In the garden at Salthamn
There are many reasons to fall in love with Gotland. One of the best is that the Swedish island is a place of second acts. The Baltic Sea resort—which is popular with Swedes but less known in the wider world—seems to be not only a place of slow living and delicious fresh food but also an epicenter of new projects, new passions, regeneration and rewilding.
“I was tired of board meetings, and I wanted to retire from Nasdaq life,” says Bjorn Westerholm, a former fintech investor who opened the stylish boutique hotel Grå Gåsen three years ago with his wife, Cecilia, who worked in HR in Stockholm. “This is life 2.0,” he continues. “With our knowledge from our previous life, we couldn’t just retire to the beach. Here, we aren’t getting bored, because we’re working with young people.”
Many of those young people are in the hotel’s restaurant, housed in a barn that dates from 1750. It serves hyper-local, inventive takes on classics, like a Gotland Negroni made with goat whey, black currant leaves and locally distilled gin from Gotland Spirits, and a “Swedish lobster roll” with herring and boquerones (anchovies).
Breakfast at Three Pheasants
Nearby, the proprietors of Three Pheasants, an eclectic bed-and-breakfast, have a similar backstory. Jerry McLean was born to British parents in South Africa, then spent 25 years working for the Economist and other publications as a financial journalist in Asia, where his Swedish partner, Josefina Bergsten, produced documentaries about human rights. Now they’re in Gotland, tending to a massive, sustainable vegetable garden, and chatting with guests as they prepare their lavish daily breakfasts. Their three-bedroom B&B is decorated with an impressive art collection, artifacts from their years of traveling through Africa, Uzbekistan, China and Indonesia.
They like Gotland because it has “a good kind of tourism. It’s away from cities, with a quieter lifestyle,” and international visitors who are generally thoughtful about the places they visit, trying to have a lighter footprint.
Likewise, Salthamn is a second, better act for its owner, Jacqueline Raymond, who left behind a successful career in “show restaurants” in Stockholm that seated up to 600 people for a big night out. Now she’s doing something far simpler, a sustainable place with cultivation and gardens for people to enjoy, whether they’re picnicking straight from the plants in the fields or enjoying an alfresco meal prepared in a fire kitchen.
Food being aged and prepared to be served in Gotland
The project is a second act for the place itself, as it was Raymond’s father’s mink farm in its previous incarnation. “I transformed it from a place of death to a place of life,” she says.
She’s not the only one looking to make a radical improvement out of something unsavory. Brothers Peter and Johan Johansson are using food waste to create gin, limoncello and other adult beverages. Their Gotland Spirits is one of very few distilleries in the world that makes its own base spirits with “stuff we get for free,” mostly carb-heavy donated foods like old bread, cookies, cereals and potatoes. When a Swedish celebrity chef got caught up in a Mario Batali-level scandal, they found themselves with a lot of otherwise worthless (branded) rigatoni. Now it’s powering sustainable Negronis.
Waste plays a significant role in another of the island’s gourmet endeavors. Climate scientists Magnus and Annelie Wendeberg had become so concerned by their research findings that they stopped writing their white papers in Germany and instead moved to Gotland and started a regenerative goat farm—animal fertilizer being good for the land—and producing excellent cheese at Gotland Creamery.
Climate change seems to be on a number of people’s minds. Italian winemaker Andrea Guerra planted the Långmyre vineyard with his Swedish partner, Emma Serner, in 2018 because he has doubts about the long-term viability of vineyards in southern Europe. (His wines display good potential but need a few more years to come into their own.)
Lilla Bjers
The proprietor of Lilla Bjers, which just won an EU Organic Award for its just-picked food presented in a sun-splashed, plant-strewn greenhouse, is less subtle. “We should just stop all fishing for five years” to restore ocean ecosystems, he says. The practicality of that idea is debatable, but his conviction is notable, and his decision to avoid serving fish is respectable. And the quality of the vegetable-forward menu means guests are hardly likely to miss animal protein.
There’s more deliciousness—with less dogma—to be found at Stelor, a 17th-century stone house where chef Linus Ström, who trained in a variety of Michelin-star kitchens, has gone back to basics with his simple cooking, kitchen garden and motto of “Don’t buy food from strangers. The seaside Majstre has some similar ideas, as evidenced by its boards of cheese and raw vegetables, and its popular summer barbecue series.
These kinds of passion projects exist all over the island, which happens to have the most microbreweries per capita of any place in Sweden. “We do this because we’re idiots,” quips Karl Andersson, who runs Snausarve brewery with his wife, Nina Schultes. There, they brew Belgian-style beers, but mostly just what they like. If you manage to make it to their farmyard tasting room, odds are good that you also like what they like.
The Surflogiet team
There are a few other wineries on the island, as well as small distillers, including Elisabeth Hellström, who was born on the island and grew up in the hotel that her father was running in the north of the island. She became captivated by the idea of distilling what her island tastes like, and the result is Hellström Gin, a juniper-forward spirit that incorporates island botanicals and has already won a number of awards.
Ultimately, the island’s most audacious dreamer may very well be Calle Ewald, who was born and raised on Gotland (and, more importantly, balancing on boards in the water surrounding it) and decided about five years ago to create a slow-living utopia for wind- and kite-surfers. For now, his Surflogiet hotel has 11 spacious and bohemian tents, with full-scale furniture, Oriental rugs galore, lights and internet, and one of the most quintessentially Swedish luxuries there is: a plush and comfy Hästens bed, set up and lavishly made up, right on top of the sand.