Lysverket

Lysverket is chef Christopher Haatuft's restaurant in the old Bergen power company building, part of the KODE museums. It holds one Michelin star.

Haatuft grew up in Bergen's punk scene, began cooking with friends as a teenager and wrote a weekly food column for a newspaper in his early twenties. After a café and bar of his own failed, he served an apprenticeship in three Bergen restaurants, then e-mailed Grant Achatz and was taken on at Alinea in Chicago. Stints at Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Per Se in New York followed. He opened Lysverket in June 2013, and the Michelin Guide gave it a star in 2022.

The name joins lys, light, and verket, works, after the utility where people of Bergen once paid their electricity bills. Haatuft builds the menu on the coast and farms of western Norway. The diver Knut Magnus brings scallops, horse mussels, sole and mahogany clams from Sotra, and the organic farmer Knut Finne grows dozens of crops for the kitchen in Voss, a circle Haatuft calls a closed-circuit economy. He has also worked with marine biologists on sea creatures that are not usually sold, such as the whelk served with the opening bites.

Menus have included scallop with tomato, fennel and oregano, turnip with smoked yogurt, radish and crab, and potato with rutabaga, vendace roe and mustard. Hake comes with grilled cabbage, peas and a garlic crouton, and a Bergen fish soup is finished with leek oil. Haatuft wanted the place to be a meeting point for Bergen's creative trades, so the minimalist dining room shares the building with a bar, and even the staff uniforms were made by a tailor, T-Michael. The result is relaxed in tone but precise on the plate.