Stockholm romanticizes the Scandinavian virtues like nowhere else: that balanced blend of minimalist beauty, understated elegance and the calm of a city where life seems to flow in good order. On Sergels Torg, the great public square at its centre, stands a building that has been a landmark long before anyone thought to make cocktails inside it, the red house, Röda Huset, unmistakable against the grey geometry of the square. Over it towers the Kristallvertikalaccent, the glass-and-steel column more than thirty-seven metres tall designed by Edvin Öhrström, a piece of Scandinavian brutalism that shatters the notion of lightness and warmth most of us carry about the North. It is an unlikely backdrop for a cocktail bar and once you stare at it from the inside, it is the perfect one. At night the square reminds of a futuristic movie scenario.
The House on the Square
In November 2021, this landmark became a bar and restaurant, reinvented with a visionary eye by its general manager, Björn Kjellberg. The ascent since has been close to vertical. Röda Huset reached No. 35 on The World’s 50 Best Bars in the 2025 edition, and gathered the Campari One To Watch Award in 2022 and the Ketel One Sustainable Bar Award in 2023 along the way.
You could stay on the ground floor and want for nothing. There, Dine & Wine, a restaurant that evokes a Nordic bistro and a wine bar, will take you without a reservation, feed you well, pour you good bottles, and send you out late into the Stockholm night, perfectly content. But that would be to stop at the threshold of the real discovery. The advice is simple: do not leave. Take the spiral staircase and enjoy the full experience.
Up the Spiral Staircase
The cocktail bar sits on the floor above: twenty low seats, and through the windows that column rising over the square like a monument to the place itself. The interior is a second surprise after the first. Where you might expect Nordic restraint, you find eccentricity, color and an organic, uncommon maximalism, the ceiling lamps, to give a single example, are fashioned from moose antlers. It’s a room built from its own logic rather than from convention, and its counterpoint is the precision of everything that happens within it: the impeccable efficiency of the service, the exactness of the work, and, above all, the drinks.
Behind that singular vision stands a strong, decisive figure: Hanna Oscarsson, creative director and head bartender, the woman driving Röda Huset’s radical exploration of Swedish terroir. She works alongside a tight team, Oskar Nilsson and Viktor Hauer at the bar, Kjellberg steering the house from the floor. Together they have built something that, for all its awards, is defined less by technique than by a single, stubborn idea.
A Map You Drink
The cocktail menu at Röda Huset unfolds as a map of the Nordic countries. Each drink points to a place, an ingredient or a tradition: strawberries and raspberries from Gotland, native apples, sweet carrots. Where conventional mixology reaches automatically for lemon or lime, here the acidity comes from apple, from sea buckthorn, from dairy wheys. This is a bar that has chosen to work only with what surrounds it, and the revelation is how much that turns out to be. To the outsider, the Swedish pantry means salmon, herring and the cinnamon bun. To Hanna, it is a wealth of herbs, shrubs, fruits and berries she knows intimately because they are part of her memory, because she has studied them, foraged them, tasted them and revered them.
That relationship reaches past mere sourcing. When a local farmer found himself with kilos of strawberries on the very edge of ripening, with nowhere for them to go, Röda Huset took the lot, stored them in the cold room in the basement, and worked through them gradually so that nothing was lost. The same logic of season and resourcefulness runs through every glass; through Kolagräs with Good Crème, twice named the best signature cocktail in Sweden. Think of sweet vernal grass, which provides an aromatic flavor reminiscent of vanilla and freshly cut grass, infused into cream, then curdled using apple juice and filtered, resulting in a clear and smooth drink that remains to an apple pie. The leftover curds are often used to make ice cream in the restaurant. It’s just the same with a drink of cold-pressed, burnt blackcurrants from Sikfors lifted with Michter’s bourbon. Nothing arrives from far away that could be found near at hand.
The Scandinavian Cocktail Experience
The headline proposition upstairs is the Scandinavian Cocktail Experience, and with it Röda Huset joins a bold and still-rare format: the cocktail tasting menu. Here, Oscarsson and her team serve six small cocktails that trace a circular route through Sweden, beginning and ending in the same region, but leaping, in between, from one corner of the country’s geography to another, exploring the produce and the techniques of each.
Red Love & Honey, Apples, Northern Yogurt, Meadowsweet & Whey, Blackcurrant, Strawberries & Cream: six names that give nothing away of what is to come. The first arrives warm. In each, the spirit (vodka, aquavit or tequila) acts as a catalyst, almost a supporting player, while the aromas and textures of authentic, sometimes rawly Nordic produce take centre stage. There are wheys and there are fermentations; there is warmth and there is cold; there is Swedish tradition and there is childhood, condensed into liquid form.
The one that stays longest with many guests is the Northern Yogurt, which Hanna prepares in front of you, narrating each step. A yoghurt made in the north of Sweden, where the milk carries a higher fat content because the cattle live at lower temperatures, is fermented in the traditional way until it develops a pronounced acidity, then balanced with sugar and aquavit. Part of the whey is separated, infused with nitrogen for a silkier texture, and poured back over the milk. The result is a cocktail like nothing else: milky, fresh, complex, with a depth that lingers long after the final sip. It is, in a single glass, an argument for the whole project.
A Gaze Turned Inward
What sets Röda Huset apart is neither its technique, which it possesses in abundance, nor its awards, which it goes on collecting. It is the radical decision to build an entire cocktail programme looking only inward, toward Swedish territory, and the discovery that there is diversity, complexity and richness enough there to need nothing from outside. Every cocktail is an argument in favor of that idea. Every sip is a small lesson in Scandinavian geography. In a landscape of bars that compete to be the most colorful, the most exotic, the most flashy, the essential purity of Röda Huset proves, with calm authority, that a drink is finally a form of liquid gastronomy and therefore native culture, and therefore a way of belonging to the world.
Raise a glass to that, and to the journey waiting at the top of the spiral staircase.
Röda Huset. Malmskillnadsgatan 9, 111 47 Stockholm, Sweden
www.rodahuset.nu
