniel’s lime-acidulated mackerel in endive leaves. This had a wonderful progression of flavours as you ate it and the texture was very pleasing; an excellent dish.

We then moved onto our main courses. Leena had a noodle dish that she turned her nose up at because it contained coriander. I had a little taste of the broth and thought it most tasty. Daniel and I ordered two different plates of 15 pieces of sushi. One of these selections was specifically made from fish caught in the North Atlantic. It was very good that all the fish was at room temperature, not straight out of the fridge. This resulted in the flavour not being muted. All of the old sushi favourites were there, skilfully pre-seasoned with wasabi. The king fish from the North Atlantic merits a special mention for its rich, mouth-coating flavour and wonderful, dense texture. The zander (aka pike-perch) was also top bunny. This was properly good sushi prepared very well.

It was a pleasant dining environment with good sushi and great starters. The staff were helpful and attentive (and spoke English faultlessly). A fun time was had by all. It would have been improved if we had brought some bottles of Kirin, but then even we don’t need to drink all of the time. This was easily one of the best places I’ve eaten in Sweden, definitely worth a trip.

Contact details: Råkultur, Kungstengatan 2, 114 25 Stockholm. Telephone: (+46) 08 696 23 25.