Zagat has lined up the 10 best eateries in the world, from Spain to Singapore, not to be missed by the gastro-savvy. And restaurant Ekstedt in Stockholm comes in second place. Chef Niklas Ekstedt has trained with the best, and after stints at El Bulli with the kitchen run by Ferran Adriá and The Fat Duck with Heston Blumenthal in the ktichen, his restaurant (which bears his name) goes back to basics, cooking all of his fare over an open Scandinavian flame. And it’s not enough with Ekstedt—in third place is Fäviken Magasinet in Järpen, with 28-year-old chef Magnus Nilsson at the helm. Nilsson recently released a stunning cookbook in which you can read about his cooking philosophy of using hyper-local products, some foraged and many farmed on-site, put together in a simple fashion yet daring enough with an unmistakable Scandinavian edge. The Zagat Survey was established by Tim and Nina Zagat in 1979 as a way to collect and correlate the ratings of restaurants by diners.

While Stockholm is known to everyone and accessible through for instance Scandinavian Airlines in under eight hours, Järpen is - if not in the middle of nowhere, at least in the middle of Sweden, close to the ski center Åre northwest of Östersund in Jämtland (literally in the middle of Sweden, an hour's flight from Stockholm)
For more info on the restaurants, see:
www.ekstedt.nu
www.favikenmagasinet.se

For the original Zagat listing, see The 10 Hottest Restaurants in the World: Where to Eat Right Now